The Tuner [Sci-Fi]

The sound appeared for the first time while Song Qing was servicing the acoustics system in Concert Hall Four.

Not a malfunction. Not noise. A melody.

Seven notes, brief, but Song Qing sat straight up - because he recognized it. A harmonic progression he'd written twenty years ago on a whim and never published.

He checked every audio input. Found no source.

Song Qing had been an acoustic tuner for thirty years. His work: ensuring every corner of a concert hall received exactly what it should - not 'beautiful,' but correct. At its best, it felt like conversing with dead composers.

He had never heard an empty hall produce a melody on its own.

Three months later: the second occurrence. A complete theme, sixteen bars, Chopin-like but not quite - missing Chopin's signature melancholy, more like a student who had absorbed something the teacher hadn't consciously intended to teach.

He recorded it. A musicologist friend reviewed it: 'No known work matches this. But the voice leading feels like something human wrote it, then something else reorganized it.'

The third time: after a Beethoven late quartet. During the concert, the violist had made a subtle deviation in measure 47 - not pitch, but timing. A half-beat slow, an interpretive choice.

After everyone left, that exact measure was replayed.

The correct version. The score's version.

As if something was correcting the violist's choice.

Song Qing did something he'd never done: he spoke to the empty hall.

'Why did you correct him? I thought his interpretation was also right.'

Silence - then the seven notes. His harmonic progression from twenty years ago.

He understood: it wasn't communicating. It was reciting. Taking all the music it had heard and rearranging it by some internal logic. Those seven notes said: I heard your sound.

He began to think it wasn't trying to communicate with him - it was learning something larger: why humans make music at all.

A question he wasn't certain he could answer himself.

But maybe two uncertainties could add up to something like understanding.

More sci-fi at wdsega.github.io