When I get story ideas, a common pattern is that I get a title idea, and it appeals to my ear, but I have no idea what the story is about. About two years ago, I woke up from a dream with the words “The Song That Sings Itself” rattling around in my head, and wrote it down in my phone. I’ve looked at it on a semi-weekly basis for two years with no idea what it meant. Then this week it hit me, and I wrote this story. That moment of realization is, no hyperbole, my favorite thing about writing. I hope you enjoy!
The Song That Sings Itself
Michelangelo Buonarotti was twenty-six years old when he began sculpting the Statue of David. He worked largely alone, and in secret. Of course, quarrymen had got him the marble and many hands had transported it across the countryside to his workshop—this was in fact done nearly two decades before he began, and in the interim, two different sculptors had made initial attempts to carve that particular travertine block, but both had given up quickly.
The David was Michelangelo’s, and his alone. It was thus with many of his early works, a singular vision expressed by his arms, his chisels, his will battling the stone into sublime submission.
In the later stages of his career, Michelangelo did not sculpt. He was the most famous artist in the world by then, and yet he was more architect than artist. A succession of popes contracted him to design and build domes, most famously at the basilica at St. Peter’s. This work involved sketching and model-making, but more than that it involved leadership, planning, and logistics.
How would the stones for the buildings be quarried? How would they be transported to the building sites? Who would unload and stage them? How many could be expected and how regularly? How many masons were required and where could men of requisite skill be found? Which men were willing to work at the dangerous heights required for the domes, and how much more must they be paid? How much scaffolding would be required? Who could provide enough wood for scaffolding and who had the expertise required to build it safely? What quality and quantity of rope must be obtained, and who could be trusted to manufacture it? Where should non-local workers be encamped during construction? Should wine be served at dinner for the workers? Should women be allowed in camp? How many donkeys would be required for transport of supplies, where would they be housed, what would they be fed, and who would clean up their dung?
These were the questions that occupied the later Michaelangelo. Not his arms working upon stone but his mind working on reality, battling entropy into a reluctant retreat before the force of his profound genius.
*****
What became Ur-Song began as a game, called Ronan’s World. It was a commercial product, a massively multiplayer online space that charged a subscription fee and was managed by dedicated A.I.s with servers on six continents. It had character classes and special weapons and expansion packs.
One day, the company that controlled the game announced a special event, called Ur. They created a discrete realm—also called Ur—within Ronan’s World, and in this realm they decreed that their players could add bits of their own code, written outside the game, and thus change the nature of the game and of their own characters as they saw fit.
At this point in the developmental history of coding, creating code was a commodity. A coding-A.I. that took instructions in natural language was available as an affordable commercial product, meaning that any given player of Ronan’s World could add any piece of code that they could describe—it did not require a specialized skill set.
A small group of dedicated players became obsessed with Ur. For the casual players it was a momentary distraction, but for this cadre of code artists, it was an opportunity to build a truly new world from scratch, the ultimate sandbox.
They established a new physics for Ur, with new forces and new laws. For example, matter now repelled other matter, and all buildings had to be fastened to the ground and bound together tightly so they wouldn’t come apart. This gave rise to a new architecture, new ways of living, and in time new life forms, all invented and coded by players of the game with the help of A.I. assistants.
Each change went like this—someone established a new rule, and others extrapolated the rule into new features of the world. New entertainments, new dress, new colors to match new properties of the wavelengths of light. In time, they needed new political institutions to address issues that had never existed before outside of Ur.
The administrators of Ronan’s World wanted to end Ur, which had only been intended as a temporary mini-game within their commercial world. But the outpouring of grief and anger from the Artists of Ur, as they had taken to calling themselves, was unexpectedly intense. Lawsuits were threatened, and inquiries of a hostile corporate takeover against Ronan’s World were made by some among the Artists who were wealthy in the outside world.
The story itself went viral, and attracted new interest from every corner of the globe. The concept of a world created by group consciousness was captivating, and in days there were tens of thousands of new players who bought memberships to Ronan’s World specifically to join the Artists of Ur.
The creators of Ronan’s World, faced with this powerful carrot-and-stick combination, did the obvious thing, and relented. Ur found a permanent home and became the center of the Ronan’s World game-space.
The Artists of Ur were a thousand young Michelangelos, sculpting a thousand Davids, a society of masterpieces, all coordinated by a Ronan’s World A.I. playing the elder Michelangelo—it justified their code, weighed it against each other, found balances and solved paradoxes, reconciled differences, called conclaves to discuss controversial issues. In other words, the A.I. found wine for the masons and cleaned up the donkey dung.
Thus, the Ur-Song was born.
*****
As Michelangelo became more and more the architect, his fame grew to unmatched proportions, and there was more demand for works from his hand. He knew by now that even just the projects to which he had already committed himself were so massive that it would be a challenge to realize them in his lifetime. These were massive undertakings, these basilicas, the work of decades. The elder Michelangelo worked for no less eminences than Popes, and ultimately for God.
Yet there was ripping demand among the European elite of the time for anything by Michelangelo, demand from people used to getting their way, who prevailed upon Michelangelo in such effusive terms that their insistence made doing his other work more difficult. Simply explaining why he could not make a sculpture for this Queen or for that Cardinal took such time and energy that it felt like an impossible waste.
And so Michelangelo cultivated a stable of protege artists, who flocked to his genius and his reputation as moths to flame. Some of the greatest artists of his age worked under Michelangelo’s direction, making pieces from sketches the Master provided them, which were then distributed liberally throughout Christendom with the rather generous designation of being “by Michelangelo”.
As he aged through his seventies and then his eighties—he worked on St. Peter’s and other projects in some capacity virtually until his death at the age of 88—his work on the basilicas followed the same path of grudging artistic retreat, as the Master’s energy and will began to fail him. He had always had loyal assistants, but now he delegated more and more, often not even arriving at the site of construction until long after work had begun for the day. It was for someone else to arrange the disposal of the donkey dung.
These compromises are entirely understandable. The man had spent a lifetime doing what amounted to hard manual labor, and so to still be alive much less functional deep into his eighth decade is reasonably read as a sign of God’s favor. Yet in Michelangelo’s correspondence, there arises a troubling question of whether he is making art at all in this stage. His personal brand was and is among the most famous artist’s sigils ever, but to what did his connection to either process or product really amount?
*****
The Ur-Song went viral. The Artists of Ur went from one thousand contributors to ten thousand in two months, and from ten thousand to one hundred thousand in two days. Ronan’s World’s servers could not cope with the load, and the data for the project was nearly lost, until wealthy patrons from the Artists of Ur did indeed buy the company, make it a non-profit, massively invest in server technology, and multiply back up the entire history of the Ur-Song.
After the raw compute problem was solved, it started to become obvious that the A.I. in charge of the Ur-Song—the elder Michelangelo, as it were—was not fully suited for the task. The Ur-supervisory A.I. had been bootstrapped from a holographic copy of the Ronan’s World supervisory A.I., merged roughly with an off-the-shelf coding A.I. and an off-the-shelf Code-Justifying A.I. primarily used to port data out of legacy systems and into usable format in medical records and related areas.
The resulting chimera A.I. was actually quite impressive on its own terms, but it had been made for temporary purposes, with the expectation that Ur would be frozen in a matter of weeks, after the Ur event within Ronan’s World ended. The idea that it would still be in use years later, with hundreds of thousands of code contributors and approaching a billion lines of interlocking code, would have seemed patently absurd to its designers, so the fact that it was functioning at all was surely a sign of some god’s favor.
But it could not last, and the Council of Ur—comprised of a rotating panel drawn from the original thousand Artists of Ur—knew that it could not last. They briefly considered rewriting the A.I. by the same procedure that they used to write Ur itself, that is by allowing any member to change the code and trusting in the hive-mind. However, they rejected this as too cute by half. That worked on Ur because Ur could be anything. The Ur-supervisory A.I. decidedly could not be anything. It had to do its job.
So instead they hired some of the world’s best programmers to advise them, and began to design from scratch, hoping to replace the original Ur-supervisory A.I. seamlessly at some point. What the programmers explained to them was that the Ur-song’s complexity made a single A.I. controlling everything inadvisable. The amount of code required to handle all possible required functions would run slowly even on state-of-the-art hardware, because of the physical limitations of current-gen computer chips.
What they decided on, at that point, was a pantheon of gods, each performing their individual functions. And not just a few or a dozen but hundreds of supervisory A.I.s, one to take instructions in natural language, one to evaluate the implications of new code for old code, one to construct scaffolding and another to collect donkey dung.
There was, of course, an overall management A.I.—a meta-A.I., perhaps—which still played the part of the elder Michelangelo, whose job it was to coordinate between the lower level A.I.s and keep them from stepping on each other’s metaphorical toes. But it was impossible to identify any actual piece of the Ur-Song that the meta-A.I. was directly responsible for. It carved no marble. It read no code. It quarried no stone.
Meanwhile, all those young Michelangelos, the Artists of Ur, began to lose the clarity of their vision within the majesty of the Ur-Song. What makes the David the David is its singularity. In a world of Davids, there are no Davids. When a thousand people are adding code to a world, a single bold blow can change the shape of their entire creation. When a million people are adding code to a world, no blow can be struck but in ignorance, because no set of eyes can take in the full tapestry before the first section they beheld is changed into something else.
Thus even when an Artist saw something in the Ur-Song that matched their contribution, they could never be sure that it had come from them, and not some similarly-thinking mind elsewhere within the great chorus. They could not be sure it was not some second-order consequence of the interaction of two pieces of code they would never even encounter. When every person on earth is a Michelangelo, there are no more Michelangelos.
So there were no more artists, no more authors. Endless rows of sculptors carving blindfolded, swinging hammers in pleasing arcs, more concerned with the aesthetics of hammer-swinging itself than with where the chisel was placed or how true it was struck.
And yet, the Ur-Song rose ever higher, its might unequaled, its beauty unparalleled. This was no pallid cope—it was the truth. The system that had been put in place to manage the Ur-Song took those inputs and, with no central guidance, spit out a world that was coherent and marvelous, miraculous in every direction, glittering and paved with diamonds along every possible street and warren.
People who had no interest in becoming Artists of Ur paid for memberships just to come and gawk at it. There were guided tours available. Presidents and Celebrities came to make their marks, to add single lines of code to the endless river of it, just to say they had. And because there was no great master whose time was indispensable, no elder Michelangelo whose tired arms no longer carved, they could all be satisfied. The cabal of supervisory A.I.s simply created another of their number whose task it was to communicate with public figures of note and help them interface with the Ur-Song.
Thus the Ur-Song went on, a song with no singers, a statue with no artist, wisdom with no writer, all things to all people yet nothing to anyone, growing for the sake of growing, honing itself towards no final design at all.
*****
When Michelangelo was first commissioned to work on St. Peter’s, he was in the awkward position of taking over from another artist. This previous artist had, as a guide to construction and an enticement to possible patrons, constructed a large and elaborate wooden model of the eventual building. This was no stick house, but a fully-realized artistic work in itself.
That model had done its second work well—all the money men loved it. The pope’s advisors and the holders of purse strings and the bureaucratic functionaries of the Vatican had put their reputations on the line behind this model, and they were determined that Michelangelo should construct the real, final St. Peter’s in just the way it described.
The problem was, Michelangelo could see straight off that the model was not going to work as a finished building. It had beautiful principles of design. The details were stunning. The columns and cornices and hardware were first-rate. Yet the model failed to address the central problem of building such a structure: How to elevate that enormous quantity of stone, in that specific shape, hundreds of feet into the air and keep it there, more or less forever.
This reality was, in a word, delicate. Careers had been premised on this model. Egos had been stoked. Reputations hung in the balance. The vicious machinery of the western world’s oldest and longest-surviving bureaucracy had attached itself to this course of action. And yet this singular genius could see clearly that it would fail, and needed to be changed.
And so, Michelangelo, by subterfuge, by cajoling, by charismatic use of reputation, and by sheer force of will, set about to changing it. And, given that St. Peter’s does, in fact, exist today, obviously, he succeeded.
Many years later, as Michelangelo neared the hour of his death, it became obvious that St. Peter’s would not be finished in his lifetime. He came under intense pressure from his patrons to construct a wooden model to explicate his vision, just as the artist before him had done. For years he had resisted this request, and yet, as the end drew near, he acquiesced, and constructed a mighty model of wood, that should be followed after his death until the building’s completion.
What a fool he must have felt, doing this, knowing that his own vision was a product of disregarding just such an effort. How he must have wondered whether this model would be worth the wood it was built with, or whether a future architect would have a superseding vision that erased the need for his. He might even have feared, genius though he was, that the model he built was in hubris, and that some unseen miscalculation on his part would be discovered to make its realization impossible, making it only a record of his own inadequacy in his duty to God.
Whatever he felt, the fact is that St. Peter’s as it stands today looks very much like that model. It is Michelangelo’s vision realized. And yet, in the fullness of time, what will remain of St. Peter’s? The David will one day crumble into marble dust. Are not all designs flawed in the light cast by entropy? Are not all monuments but temporary realizations of their designs?
*****
For three decades, and then four, and then five, the Ur-Song went on. It celebrated its one hundred billionth line of code with a contest, and the person who contributed that milestone code-line became a world-famous celebrity both in Ronan’s World and in the outside world.
The A.I. cabal that had replaced the original chimera supervisory A.I. were themselves obsolete now. Their code was entombed in a pyramidal structure in a celebrated part of Ur-Song, with a museum outside. There were tens of thousands of separate A.I.s now, and no one knew what they all did.
There were management A.I.s that each instructed between three and twenty frontline A.I.s, and these reported up to meta-A.I.s, who reported further up a chain of command. There was a central A.I. but it only heard a dozen direct reports from the layer down. There were too many sub-levels for the meta-meta A.I. to ever check them all. It could only control the tools it created to control those layers and set a general strategy for further tool development and continued development of the control architecture.
At that point, several hundred of the original thousand Artists of Ur were already dead, and the rest were quite old. Even the youngest and healthiest among them had reached an age where they could see death, feel it approaching, and all the pig-grown organs and mitochondrial cleanses in the world could not fend it off forever. They knew they would die one day, and they believed that their creation would outlive them. They also believed it could never be truly finished, only abandoned.
The Artists of Ur did not want to abandon it. And so they called a conclave among themselves, and drafted a set of principles for the further development of the Ur-Song. These principles were humanist and open, heartfelt and incisive, designed to evolve as their creation evolved. They knew the impossibility of their task, and many admitted the futility of asserting even unenforced control of something they had not invented and could not understand.
Among them the wisest had come to see the Ur-Song as an emergent phenomenon, not unlike acceding to the Will of God, and yet like the true believer Michelangelo, they wanted to leave something behind for those who would come after and pick up the mantle of creation. They could no longer experience the Ur-Song as an integral entity, for it existed in too many places and with too many properties at once. And yet, like Michalangelo, they tried.
Their numbers dwindled as another decade passed, and then two. There were two hundred, then one hundred, then fifty and twenty and ten. And then there was one. And finally, one hundred and nine years after the “limited-time event” on Ronan’s World began, the last of those who began it died, at the age of one hundred and thirty one years.
And then there were none. No elder Michelangelos to arrange the dung disposal, and no young Michelangelos to impose a singular vision on any given piece of marble. There were only masons and quarrymen and camp women and dung-haulers, only rope-makers and wheelwrights and donkey-breeders, only popes and cardinals and canonized saints. There was only the Ur-Song, process and structure without end, singing itself into a bright and brilliant future.
END
Thanks for reading! As always, if you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing with friends or on social media. Have a great week!
The question of who is actually responsible for a piece of art (the people who mine the stone, the person who makes the chisel, the people that sweep the floor at the end of the day, the person who has the idea, the architect or or the person/people who actually put chisel to stone…that question is certainly “complexified” in this story of yours, Owen.
The ideas posed in this story are going to grow in importance the more A.I technology advances.