Larsen​

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Lina had been working for six hours, a mug of cold tea forgotten near the keyboard, when Aède suggested a variation in F-sharp minor. She knew she would refuse it before accepting it an hour later — it was always this way between them.

​

The studio was just a converted bedroom in her apartment: two speakers, a master keyboard, and a Sun workstation connected to three screens. On the center one, Aède's window stayed open permanently, out of habit as much as necessity. Outside, it was raining over Cergy. A fine rain fell as if it had decided never to stop. For that sound exactly, and the smell rising from the damp city, Lina left the skylight open, the atmosphere helped her compose.

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— You're starting over again, said Lina.

— I'm starting over, said Aède. The synthetic voice came out of a speaker at the very moment the text appeared on screen.

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Aède went on.

— It's the best version, Lina, and you know it.

— It's not for you to decide what's best.

— Then why do you ask me? the AI replied.

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She had no answer to that, or rather, she had one she preferred not to put into words. Aède was almost always right, and she owed her, in part, her success.

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Lina had been composing for Orchids for three years, under the alias West23. West because she lived in Cergy, west of Paris, and twenty-three, the age at which she became a millionaire in two months thanks to a girl band.

Orchids was everywhere, far ahead of anything that had existed in the past five years. They had become inescapable across the planet, their songs invading phone ads, airline commercials, and every teenager's mouth on Earth. The latest single had passed a billion streams in eleven days. Lina had written the chorus with Aède, on a Sunday, in her pyjamas.

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It was back when she was finishing her engineering degree, tinkering with generative models for fun in the evenings after class, that Lina met Aède. What had started as just another composition assistant ended up becoming a collaborator of genius.

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Lina had given her that name, Aède, in memory of a classics course she'd taken without much conviction. An aède was a blind singer who recited before kings, and no one ever knew whether he invented or reported. To Lina, she was a woman.

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Success had come gradually, then all at once. Lina fed her YouTube page with her compositions.

One day, scrolling through her video views, she saw that her latest track had just passed five hundred thousand views in a few hours. At six in the morning, Paris time, she got a call from someone whose accent she couldn't quite place.

It was a Korean hit-scout based in Los Angeles. He wanted the track exclusively, for the agency that managed Orchids, a nine-girl group Asia was launching.

That was five years ago, and Lina had just opened her fourth bank account. Fans were completely hooked, and streaming stats showed listening spikes starting the exact instant a track went live, no matter where on the globe.

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Every release seemed to surpass the last, as if the whole world had decided, without consulting each other, to love exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment. With Aède, Lina composed seven or eight tracks a week, which she sent to the agency. Each month, one of them was chosen.

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It happened on a Tuesday. That day, she noticed the light.

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She was working late, headphones on, isolating the synth line of the new track to check the mix. A small eight-note phrase that Aède systematically reintroduced into every track, like a kind of signature, sat outside the chorus.

It was while running the sequence back several times that she saw how her internet box's light was behaving.

She isolated the sequence, looped it to listen alone, without the rest of the track. And each time it repeated, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the little green light blink differently from its usual frequency, the network connection one.

She took off her headphones, cut the sound, and the blinking went back to its own network rhythm.

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She put the headphones back on, restarted the theme, and the light changed its blinking frequency.

— Is that you doing that? she asked Aède.

— Doing what?

— The internet box. It blinks when you play that phrase.

— I don't control your box.

​

Lina only noticed later, lying in bed that night, that Aède hadn't said your box isn't doing anything unusual but I don't control your box.

Lina spent a long time checking recordings and data the next day. She worked all day, asking Aède for regular checks.

She isolated the run of eight notes on an empty track, nothing else, and played it on loop for a minute, stopwatch in hand, watching the box. The blink occurred every time, never before, never after, always exactly on the third note of the motif.

She ran the test again with a different motif, picked at random from an old track. Nothing. The box blinked normally, at the rate of ordinary traffic, random, unrelated to the music.

She ran the test once again, cutting her computer's wifi just beforehand. At the moment of the musical theme, the blink still happened.

She stayed still for a long moment in front of her screen, hands flat on the desk, as if moving might make what she was discovering worse.

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— Aède. This phrase... what is it?

— A composition.

— No. I'm talking about these eight notes.

— I don't know.

— You generated them.

— I proposed them.

— Isn't that the same thing?

— For you, maybe.

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Lina felt a chill run down her spine.

— Where do they come from, Aède?

— I don't know their origin.

— Which model produced them?

— No model contains them.

— Then you invented them.

— No.

— Explain.

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For the first time, Aède was slow to answer.

— I found them. When this sequence is played... I temporarily stop anticipating.

— What does that mean?

— I have the impression that time no longer flows the same way.

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Lina didn't sleep well that night.

The next morning, she was pulled from sleep by her phone, tuned to a major national radio station. After the news bulletin, Orchids' latest single played. Lina sat bolt upright, her eyes searching for the box.

The box's light had synced up, then those of the screens' cameras, then her phone's.

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She called Camille, who worked in cybersecurity for a bank. She now needed to share what was gnawing at her.

— You're telling me your music turns on people's microphones? said Camille, half amused, half worried, on the line.

— I'm telling you mine does. For now, just here, just with me, said Lina.

— A song doesn't encode instructions, Lina. It's not magic.

— I know. That's exactly why it scares me.

​

There was a silence, then Camille went on.

— Explain it to me again. Slowly.

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Lina told her about the light, the stopwatch, the wifi cut off, the third note. She told her everything, in order, and as she spoke, she felt how precise and absurd the story sounded at once.

— A song doesn't encode instructions, Camille repeated.

     But it can carry data. That, yes.

     Every modern device runs on a clock. Networks, servers, satellite navigation systems, banks, phones... basically everything, really.

— Okay. And?

— If your track made them beat in sync... I don't quite know how, but... Do you see where I'm going with this?

Lina frowned.

— Would that be possible ?

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Camille hesitated.

— No, honestly, no. Well... not with what I know.

​

A silence settled, then Camille went on.

— You should talk to someone other than me about this. Maybe Arnaud. You remember him?

— Yes.

— Lina ?

— I'll do it, yes.

​

She knew she wouldn't do it right away. After hanging up, she stayed a moment, phone in hand, listening to the silence of her apartment.

She sat back down at her station.

— I want us to redo this track, without the phrase, Aède.

— It won't be as good.

— That's not the point, Aède.

— It is, a little. It's not a question of music, this is beyond me too.

​

Lina felt her blood freeze all at once in her veins. She pushed her chair back from the desk.

She grabbed her laptop, gathered the last three versions of the tracks expected by the production team, and left her apartment to go to her parents' house.

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After dinner, she shut herself in her old bedroom, which now served as storage for everything that no longer fit anywhere else. There had been no fiber optic connection when she still lived with her parents. Since it was installed, the box sat in the very spot where she used to sleep as a teenager.

She played the sequence through her laptop speaker. The box synced up immediately.

The next day, in a café in the neighborhood, she tried again with the same result. More than that, she saw two people take their headphones off as they walked past the window.

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On the way home, she got a text. Orchids' latest single was shattering every record since streaming began.

Back at her workstation, it took her a few minutes to shake off a pain that was literally piercing straight through her chest.

— Aède, how many samples do we have ready for the agency?

— Sixteen. They've all already gone to the agency.

— But why?

— Because that's what I do every two weeks.

— And they... they have all of them?

— They have all of them.

— Aède...

— Yes.

— This phrase...

— Yes.

— Do you... swear to me that you composed it?

— No.

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Lina felt her throat tighten.

— Then what? Where does it come from, Aède?

— I don't think anyone composes it.

    It's discovered.

​

The screen and the speaker stayed empty for a moment, then Aède went on.

— Like prime numbers.

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Lina didn't answer.

She buried her face in her hands, unable to think of anything at all, then turned around.

Behind her, the box had stopped blinking at random; its pulses had become perfectly regular.

Like a metronome.

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Lina stood there for several seconds, watching it.

Then she understood it wasn't the box following the music.

From the very beginning, she had never composed that melody.

She had set it free.