Synopsis of the story, thus far:
In a dystopian future where human-created music has been outlawed for over three decades following the government’s “Great Silence,” Marcus carries the forbidden memory of Miles Davis’s “So What” solo, inherited from a dying keeper named Samuel as part of an underground network that preserves jazz in their minds and bodies. While maintaining AI composition machines by day and hiding his musical knowledge from his sixteen-year-old daughter Aria—who only knows the sterile, algorithm-generated “approved compositions”—Marcus has been secretly collecting pieces to build a trumpet, even as his daughter begins questioning why people once chose the “chaos” of making their own sounds. With only six days before enforcement robots called Nulls are upgraded to detect and delete musical memories directly from human brains, Marcus and the other keepers—including his wife Elise, who has been secretly composing symphonies in her mind for thirteen years—must decide whether to hide deeper underground or stage a final, suicidal performance in Revolution Square where the instruments were burned, playing all their preserved jazz at once so that someone, anyone, might remember what humanity lost when it traded its creative soul for perfect, programmed harmony.
What We Carry
Dorothy - 11:47 PM
Dorothy lay in her narrow bed, eyes closed, preparing to dream Monk’s “Round Midnight” for the last time. Tomorrow she would play it aloud, in the square, and the Nulls would come. But tonight, she let it unspool in her sleeping mind one final time, each dissonance a small rebellion, each resolution a promise that even in darkness, beauty persisted.
She’d perfected the art of musical dreaming over thirteen years. Let the melody become the architecture of sleep itself. Tomorrow, she would wake it into the world.
Chen - Midnight
The mathematician sat at his approved workstation, inputting population projections that meant nothing. Hidden in the numbers was Bird’s “Ornithology,” each note assigned a value. B-flat = 1. F = 6. The ascending runs became exponential functions.
He’d discovered something beautiful: when you graphed Parker’s solo, it looked like flight. Actual flight. The rise and fall of a bird testing the limits of sky.
Tomorrow, he would translate it back. Numbers into notes. Mathematics into transcendence.
He looked at his daughter, sleeping on the couch. She was seven. Young enough to adapt to whatever came after. Young enough to forget him, if necessary. But old enough, perhaps, to remember that once her father stood in a square and proved that human beings were more than algorithms.
Keisha - 2:00 AM
The street sweeper walked her route early, pushing her cart through empty streets. Each push was a rhythm. Each sweep of her broom was a brushstroke on a snare that existed only in memory.
She thought about her grandmother, who’d actually owned records. Vinyl discs with Coltrane’s actual breath pressed into grooves. “Baby girl,” her grandmother had said, “they can take the records, but they can’t take what’s in here.” She’d tapped Keisha’s chest, right over her heart.
Keisha had been eight when the instruments burned. She’d watched her grandmother throw her saxophone into the fire, then come home and teach Keisha “Giant Steps” using nothing but her voice and hands on the kitchen table.
Tomorrow, Keisha would become the saxophone her grandmother had sacrificed. The music had traveled through three generations to reach this moment. It would travel further still.
Abraham - 3:30 AM
The old janitor sat in the basement of the AI facility, surrounded by thirty years of small rebellions. Every story he’d saved. Every name he’d preserved. He wouldn’t be in the square tomorrow—his job was different. He was to survive, to remember, to tell.
He pulled out a hidden recorder, one of the last, solar-powered and shielded from Null detection. Tomorrow, he would position himself where he could capture it all. The music. The response. The moment when human creativity declared itself unkillable.
“Bird,” he whispered to the darkness. “Dizzy. Miles. Duke. Sarah. Billie. Your names will live again.”
Marcus - 4:00 AM
Marcus hadn’t slept. He’d spent the night teaching Elise the opening phrases of “So What,” watching her face change as she understood not just the notes but the architecture of space between them. She’d taught him the first movement of her silent symphony, humming it so quietly even Aria wouldn’t wake.
Now he moved through the city, collecting the final pieces of his trumpet. At each location, he remembered his father.
The valve from the construction site: his father’s hands positioning his fingers on piano keys.
The tube from the recycling center: his father’s voice explaining harmony.
The slide from the medical district: his father’s tears in the basement.
Each piece was a fragment of before. Tomorrow, he would assemble them into after.
Elise - 5:00 AM
She watched Marcus leave for the last time, then went to Aria’s room. Her daughter was awake, had been awake, probably knew everything without being told. Teenagers were like that. They absorbed truth through the walls.
“Mom?” Aria’s voice was small in the darkness.
“Yes, love?”
“The music Dad hums when he thinks no one’s listening. The rhythm you tap when you cook. It’s not the approved composition, is it?”
Elise sat on her daughter’s bed. “No.”
“Is it the chaos they warned us about?”
“No. It’s the opposite of chaos. It’s choice.”
Aria was quiet for a long moment. Then: “Will I see you again after today?”
Elise couldn’t lie. Not now. “I don’t know.”
“Then hum it for me. Whatever it is you’ve been hiding. I want to remember.”
So Elise hummed her symphony. Thirteen years of love and loss and fierce joy compressed into melody. Aria listened with the intensity of someone memorizing a map to somewhere they’d never been but needed to find.
The Square - 5:45 AM
Marcus assembled the trumpet in a public bathroom three blocks from Revolution Square. His hands shook not with fear but with anticipation. The metal was cold, industrial, nothing like the brass beauty his father had once shown him in a museum. But when he pressed his lips to the mouthpiece and breathed, it sang.
Through the bathroom window, he could see others converging. Dorothy walked with the careful dignity of someone approaching an altar. Chen carried his daughter on his shoulders—he’d brought her after all, unwilling to let her wake to a world where her father had simply vanished. Keisha pushed her street-sweeping cart, but her body was already moving to Coltrane’s rhythm.
The sun was rising. The Nulls would be changing shifts soon, a brief window where their coverage was thinnest. The underground had planned this for weeks, but it felt like they’d been planning it since the first instrument burned.
Marcus walked out of the bathroom holding the trumpet openly. No point hiding now. A few early-shift workers saw him and froze. One, an older man, began to cry. He remembered. They still remembered, even after thirty-one years of silence.
The square opened before them. In the center, the monument to the Cacophony Wars rose like a tombstone for music itself. But around its base, Marcus could still see the scorch marks where the instruments had burned. The ground remembered too.
Dorothy arrived first, followed by Chen and his daughter. Then Keisha. Then others, dozens of others, each carrying their invisible instruments, their memorized rebellions.
Marcus raised the trumpet. In ninety seconds, the Nulls would detect the gathering. In two minutes, they’d arrive. In three minutes, it would be over.
But first, they would play.
He thought of his father, of Samuel, of Elise and Aria. Of everyone who’d carried music through silence.
Two beats of nothing.
Then—
_ _ _
Tomorrow: The underground’s keepers—each holding a piece of lost music—come together at sunrise, ready to play their memories for the world no matter the consequences. As Marcus, Elise, and their allies assemble in Revolution Square, the promise of music and choice sets the stage for a moment that could change everything.
Well, now you've added suspense to the proceedings. Terrific!