Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - Neal Stephenson Page 0,197

from Boston but trying to fake the Scottish accent that he fancied a dwarf would speak in; and another was in London and acutely sensitive to how badly the guy from Boston was getting it wrong; and one of them was a woman playing a male character; and one of them was carrying on a running argument with his mom, who wanted him to take out the garbage; when all of that was happening at once, in real time, making those characters sound as good as they did in the movies was impossible. The Weird Stuff team had made some headway using a divide-and-conquer approach. They had figured out ways to make male voices sound female and vice versa. They had used speech-to-text systems to decode what the players were saying, then used AI algorithms to filter out the “Take out the garbage now or you are grounded” chatter, then used text-to-speech technology to re-render them with correct accents, and so on. That technology had made its way into applications beyond gaming.

El was using it to talk now. Some years ago, when he had begun using the Metatron to manifest himself at conferences and meetings, he’d mapped his own face onto its blank mannikin head and he’d piped his own voice straight through, essentially using the robot as a mobile speakerphone. Since then he had gradually changed his ways. He had turned off the face mapping so that no one could see him, and he’d begun using speech-generation technology. At first the Metatron had spoken in a generic, off-the-shelf voice and accent, but he or his staff had been customizing it. The voice was now recognizable as El’s. It did not sound exactly like El sounded when he was physically sitting across the table from you and pushing air through his vocal cords, but close enough that people who knew him would cock an ear, nod, and admit that it was not bad. Exactly how the speech was being generated was not clear, and had been the topic of many debates held in bars and coffee shops among people who had just finished “talking” to El’s Metatron. Sometimes the voice had a natural cadence suggesting that El was speaking into a microphone and his speech being reprocessed. Other times it sounded like the results of a text-to-speech algorithm. Since those algorithms were pretty good now, there was a considerable gray area between those theories—which was why it made for such good arguments in bars. Most of those arguments could have been settled if someone had actually laid eyes on Elmo Shepherd in the flesh recently. But no one had seen him in over a year, and opinions varied as to what condition he was in. Some said he was already dead. Of those, one faction believed that the speech they were listening to was actually coming from Sinjin Kerr or Enoch Root or perhaps a cabal of token holders sitting in a room together. Another faction held that El’s brain had already been scanned and was running in the cloud as a process that could interface directly with the voice-generation system. Most people, however, assumed that El was still alive.

Making it somewhat spookier was that the Voice of El could emerge from different instruments at different times, depending on how he wanted to manifest himself. In the early going, they’d all come to associate it with his Metatron. He had them planted in cities all over the place, and they were smart enough to take public transit to a FedEx facility and ship themselves wherever they needed to be, sometimes traveling more quickly than human beings with airplane tickets. He used the same voice for old-fashioned phone calls and teleconferences. And it was the voice of his avatar when he manifested himself in virtual or augmented reality.

As now. Hearing the voice, Corvallis turned his head to see El’s avatar standing a couple of meters off to his side. The avatar was also gazing at the Wad, as people had begun referring to the dense cottony underlayment of this display. El turned his head to look at Corvallis. The avatar didn’t look much like Elmo Shepherd. Whoever had designed it had apparently started with a 3-D scan of the Metatron and then tweaked it over time. It had passed through a phase of looking dangerously like the statuette on an Academy Award, and people had started calling it Oscar. But then El must have called in an artist or a designer