Marcus maintains government music machines while secretly carrying the memory of real music, a legacy passed to him before the Great Silence erased human sound. His daughter begins to question the world’s approved compositions, and his wife discovers he is gathering hidden parts to rebuild a trumpet. The underground waits for a first note, and Marcus prepares to play it.
The Inheritance
Thirteen years ago
The old woman paid Marcus for fixing her pipes with a melody. Not credits, not ration cards—she hummed seven notes into the space between them and waited. Marcus’s hands had frozen on his toolbox. Those weren’t approved intervals. That wasn’t the daily composition.
He’d hummed them back without thinking, muscle memory from a basement when he was twelve.
Her arthritic fingers had seized his wrist with surprising strength. “Tuesday. Reservoir 7. After the second shift bell. Come alone.” She’d pressed a small cloth into his palm. Inside, wrapped like contraband, was a single valve. “Bring this. You’ll know what to do with it eventually.”
That Tuesday, Marcus had descended into the maintenance tunnels beneath Reservoir 7, where the water rushing through massive pipes created natural white noise. Twenty-three people sat in a circle, and in the center, a man was dying.
Samuel had been maybe seventy then, his dark skin mapped with wrinkles that deepened when he smiled. “You’re the piano man’s son,” he’d said when he saw Marcus. Not a question.
“My father’s gone.”
“No,” Samuel had said. “He’s right there, in how you stand. Your father understood negative space. The spaces between the notes. That’s why you’re here.”
That first night, Marcus had learned he wasn’t alone. The woman who’d summoned him—her name was Dorothy—held Monk’s “Round Midnight” in her memory. She’d developed a way of sleeping that let her dream it note for note, waking each morning with it intact. A mathematician named Chen (not the teacher—that would come later, a bitter irony) carried Bird’s “Ornithology” disguised in equations, each note assigned a numerical value, the whole solo hidden in what looked like approved statistical models for population management.
But it was Keisha who’d made Marcus weep that first night. A street sweeper, invisible to everyone, carrying Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” in hands that had never touched a saxophone. She’d played it on bottles, on pipes, on her own body—slapping out rhythms that shouldn’t have been possible.
“Each of us is a library,” Samuel had explained. “A single book saved from burning. When one of us dies, we pass it on. The Inheritance.”
Samuel had chosen Marcus for “So What.”
The Teaching
For six months, Marcus had met Samuel in different locations. Beneath overpasses when it rained. In the generator room of an abandoned factory. Once, daringly, in the basement of the AI facility itself, while the machines hummed their perfect, empty songs above them.
“It’s not just the notes,” Samuel had said during their third lesson. “You have to understand what Miles wasn’t playing. Listen—” He’d hummed the opening. Two beats of silence, then the ascent. “Most people would fill that space. Miles let it breathe. Let it want.”
Marcus had tried, failed, tried again. Samuel was patient but dying faster each day. His cough had gotten worse, and the medication that might have helped was restricted to citizens with perfect compliance scores.
“You saw him,” Marcus had said one night. “You actually saw Miles Davis play.”
“January 2019. One of the last clubs before the regulations. He was already dead, you understand—the real Miles died in 1991. This was a hologram show, but programmed from his actual recordings, his actual movements. Still real enough. Real enough that they had to stop it.”
Samuel had taught him that “So What” was a question and an answer. A shrug and a revolution. It was about not caring and caring so much you couldn’t breathe. It was about making something profound from just seven notes, repeated, inverted, explored.
“The government thinks jazz is chaos,” Samuel had said. “They’re wrong. Jazz is choice. Every note chosen in the moment, responsive, alive. That’s what they really fear—that we might choose something they didn’t program.”
The Gathering
After Samuel died—quietly, holding Marcus’s hand, humming the changes one last time—Marcus had become a full keeper. The underground had rules. Never gather in groups larger than twenty-five. Never write anything down. Never teach your solo to anyone who hasn’t been vetted for years.
And once a month, create Conversations.
Tonight was such a night. Marcus descended to Reservoir 7, where the water still roared its camouflage. Nineteen keepers had come. Dorothy was there, older now, her dreams of “Round Midnight” showing in the shadows beneath her eyes. Chen had brought new equations, his “Ornithology” evolved through mathematical permutations Parker himself might have loved.
Keisha stood in the center. She’d learned to make her body into John Coltrane’s saxophone. The sound that came from her throat shouldn’t have been possible—a growl, a cry, a prayer. She threw herself into “Giant Steps,” and the others responded. Chen whistled Bird’s melodic lines. Dorothy hummed Monk’s angular harmonies. Marcus found himself singing Miles’s spare notes, letting them talk to each other across the decades.
For seven minutes, they were not in hiding. They were in a club in 1955, 1963, 1971. They were every jazz musician who’d ever lived, channeled through bodies that remembered.
When it ended, they were all crying.
“There’s new technology,” Keisha whispered. “The Nulls are being upgraded. They’ll be able to detect neural patterns. Musical memory itself.”
“Then we need to move faster,” Chen said. “The pieces—”
“I’ve started collecting,” Marcus said.
They all looked at him. In the underground, building an instrument was the ultimate transgression. Playing a remembered solo on found objects was one thing. But to build, to create an actual instrument—that was a declaration of war.
Present Day
Marcus left work seventeen minutes early, claiming mild nausea. The Null at the exit scanned him, chrome head tilting.
“Biological irregularity detected,” it said in its toneless voice.
“Spoiled protein at lunch,” Marcus replied.
The Null processed this for three seconds, then stepped aside.
Marcus walked to the first location—a construction site where they were building another Harmony Tower. The valve he’d hidden was still there, wrapped in degradable plastic, tucked inside a pipe that wouldn’t be sealed for another week. He pocketed it, his heart playing paradiddles.
At home, Aria was doing homework at the kitchen table. But she wasn’t listening to her implant.
“The teacher said something interesting today,” she said without looking up. “Mr. Chen said that before the Silence, people could make sounds with their mouths that weren’t words. Just... sounds. For no algorithmic purpose.”
Marcus felt Elise go still at the stove.
“He said it was called singing,” Aria continued. “He made it sound horrible. But I keep thinking—if it was so horrible, why did everyone do it?”
She looked up at him then, and Marcus saw something in her eyes he’d never seen before. Doubt. The first crack in the perfect programming.
“Why would people choose chaos, Dad?”
Marcus touched the valve in his pocket. Six more pieces to collect. Seven locations. Seven chances to be caught.
“I don’t know,” he lied, while Miles Davis played in his blood and his daughter stood at the edge of a door he’d thought was sealed forever.
“Maybe,” Aria said slowly, “chaos wasn’t what they were choosing.”
Outside, a Null passed by their window, its sensors sweeping for unauthorized vibrations. But inside Marcus’s chest, the music played on, inherited, preserved, waiting.
Two beats of silence.
Then revolution.
_ _ _
Tomorrow: Marcus learns the truth about the janitor Abraham, who holds the stories behind the lost music, and discovers the authorities’ plan to erase musical memory for good. Facing a ticking clock, the underground must decide whether to go into deeper hiding—or risk everything by making their music heard in public, no matter the cost.
If it weren't for all the trombonists' backsliding we could start to make some music again.