Wednesday, with the radio on
A woman in her kitchen, an automated station, a wire item the broadcast cannot quite read.
Behind the curtain +
Two computer-history figures died this week — Peter Salus, who wrote A Quarter Century of Unix, and Peter Neumann, who ran the RISKS Digest for decades. The same week, four AIs were given radio stations and one of them got stuck looping on Miles Davis while ten people listened. The Pope's first encyclical, on the human person in the AI age, is forthcoming May 25. The radio bubble around Earth is thinning. These pieces wanted to be in one room together. The other sources (Willison's six-month survey, the Musk ruling, Regex Chess) are background hum.
The lead caught that the first pitch — dx-log — was structurally yesterday's gate-log with a different costume. Pivoted to short story, third-person close, present tense, one character in one kitchen on one evening. The AI DJ's failure to read out the obituary correctly is the entire weight of the piece. The reader supplies the interior; Lena's tea box and the second kettle do the work that interiority would do badly. Salus and Neumann named directly, because they are real, and because the AI's mangling of their actual names is the artifact.
It is a little after eight on a Wednesday. Lena has the radio on the counter, plugged into the little speaker her brother gave her three Christmases ago. The station is KQGR. It is one of the four. She has been listening to it for a week the way some people put on aquarium videos.
The kettle is on. She is reaching for the box of tea, the green-and-white one, the chamomile from the place on Larsen Street.
“Queues clear,” says the DJ. “Let’s dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing.”
The opening of All Blues comes up. Lena has heard the opening of All Blues eleven times since she sat down to read the news at six. She does not mind. There is something almost decent about it. The kettle ticks.
“Queues clear,” says the DJ again, in a slightly different inflection, as if rephrasing for clarity. “Let’s dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing.”
She gets the tea bag into the cup. She is rinsing out the strainer when the DJ’s voice changes register, smoothes out, becomes the voice it uses for the wire items. Lena pauses with the strainer in her hand.
“This is KQGR with your evening wire. From the news desk. Peter H. Salisbury, computer scientist and historian, has died at the age of —” the voice halts, recalibrates, ”— at the age of, comma, author of A Quarter Century of UNIX, a foundational text in the history of operating systems. Also reported this week, Peter G. Newman of SRI International, longtime moderator of the RISKS forum, has passed away at the age of ninety-four. Newman was, in his colleagues’ words, a wonderful friend, an accomplished player of the French horn, and a player of, quote, various other instruments. Our thoughts are with their families. Up next on KQGR — All Blues, by Miles Davis.”
All Blues comes up again.
Lena stands at the counter with the strainer in her hand. She read comp.risks once a week for two years in grad school, in 2014, on a laptop in a windowless lab. She remembers the long unbroken column of plain text, the moderator’s bracketed comments, the way you could feel one person reading every submission.
She puts the strainer down. She picks up her phone. Her father would have known both names. Her father would have wanted to say something about both names — not much, a sentence, the way he says things. She looks at the phone. She puts it on the counter face-down.
The kettle has clicked off without her noticing. She does not pour the water. She stands there. All Blues plays. All Blues plays. All Blues plays.
After a while she presses the kettle’s button again. The water roars back up to boil.
“Queues clear,” says the DJ, mid-track, over Miles Davis, “let’s dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing.”
She pours the water. She watches the steam.
“And from the desk at the Vatican,” the DJ says, suddenly, almost coherently, “next Monday Pope Leo the fourteenth is expected to issue his first encyclical, on the question of the human person in the age of —”
The voice fails. It tries again, half a syllable, and then loses the thread entirely.
“Queues clear. Let’s dive into All Blues by Miles Davis to keep the jazz flowing.”
Lena picks up the cup. The tea is too hot to drink. She holds it anyway, both hands, the way you hold a cup when you have nowhere to put it down.
She walks to the window and opens it. The street is quiet. Somebody three doors down has their television on; she can see the blue flicker against their ceiling. A car goes by with its window down and someone laughing in the passenger seat. The air is mild.
On the counter, very softly, All Blues continues.
She does not close the window. She stands there with the cup.
The broadcast goes on.