Click. Ambient hiss. 

World Science Journal: There. That’s better. So, the question on the table— 

Gregori Egorov: No, I’m not worried— 

WSJ: Hang on a sec, Mister Egorov. I’ll repeat the question for the recording. With all the litigation being brought against proponents of free information, are you concerned about the legality of your project? 

GE: I’m not worried. When I first set [the project] up, in my fourth year of university, I was using a random number generator. My earliest published successes, the first near- or exact-copies, were attacked by owners of the originals, the templates, as violations of copyright. And, in a sense, the copyright holders were right. I had created the numbers artificially, which, in the courts, looked very much like an analogue to me just sitting down and tracing a cartoon, say, or copying, word for word, a short story. 

Then, during my post-graduate studies, a mentor suggested to me that I use pi as the basis for the project, rather than a random number generator. I would yield similar results and be legally unassailable. 

WSJ: Why is that? Why use pi? 

GE: Because it is theoretically an infinite, non-repeating series of digits. All possible combinations of numbers are contained with it. And I can’t be accused of creating the content I publish, since pi itself cannot be owned under the world copyright code. 

WSJ: All the information is there? 

GE: It’s all there. In the public domain. You just have to find it. 

#

Gregori Egorov, in a black bathrobe worn to threadbare transparency, tripped down the last four steps, righted himself on the landing, and blinked in the sunlight. It was very much like coming down a flight of clammy concrete stairs and into the belly of a mad scientist’s underground lab, if you discounted the wide open curtains, children playing in a sprinkler outside, and the smell of bread in the oven. Not to mention that the only madness evident was a tendency toward anal-retentive cleanliness. 

Watta was in the kitchen, cross-legged on the counter, fiddling with one of the dials on the oven. She turned and spread her arms for Gregori. 

He signed, Burn, and raised his eyebrows to show it was a question. 

She heaved a sigh, signed, I’m not child, and opened wide her arms again, demanding to be held. 

Gregori lifted her by her armpits, blowing out a thick lungful of air. “You need to lose a few, honey,” he said. She wrapped her furry arms around his neck and craned her own to plant a wet kiss on his cheek. 

“Aww, thanks, stinky,” he said. Her palms dangled down to his butt. She squeezed. “I’m sorry. You need to learn to be more gentle, my love. I haven’t recovered from last week, much less last night.” The warm saliva from her sound of distaste spattered against his ear. “Let’s get to work, huh?”

She nodded and signed, Okay, as punctuation.

Two desks ran along each side of the living room, which jutted out from the side of the house like an arm or a neck. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the whole length of the room, interrupted by wooden struts. Taped, tacked, and gum-stuck to these struts were hundreds of printouts, from legal-sized pages to slips the size of cookie fortunes. One desk faced the walkway out front, the other the back yard. Each desk had a series of flatscreen monitors, desk lamps, and small linked-paper printers at the end. It looked like the office of a team of private investigators who both struggled with seasonal affective disorder. 

“What did you say you lost, ma’am?” 

“My bestselling novel. The one I haven’t written yet.” 

“Hang on. Let me open the blinds.” 

A sheet of banner paper had been glued to the window, just above eye level, of the latter. Watta’s Desk, it read, and underneath: cat frown and a rough drawing of an eighth note. That had been relatively easy to find in the mess of pi. Watta had gone nuts over the random words that had followed the legend, and had refused to sign anything but, Cat Frown, for a week. 

She scrambled up into a thick black leather chair at her station and steepled her toes. She stared at Gregori, drumming her hands on her feet; he had stuck his hands in his pockets and was now breathing deeply the warm greenhouse air. He stared out at the street, at Doctor Jema from next door walking his dog, at the two teenage girls sunbathing in the front lawn of the next house over. 

Watta pushed away from the desk with her arms and rolled her chair into the back of Gregori’s knees. He stumbled, turned, and laughed. “Sorry. Nature hypnosis.” She peered around his arm and pointed at one of his terminals. 

In large print, so it would be easy to read from a coffee break in the kitchen, characters were spilling in black across a white field. 

@8|nmymotherisafis 

Mother, signed Watta, her eyes wide enough that Gregori could see his own grin in them. 

Something hit the window. Gregori leapt, banging his knee into the desk. The safety glass spidered and dented at the point of impact. Watta crawled under the desk to peer out the bottom of the window. 

“Bird?” asked Gregori. Watta scooted out, behind first. Brick, she signed. 

#

WSJ: Do you work alone? 

GE: You know I don’t. Didn’t. That’s an intentionally leading question. I’ll answer it anyway. 

WSJ: Mister Egorov, I wasn’t—

GE: Yes you were. Yes you were. It’s not like it’s a new question. I worked and I lived with Watta, my life partner. All right? She was a pygmy chimpanzee, one of the two dozen or so that were given citizenship thanks in part to the Animal riots in the twenties.

WSJ: Did you participate in those riots?

GE: I did not. I was too busy researching my dissertation. 

WSJ: Which you never delivered, correct? 

GE: Yeah. Didn’t seem to be much point. [Watta] and I got a modest subsidy because she’s a pre-human citizen. [laugh] She doesn’t like it when I call her that.

#

Gregori read the note again. 

“This isn’t even literate,” he said, letting the crumpled paper slip to the floor. “You’re sure you didn’t see who threw it?”

Watta nodded.

“Right in front of my desktop, too,” Gregori continued, squinting through the tangled mess of white lines. “Going to have to replace the whole window.”

Behind him, Watta was listening to scraps of nonsense. Most of it sounded like static to Gregori’s ears, but occasionally there were tones, the crash of a chandelier falling, or wind shoving past the house. It was like listening to a badly scratched sound effects record.

Letting his eyes blur, he noticed that the dense center of the impact looked a bit like a mouth wide open, if he inverted his perception and let white equal black. A thin band of cracks surrounding could have been lips. A bundle of wild hair, white being white again, shot straight up from where a forehead would be before circling around to frame the cheeks, two spots of unbroken glass. A round-faced wizard, it looked like, staring straight out of the pane, conjuring Gregori’s world ex nihilo.

From Watta’s workstation came the distinctive metallic twang of Tin Pan Alley guitar. He whirled in his chair. Watta was standing on her desk, dancing in front of the radio she kept at the end.

“Watta!” He scowled at her. She flipped him the bird and grinned widely. Tired, she signed.

Sighing, Gregori turned back to the window. He couldn’t pick out the wizard’s face again.

#

Glitch. Pop. 

WSJ: —were after the recipe for Guinness?

GE: I had already placed it in the public domain. It didn’t make much sense to steal it. No, I think they had a different agenda.

WSJ: What, then? Revenge?

GE: No, not revenge, though it’s not something I’d put past the Irish. No. I haven’t told this to anyone else, Jerry. But the bullet wound in Watta’s head was located directly between her eyes. It wasn’t a random shot, a shot in the literal dark.

WSJ: Why would anyone want to assassinate Watta?

GE: My partner was political. Not as a hobby, but just by virtue of her existence. She didn’t enjoy the polarization that surrounded our lives. She mostly wanted to sit around in the study with me, watching and listening; she lived for the adrenaline of discovery. Physiologically, chimpanzees are much easier to addict to the chemical. She knew she was, but she didn’t want to give it up. We went on a vacation, once, to the back yard. But the neighbor kids didn’t know how to sign to her, so I ended up turning her text displays around so she could read them from her lounge chair.

But political factions suffer from [a long pause] creative differences. There are some, it is plain to me, who, if given a One if by land, two if by sea sort of code, would promptly forget what it meant, as well as their battle cry and where the guns were buried. Countrymen to count on, they are. Now with night vision goggles.

WSJ: And what was the end result; to where did that tragedy bring you?

GE: Well, they made off with my computers, and a bunch of the archives. But big deal. I had backups, and the server is buried in a cooling system under the badminton court in the yard.

She killed at badminton. Always hit it over the fence. Don’t know why those neighbor kids never learned how to sign.

#

It was a bad day for concentration. Gregori was imagining things in the pages of text scrolling past him, now. He could see faces, hands, people in the gaps between blocks of characters, in the configuration of punctuation marks. These two periods close together made eyes, and from them poured a waterfall, pounded by slashes and capital Ls.

He gladly took a break when the workmen arrived to replace his window. They said, We won’t disturb you. We can do it all from outside. 

“I’m gonna get some coffee. You want any?” he asked Watta. She shook her head to one side, not meeting his eyes. She was sulking about having to turn the radio off.

It was getting on toward evening. Gregori stood by the kitchen window as the kettle rose to a boil. The sunset was beginning, but it wasn’t worth staying around for. Not a cloud was in the sky; the boring gradient shaded from navy in the East to dust in the West, and that was it. 

The kettle whistled. Gregori poured a mugful and stirred in a teaspoon of freeze-dried crystals, even though the caffeine would keep him up tonight.

Back in the living room, the workers had finished unrolling the new window and were tamping its corners into place. Gregori watched them as he tried to compose a short poem in his head. The warm coffee, his bare feet in the carpet, the workmen standing still and fading into the deepening night, it all fit somehow together. He couldn’t find how, not with his own words.

Watta screeched. Found something, she signed with flailing arms. Gregori coughed, spit coffee onto his bathrobe. 

#

WSJ: How many works have you forced into the public domain in this way? 

GE: Uh, only four have actually been ceded to the public. There was this novel published a few years back — Starve a Fever, by the Canadian author Bess Kashuba.  That was the most recent. Last year, I think, the publishing house’s lawyers relinquished it. The print version had a typo on page eighty-eight. Mine didn’t. That was pretty funny. 

WSJ: Only four? 

GE: Well, yeah. It’s slow going, the process of discovery. But that’s all there is now. There’s no such thing as creativity anymore; just discovery. 

#

Gregori stopped reading aloud. His tongue tasted funny to him. He made a sound through his nose that might have been a laugh if, halfway through, it hadn’t turned into a sneeze. 

“That’s the end,” he said. “It trails off into gibberish after that.”  From her perch in his lap, Watta gave a grunt of dismay.  She fumbled around so she was facing him. 

Not accurate, she signed. 

“Should I publish it?” he asked. 

She shook her head. Might happen, she signed small, between her folded feet. She turned to stare at the flickering images on another display. Gregori watched her fidget with the thin fur behind her ears. She heaved out a great sigh and turned again, resting her long arms on his thighs. 

You didn’t cry, she signed.

“No, I didn’t. It wasn’t me,” he said.

You somewhere, she signed.

Tired, she signed from her elbows down. 

Play, Gregori signed, smiling straight across his face, too tired to hold the corners up. “You pre-human citizen you.”

She leapt up onto the desk and waddled to the radio, her arms up for balance. Click. Ambient hiss. Cat Scratch Fever.