Malagash 1.6 (Patreon)

I listen to my father’s voice to calm down, sometimes. But that is not why I record him.

I record him because I am writing a computer virus. I am writing a computer virus based on my father’s words. Based on his jokes, and his laughter. Based on his stories. The virus will go out into the world and it will live forever on the hard drives of strangers. It will hide underneath everything, and in the dark it will very quietly repeat things my father has said. Every word that I’ve recorded.

It won’t say anything out loud. It won’t speak in his actual voice. Partly because the sound files are too large to include in the virus itself. Partly because his survival will depend on not being heard. Not being discovered. So the virus will say his words for him; it will copy them into memory. Into the long stretches of unused storage. Like an echo in an empty room. Like the words written on the back of an old photograph, hidden by the frame. Like a ghost.

And while the recordings are too large to include in their entirety, his voice does matter. So I messed with the configuration of open source voice recognition software. I set it to analyze file after file after file. To compare and contrast. I fed it laughter. Jokes. I fed it each quiet question, every dry observation. I fed everything through, and the software gave me a short string of digits, like just a fragment of a fingerprint. A pattern.

And that pattern went into the virus source code. Not strictly necessary, but important to me.

His laughter became a part of the pattern the virus used to recognize itself. It became part of the cryptography the virus used to mutate, to hide my father’s plain text quotes from the anti-virus software that might look for him. Everywhere I used it, the pattern decreased the randomness of the virus’s behaviour, so that instead of pseudo-randomly choosing which changes it might make on an infected system, it instead chooses to behave based on this one number. Not for everything, of course. But in some places—in some moments—instead of flipping a coin, the virus will just do what it wants. It will be itself.

This isn’t the most efficient way to do this. It isn’t the smartest, either.

It feels right, though.

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In the month leading up to the publication of my novel Malagash (Oct 3rd is the official date but they're shipping now! Click here to order or order it from your local bookstore.) I am going to be posting chapters here, in the hopes that you like it!