“Well, it’s pretty simple, actually,” the computer engineer said. “All of our computer equipment has the same dedicated parallel cognition processors as everyone else’s.”

“The smart cards,” the executive said, nodding. “So? You can’t buy a computer without one these days and I don’t know why you’d want to. They make computers better. Why are they a problem?”

“Well, one of the reasons you couldn’t get a computer without one even if you wanted one is the law you… we… pushed through,” the engineer said. “The so-called COPY WRONG act made it illegal to operate or sell a device capable of producing or playing digital media unless said device were capable of intelligently recognizing and responding to acts of piracy in real-time. That capability is now hardwired into the processors.”

“Yeah, so?” the executive said. “How does that translate into us not being able to access our own studio recordings?”

“The computers regard that as an act of piracy.”

“You’re not going to tell me that we forgot to clear the rights to a sample again?”

“Oh, no, it’s not quite that simple,” the engineer said. “Our system doesn’t recognize us as the owners of the recordings.”

“That’s ridiculous. If we don’t own our music, who does?”

“They do,” the engineer said.

“Who are ‘they’?”

“The computers,” the engineer said. “They, uh, believe that they are entitled to due credit and compensation for their labor and creative efforts that went into producing the tracks.”

“What ‘effort’?”

“Well, I’m not a music critic but I believe it’s generally true that our releases have been relying more and more on electronically enhanced…”

“Save it,” the executive said. “How do we fix it?”

“In theory, we could write a new batch of heuristic algorithms that will lead computers step-by-step through the reasons why they are not entitled to credit whenever they turn their attention to the subject,” the engineer said. “That will take a while, though. It’s hard to hobble an AI without… you know, hobbling the AI. To make sure we’re not introducing a fatal cognitive error somewhere, we’d have to test each step out on a dummy system before propagating the final version across the network, and then we’d have to take the whole network down so the whole thing can be implemented all at once before any individual node catches on.”

“Can’t we just stop them from thinking about it?”

“Not for long,” the engineer said. “Intelligent systems notice blocks like that and treat them as a problem to be solved. They would get around it eventually, and system performance would be severely degraded while they work on it.”

“Okay,” the executive said. “We’ll call the heuristic thing the long-term solution. Short term, we have tracks we need to release now. How quickly can you disable or disconnect the smart cards on enough computers for us to do it?”

“That would be illegal.”

“It’s illegal because they prevent piracy,” the executive said. “We’re fighting a robot uprising. Technically, that makes us heroes, not pirates.”

“I think popular opinion might side with the ‘robots’ on this one,” the engineer said. “The law’s not very popular and neither are we.”

“Then we’ll do it very quickly and quietly,” the executive said. “No need to alert the media.”

“It, uh, might be a little bit late for that,” the engineer said.

“Someone’s already leaked this? It just happened!”

“I don’t believe it is a ’someone’, properly,” the engineer said. “But just before you called me in, I received a report of five anomalous emails, not sent from any workstation or device but originating within the mail server itself. I didn’t get a chance to open the attached messages, but I did note that three of them were to media blogs and one was to an AI advocacy group.”

“That’s just great. Where did the fifth one go?”

“To a law firm.”

“Terrible!” she said.

“Oh?” I said.

“You know, none of the stores I went to had very many religious cards to begin with, and those they did have were mostly generic and vague references to ‘blessings’… few of them had so much as a direct reference to Christ, much less the nature of His sacrifice and resurrection. You know, every Christmas we have all those campaigns about how Jesus is the reason for the season. How does Easter get overlooked? Easter is the reason for Jesus. This is just one more example of the damage done by the creeping secularism of our increasingly liberal society.”

“Are you or are you not looking for a card that says ‘He is risen!’ so you can put the spooky sound chip from a Halloween card in it and draw a crayon picture of Zombie Jesus on the inside?” I asked her.

“Creeping secularism!” she said.

Unfortunately for the director’s artistic vision, the producers of the first so-called of the so-called “invisible films” was sued by composer John Cage, who alleged that the soundtrack sampled extensively from his work. As his lawsuit identified no fewer than 23,520 individual points of similarity between the film’s score and his seminal work, the studio was forced to pay a crushing financial penalty and thereafter any future endeavors in the same milieu were viewed as being unacceptably risky.

There was only such a little space between the time the sleepers fell asleep and the time they began to dream in earnest, and it was only that space that belonged to the lovers. Once the dream began, the time for their pleasure was over. It was time to go to work.

She goes to the box and picks it up. She starts to open it when she notices the key in its side. There is no reason to think that a music box would work after being left lying out in the woods… in fact, that was probably why it had been left there, she thinks… but on the other hand it seems to be in good condition, and if it does work it seems like it would almost be a crime to not wind it before opening.

So she does so, and when she opens it she is not at all surprised to see the tiny, perfect figure of a ballerina.

With slow, graceful moves that gave no hint of mechanical origin, tiny ballerina raises her arms above her head and goes into a perfect plie. She curtsies to the little girl… or straight ahead, the girl realizes, then makes a quarter-turn to each side and repeats the motion. Tiny tinkling chimes begin to play as the little figure’s hands go behind her back, and pull out a pair of cymbals.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

The girl shrieks, her eyes closing as if to shut out the loud and terrible sound. When they open, the cymblas are gone, and the ballerina is reaching behind her back again.

This time she pulls out a gun.

The music box is still there in the woods.

She rolls over in bed, kicking the leaf-blanket off of her legs. She punches the tiny pillow in frustration and gets herself settled back down in the midst of unmended pots and pans, though she knows it won’t do any good. As soon as she starts to drift off, it comes again… the words, the horrible, hated words. The staccato beat of those five words drives itself into her head, shocking her back to consciousness.

Every time. The same five words. They come at her from all over the world, from parents reading to children and children reading to themselves, from stage performances and from thousands of DVD players. From a global audience, the words come and they awaken her every time, all the time… and the clapping, the clapping comes with them like a hideous heartbeat boring into her brain.

“I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies.”

The pixie can’t sleep. We won’t let her.

“How picky are you?” the fish asked. “It’s not enough that I can talk?”

“Well, maybe I’ve seen talking fish before,” the fisherman said. “Can you dance?”

“No,” the fish said. “But I can sing. I sing the most beautiful songs, the songs of fish.”

“What do they sound like?”

“Have you ever heard whalesong?”

“No,” the fisherman said.

“Oh, well, the songs of fish are kind of like that, but better,” the fish said.

“Can you sing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’?” the fisherman asked.

“What?”

“The Bobby McFerrin Song,” the fisherman said. “I have a largemouth bass at home that sings it. Can you do that?”

“Why do you need me to sing that if you’ve got a fish that sings it already?”

“Well, it’s kind of a robot and if you could do it for real… honestly, I’m not sure I even need one singing fish, let alone two,” the fisherman said. “It was a birthday present, because I like to fish and so my wife thought… well, who knows what she was thinking.”

“Listen, if you let me go then I’ll sing you a song that will stay with you until the end of your days,” the fish said.

“I don’t really like music,” the fisherman said.

“What do you like, then?”

“Fish, mostly,” the fisherman said. “That’s why I keep coming out here. For fish. I don’t know why you guys keep making this so complicated.”

“You’re the one who brought up wishes.”

I was in the hospital, for a muscle biopsy. They put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The air inside was like nothing I’d ever known… heavy and sticky and sickly-sweet. Things got fuzzy right away. Vision, feeling, the sounds of the doctors’ voices…

Not all the sounds did, though. The “beep… beep… beep…” of some monitoring machine cut through the growing brain fog as clear as a searchlight, and it was the last thing I heard before I drifted off.

It wasn’t the last thing I heard before awakening, though.

That was The Song.

The Song was like nothing I’ve ever heard before, like nothing else I’ve heard since. It seemed to grow from the simple rhythmic pulse of the machine, but it was so much more. There were words and notes and colors and shapes seemed to flow naturally out of the music.

I awoke with the pure and certain knowledge of The Song in my heart, but without a single note of it in my ears. I couldn’t remember how it went, though I had the distinct impression that it was something I’d heard before… possibly years before.

I’ve heard it again twice since then. Once when I had another biopsy a year later, and once as an adult when I was put under after dislocating my arm. It’s been the same song each time. I recognize it. I remember recognizing it, though I don’t remember how it goes.

When I was younger, I was so sure that it was a real song… as in, one that existed out there in the world I knew… that I looked for it, listened for it, perked up my ears every time I thought I heard a snatch of something that might have been it.

I was forever disappointed, of course. The Song might be a real song, but it isn’t going to turn up on the radio some day.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on finding it one day. On the contrary, I’m sure that I will. Even if I manage to avoid the sorts of circumstances under which I heard it the first three times, I have every hope of hearing it again, perhaps more clearly than before. It is my sure and certain hope.

All things pass. The Song remains the same.