The Glass Harmonica by Louise Marley

Author:Louise Marley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

CHARLIE made a meal of organic semolina pasta with cilantro pesto and toasted pine nuts. Erin cleared the dishes while Charlie rolled the Akai out from beneath the old piano. When she finished in the kitchen, she joined him. He pointed to the synthesizer.

“See this?” he said. A little array of gray metal cylinders had been added to the Akai. To Erin they looked like ballpoint pens cut neatly in half. They also looked vaguely familiar.

“What are those, Charlie?”

“Sensory emitters,” he said, with an air of triumph.

“What?”

“Sensory emitters,” he repeated. “Like the ones Gene uses. Gene does augmented binaural beats, and I’m doing augmented sensory music!”

That was why they seemed familiar. Erin stared at her brother, perplexed. “Charlie—what the hell is augmented sensory music?”

He wiggled his brows and grinned. “Let’s find out, little girl.”

He made Erin lie back on the couch and he turned the Akai so the emitters were directed at her. He had made a synthesized recording of the first movement of Mars, though he explained that the sensory effect would be considerably less without the strings and flute and glass harmonica. “But try it, E. Tell me what you feel.” He touched a few buttons, and sat back to watch her reaction.

The synthesized music was colorless, of course, but Erin was used to that. She knew the piece well, and her mind supplied the resonance, the timbre, the flavor of the actual instruments. It was what the emitters did that startled her.

It was a tickling sensation, beginning in the tips of her fingers, in her eyelids, on the back of her neck. It grew gradually in intensity, a stimulus that ran up her arms, that flooded her face and her throat, that made the backs of her knees throb. And it had—she searched for a word.

“Affect,” she finally whispered.

“Exactly.” Charlie looked smug. “Augmented sensory music will have enhanced affect. For those who can feel it. Some won’t, of course.”

“And Charlie—some will hate it.”

“Oh, yes,” he said complacently. “There will be resistance.” He chuckled. “If we’re lucky, lots of resistance. And Moving Mars will be the first! They’ll feel the wrench of the gravity, the ripple of the disrupted atmosphere—they’ll feel the bloody planet move!”

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