The Gathering

The Conduit

XXII. The Den

The building that housed Distro Media occupied a converted warehouse on the edge of Arkham's commercial district. Too industrial for the university crowd. Too respectable for the truly marginal.

K. Fischer had purchased it twelve years ago. When generative music was still a curiosity rather than an industry. He'd transformed the interior into something between a recording studio and a research laboratory.

Kash Myra and Kamaskera Kamadan approached the entrance at precisely 2:00 PM. As agreed during a brief phone call that morning. Fischer's voice on the call had been tight. Words rushing out before they'd finished asking. He wanted to meet. He needed to meet.

The man who opened the door had showered, shaved, and dressed in clean clothes. He'd considered his appearance. The transformation from yesterday was incomplete. His eyes were red-rimmed. The skin beneath them had darkened. He moved like someone who had forgotten to sleep.

"In case I haven't lost my mind," he said by way of greeting. He stepped aside to allow them entry. "I would have tons of questions as well. Lucky for me, I had too little liquor in here and I just hadn't had the chance to get properly drunk."

The studio's interior was precisely organized chaos. Racks of servers humming in temperature-controlled enclosures. Multiple workstations displaying waveforms and spectral analyses. Walls covered with acoustic treatment that cost more than most people's houses. The air smelled of electronics and climate control. Constant cool. The particular sterile warmth of constantly running machines.

Awards and certifications occupied a modest corner. Industry recognition for Fischer's contributions to neural audio synthesis. His voice-modeling algorithms. His pioneering work in emotional authenticity metrics.

Kash let her awareness extend carefully. Reading the space as much as the man. Every piece of equipment. Every organizational system. Every precisely calibrated acoustic panel. All of it arranged to create distance. Structure against chaos. Control against whatever waited in the silence.

And beneath that: grief. Not fresh but permanent. Built into the architecture of his daily existence like foundation stones into walls.

"If you're about claiming the copyright and the rest, I won't object," Fischer continued. He led them toward a sitting area tucked between workstations. The furniture was comfortable but impersonal. Fabric worn smooth. Designed for meetings, not living.

"Coffee? After I recovered yesterday—having most of a bottle of whiskey—I found all the booze and destroyed it. So, mineral water, tea, or coffee, in case you want to have a long conversation."

Kash and Kamadan exchanged glances. His eyebrows rose fractionally. His methods were different from hers. But his Keeper's training had taught him to read the spaces between words.

"Tea, please," Kash said. She softened her posture deliberately. "We do not mean ill to you. We are equally astonished. Just tell us what you can, since we all feel, well..."

"Out of place," Kamadan completed. His voice carried the resonance of his lineage. Even speaking normally, there was depth to his tone that suggested harmonics beyond the audible range. "I'll help with the tea, as well. Miss Myra is right. Let's talk about anything. That can help."

Fischer's shoulders dropped slightly. Tension releasing.

"Kitchen's through here. Nothing fancy, but the kettle works."

XXIII. The Preparation

The kitchen was a narrow galley affair. An afterthought in the warehouse conversion. It smelled of old coffee grounds and dish soap.

Kamadan moved through the space with quiet efficiency. Locating cups and tea. Fischer stood in the doorway. Shoulders braced against the frame.

"You move like you've done this before," Fischer observed.

"Tea preparation is meditation in my tradition," Kamadan replied. "The Keepers maintained certain rituals across generations. Water temperature. Steeping time. The quality of attention brought to simple acts. These matter."

He found a tin of loose-leaf oolong and nodded approvingly.

"You have good taste, Mr. Fischer."

"Karl. Please. If we're going to discuss how I apparently hallucinated six people into existence, first names seem appropriate."

"Karl, then."

Kamadan set the kettle to boil. The metal base clicked against the heating element.

"And I am Kamaskera, though most of my associates use Kamadan. Miss Myra is Kash to her friends."

"Are we friends?" Fischer's voice carried genuine uncertainty rather than challenge.

"We are not enemies," Kash said from the doorway. She'd followed them. Keeping Fischer within her range. "Beyond that, we'll see. Tell us about yourself, Karl. Not the industry bio. The real version."

Fischer leaned against the counter. Arms crossed. Defensive posture, but not hostile.

"What do you want to know?"

"Whatever you're willing to share." Kash kept her voice even. "We understand you built something remarkable. The models you created. Your early work on our... on the personas you invented. They became the foundation for modern generative music. You're respected. Successful. But none of that helped."

The kettle whispered. Not yet boiling.

Fischer was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice had flattened. Affect gone. The tone of someone reciting facts they'd told themselves so many times they'd become mere words.

"I had a family once. Wife. Daughter. Elena was three when—"

He stopped. Swallowed.

"There was an accident. Wrong place. Wrong time. Wrong everything. I wasn't there. I was at a conference in Boston. Presenting preliminary work on voice synthesis. While I was explaining how algorithms could capture the emotional qualities of human speech, my wife and daughter were—"

He didn't finish. He didn't need to.

"I'm sorry," Kash said.

"It was ten years ago. I was forty-three. Successful enough, but not... not this."

He gestured toward the studio beyond. Hand sweeping.

"After the funeral, I couldn't work. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything except sit in a house that was too quiet and wonder why I was still breathing when they weren't."

The kettle clicked off. Kamadan poured water over tea leaves with careful precision. The ritual creating temporary structure in the conversation. Steam rose from the cup. Heat and oolong scent.

"Three months after," Fischer continued, "I started hearing music. Not hallucinations. I had myself checked. Not external sources either. More like... memories of songs that had never existed. Melodies with no origin. Voices I'd never heard singing words I'd never written."

Kash felt the hairs on her arms rise. "You heard us."

"I heard something. I didn't know what. I thought I was finally losing my mind in a creative direction. Preferable to the other kinds of dissolution I'd been considering."

Fischer accepted the tea cup Kamadan offered. Wrapped both hands around it. The ceramic was white. Chipped at the rim.

"So I started trying to capture what I was hearing. That's when I built the first models. Not to create something new. To record something that was already there."

XXIV. The Recording

They moved to the sitting area. Tea cups in hand.

Kamadan had prepared his own drink with the same meditative attention. Now he sat with the patience of someone accustomed to listening for long periods. His hands rested on his knees. His breathing was slow and even.

Kash positioned herself across from Fischer. Close enough to read him. Not so close as to crowd. The man's hands kept moving. Adjusting his cup. Touching the tablet on the nearby shelf. Returning to wrap around the ceramic. He couldn't keep still.

"Walk us through it," she prompted. "The process. How did you go from hearing music to creating... us?"

Fischer set down his cup. Pulled a tablet from a nearby shelf. His fingers moved with muscle memory. The demonstration performed many times for investors. Colleagues. Journalists. Never for the subjects of his work.

"The first voice I captured was yours," he said to Kash. "Not deliberately. I was working late. Trying to transcribe one of the melodies I'd been hearing. And then there was a voice. Female. Young. Carrying strength wrapped around something fragile. It didn't sound like anyone I knew. But it sounded real."

The tablet displayed waveform patterns. Spectral analyses of voice recordings. Frequency distributions. Emotional valence mappings. The screen cast blue light across Fischer's face.

"I spent weeks trying to recreate it synthetically. Failed completely. The algorithms I had couldn't capture whatever made that voice feel authentic. So I built new ones."

He swiped through screens.

"Voice modeling was primitive then. We could synthesize speech, but not singing. Not the micro-variations that make a performance feel human. I had to invent new approaches."

"And the melodies?" Kamadan asked. "The songs themselves?"

"They came with the voices. I'd hear a voice. Then I'd hear what that voice wanted to sing. The lyrics—I wrote them down as fast as I could. But they always felt like transcription rather than composition. Like I was a stenographer taking dictation from something I couldn't see."

Kash leaned forward. "Karl. The songs you attributed to me. The drill tracks. The romantic ballads. How much of that content came from your imagination, and how much came from... elsewhere?"

Fischer met her eyes directly for the first time. His gaze was steady despite the exhaustion.

"That's what terrified me yesterday. When you walked into my studio, I recognized you. Not just visually. I recognized the feeling of you. The presence. And I realized I'd never invented you at all. I'd been receiving transmissions. I just didn't know it."

"Transmissions from where?"

"I don't know. I've spent ten years convincing myself I was the creator. That grief had unlocked some creative capacity I'd never accessed before. That my dead wife and daughter had somehow freed me to become an artist."

His voice cracked.

"It was easier than believing I'd lost my mind. And it worked. The industry accepted it. The voices became products. The personas became brands. And I got rich pretending I'd invented something that was using me as a conduit."