At work one day, Meadow discovered an app that would allow her to simultaneously hear all the music that was washing over the entire globe of W.2: K-pop stars promoting live tours; aborigines beating tortoise-shell drums; conductors leading performances of Mozart; there was a cacophony of young people furiously fingering frets in the MonsterGuitarCloud competitions, as well as Tibetans chanting their prayers, and every teenager who just cut the sweetest rendition of Metallica’s “One” and was uploading it from his bedroom…. And of course, everyone’s favorite: cats walking across keyboards. It was a kind of music of the spheres, the music of W.2, an echo of white noise, the hiss of sea foam.
When she switched on a filter to limit what she heard, what she heard first was a flute playing those same 3 notes Nico used to blow. Coincidence? It must have been, though she knew almost nothing online was coincidence: the ads a person saw, the news they heard, everything was directed to them out of some algorithm.
She used those three notes as a homing beacon, the flute music growing louder and more distinct as the globe turned, bringing her to a large peaceful valley. It looked like a pastel drawing—soft, flat colors, puffy clouds, and thousands of picnickers, lounging on blankets. Here and there helium balloons bobbed with the too-regular rhythm of programming trying to mimic wind; the breeze brought to her snatches of one of those last-century hippie songs with its lyrics about being stardust—billion-year-old carbon...caught in the devil’s bargain—and the need to get back to The Garden.
Several flags sported the multi-colored rainbow of the LGBTQIAprog+ Nation. Long stretches of the valley were spanned by strings of Tibetan prayer flags. Billion-year-old carbon. Carbon nanotubes. That’s what AI chips were made out of too, she thought, and she had to smile at how many people mythologized the 1960s just because, back then, scraggly hippies in bellbottoms came up with Earth Day. Were those 1960s reenactors here? They took turns playing No Nukes or Selma protestors and riot cops, sometimes armed with homemade water cannons. So she kept an eye out to avoid them as she wandered the audience gathered for an outdoor concert, listening for the notes of the flute she’d heard, looking for Nico among the middle-aged couples with picnic baskets, wine glasses, and candelabras. The mosaic of people seemed to go on forever. A Frisbee sailed past….
The note suddenly sounded nearby; she made that knob-turning gesture to turn her avatar, searching the other avatars to see which had a flute. Then she saw him: a vendor, like those in Indonesia who went among beach loungers, selling fruit drinks. Periodically he blew in the red flute he carried to get people’s attention—just like the flute they’d bought for Nico.
Meadow’s heart beat faster as she kicked her fingers into a jog. As she neared, though, his form suddenly began to vanish. “Wait!” she typed, hitting the Shout key. But the avatar’s body had already begun to turn into that generic nude doll all avatars began life as and returned to when their owners logged off. Before her eyes, he deteriorated into pixels. Gone. Offline. Or else teleported to a different location.
But at her feet was the flute. A red flute exactly like the one they’d bought for Nico. The match it had made to his red hair had had mystical significance to a four-year-old. She picked it up, and read its embossing: Pyramid.com.