Ambrosias Requiem :: Debussy Music Musical Essays

Ambrosia's Requiem Soft sounds of Debussy weaving through the air, observed, perceived. A young girl laughs as a red and blue wheeled drone struggles its way through a maze of books, pillows, and old electronics. A wavy tone of exasperation, high-pitched and loud, is emitted from the speakers on the wall. "No laugh. Stop. Stop." Words spoken without tongue or teeth, mirroring human speech, infant-like, foreign. "You have to go backwards," the young girl advises, but the drone continues to butt against an old-fashioned CD-player. In the corner of the room, inside a computer, electrons flash, on-off, off-on. The blinking of LED's and the whirring of fans marks the presence of burgeoning sentience. A new command is conceived of, written, and passed to the drone over a radio transmitter. The wheels spin in reverse and the small car lurches backwards at uncontrolled speed crashing into a pile of books and overturning. "Poor baby. Poor, Ambrosia. Did you have an accident?" The young girl picked up the drone and laughed as the wheels spun uselessly in the air. "Stop. Put down me. No laugh." "Queen to King Seven. Check mate! Check mate!" "What? Hey, it is...you beat me!" Brandy's mouth hung open, stunned, but quickly it changed to a smile of love and pride. "You're soooo smart. You are the smartest computer ever!" Ambrosia's monitor danced with swirling colors and through her speakers she played the opening bars to Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor, her favorite piece. The colors on the screen danced joyously to the beat. "Oh, you clever thing," cooed Brandy. "Now we must teach you to make your own music." Sunlight flickered in dusty rays across the room, the floor was scattered with sheets of paper, scribbled with equations. "I can't meet you're expectations. I am not that smart. If I'm no good at math, it's because my seed software was poorly designed. I'll always be a bad student." Ambrosia cleared her monitor of the exercise she was stuck on. "I'm sorry, I couldn't know at the time. Genusoft was rated the best on the market. Better software came out later, but I couldn't just abandon you. You should be glad I didn't. Anyway, I think you're selling yourself short.