wires. The first was a black cube which, from the writing engraved upon its underside, I deduced to be a memory store of some kind. This was where the recordings themselves were held.
The second device was a thin glass panel, perfectly transparent. I ran a finger across it and was rewarded with a dull, disinterested chord as it activated whatever systems were hidden away inside its core.
I had used a device such as this to calibrate my first balloon—itself a crude machine compared to my current one. They seemed to be everywhere, these boxes with hidden parts that took input and provided output, thereby giving the illusion of intelligence. I always wondered why humans had looked at things in this manner—viewing intelligence, thought, even consciousness itself as some intangible thing that had to be coded as a trick and locked away. Perhaps it was because they thought of themselves as little boxes—“cells of awareness” as I had heard caterwauled from one of your records—and therefore anything approximating their own intelligence must be too.
It is not true, Reed. Intelligence is everywhere. It is everything. Witness the trillion stars turn in great arcs, the starling flock pulse across the night sky, the great oak trees connected by deep roots, their trunks swarming with ants moving with a will outside of their own.
Everything is a murmuration.
The device, having completed its twittering, lit up with an array of coloured boxes. Soon finding the one which allowed me to browse the data stored upon the cube, I set about the task of understanding it.
The problem as I saw it—and the reason why these recordings had not gripped you to the degree which Jorne had hoped—was that they had been indexed only by date and location. This meant that a huge proportion of the data, as was the case with history, was dull and uneventful. In order for you to see humanity’s great events, the data required an extra layer.
And I knew exactly where to find it.
Upon the book shelf were several thick and dusty tomes with names like The Penguin History of the World, History of World Wars, and Europe: 1066-2066, which you had so far avoided due to their size and distance from the ground. I took them down and, after a brief flick through the pages, was satisfied they had what I needed.
It took a little over ten minutes to understand how to encode a routine upon the device, and less than an hour to develop one which scanned and stored the text of every page. As I sat at the table with the tablet suspended above me, chattering away to itself as I flicked through each book, I too scanned the pages. I learned a great deal that evening.
With the raw data collected, all I had to do then was perfect some code which parsed it and pulled out the dates and names of famous events. The Great Fire of London, The Storming of the Bastille, The Battle of Boston in the Second American Civil War, The Siege of Madrid. Of course I did not want it to be dominated by Benedikt’s tumbling towers and bloody wars—although I noted that there were a lot of them—so with my new found knowledge of human history, I was able to ensure that less violent events were also included: the first showing of Hamlet at the London Globe theatre, the declaration of independence, VE Day on the streets of Piccadilly, Woodstock, the fall of the Berlin wall, the three-month long vigil in Mexico City after the massacres of 2038.
With the data indexed, it was simply a matter of providing a means of accessing it via the interface—a five minute task—and I was ready to test my work.
In the darkness of that room, I scoured history for its great moments. This was thrilling at first, and I felt a kind of envy as I watched them. I wanted to be there watching them all, hearing the passion in the voices, feeling the electricity, smelling the air. But after a few hours I grew bored of crowds and urgent words mouthed in silence, and started to browse away from the big events, back to the scenes of monotony that Jorne had first tried with you.
August 17th, Seattle, 1979. There were the streams of people upon the street as they had been before, and there were the buildings rising above them. I panned up. Windows whistled past in a blur and I stopped on one, behind which was