P118089 was already out of its seat when the barked order came from P154 “Let’s go, newbie”

“This LifeGraph is incredible. I’ve never seen an HSS graph with such few possibilities! Sure canines had LifeGraphs with just a few hundred possibilities, but all the HSS souls I’ve seen with you had at least a million!”

P154 knew the pattern in this LifeGraph well – while the archetype surfaced only once every few million souls, it wasn’t anything it hadn’t seen before. Time to test the new kid.

“True, it’s unusual. Why do you think that is?”

“I was thinking it could be one of two possible things – either this person is really low IQ, similar to a canine, OR, grew up in a really remote area where there weren’t that many paths life could take”

“Not bad guesses – those two situations do typically have fewer branches, but those still don’t get down to sub 1000 lives. This graph is the classic example of an obsessive perfectionist – in HSS lingo – a prodigy.”

“Prodigy? So, he always chooses the same thing when presented with choices…”

“..because in his mind there’s only one right answer. And, he is so obsessed with controlling his environment that even the outside world presents very few variables. So even though this HSS lived in downtown Vienna, his life has fewer variations than the average HSS from a remote island in Tuvalu.”

P118089 was silent as it continued poring over the LifeGraph. It knew what P154’s next question was going to be, so it piped up before P154 had a chance to ask it. “For the guide rendering, you should probably go for a conductor in an orchestra – familiar, trustworthy.”

P154’s silent stare and tiny smile as it changed its appearance to match exactly that was better than any pats on the back. P118089 felt a zing of excitement – maybe it was ready to finally do a soul processing! 

“Welcome to the After Life Processing Center – your final step to put a bow on the lives you have and could have led. Your Guide will be joining you shortly, so please wait for a few moments.”

Wolfe Bauer opened his eyes and immediately knew something was wrong. After waking up to the white ceiling of his bedroom every single morning for the past 11 years, he knew this vast black cavern he was now staring at meant something big had changed in his life. 

He looked around a bit more – at the man in the tail coat in the corner, at his own feet that were vanishing into mist into the black floor, and up at what seemed to be a giant TV instead of an audience that would normally be seated for one of his concerts.

“The only logical conclusion here is that I’m dead.” he said out aloud to the man now approaching him.

“Very astute, Wolfe. You passed peacefully in your sleep last night. Heart Attack.”

Wolfe nodded once. He looked around once more, taking in the space and feeling the beginnings of a composition in the back of his head starting to form. 

“Now I’m here to -”

“Do you have a violin?” he looked around again. “Or I suppose, can you conjure one up, since I don’t imagine this is a strictly physical world I’m in right now?”

P154 paused for a beat. Requests for earth objects weren’t that unusual – some asked to sit in their favorite car one last time, some for a favorite meal or drink. Usually these tended to be distractions from the soul processing, so protocol was to deny them, but it sensed that this HSS needed music. Like child souls often needed their favorite stuffed toy. 

“Yes we can do that – I believe this is the D Z Strad you have at home?”

‘Isn’t this against protocol?’ P118089 chimed in. 

‘Read section on Child Prodigies, chapter 18’  P154 signaled back, keeping an eye on Wolfe as he triple checked the tuning on his violin and started playing a slow melancholy note. 

P118089 flipped quickly to Chapter 18 – “Exceptional cases”. It had not yet gotten to this part of the manual and cursed itself for not getting here sooner. The section on Child Prodigies was a short list of pointers, and item number #7 explained P154’s call in the room:

7) Prodigies often use their chosen area of skill as a way to understand and interpret their emotions, so enabling that typically makes the soul processing smoother

The melancholic strains coming from the room as P154 explained the LifeGraph made a lot more sense now. The HSS was simply processing its feelings about his death.

Wolfe closed his eyes as the conductor asked him which life he wanted to relive. He had already memorized the graph, so in his mind’s eye, he looked at the oddly shaped structure – almost like a tree with three branches – two of them thick and straight, shooting almost vertically straight up and horizontally straight across, and a skinny branch that made its way up diagonally. A single white line pulsed on the horizontal branch – which according to the conductor represented the life he had just lived.

He stopped playing for a second, and looked at the conductor. “The answer is quite obvious, is it not? There are three branches, one of which I have already lived. Natürlich I would like to watch one life from each of the other two remaining branches. Specifically the longest in each one.”

He resumed playing as the conductor nodded once, pointed towards the screen and said, “let’s start with the one life on this vertical branch, and we’ll play the diagonal branch second.”

Wolfe said nothing as he turned his attention to the screen, still engrossed in the refrain that his brain continued to churn out, wanting to get it on to the violin before he lost the thread.

The LifeVideo started, and he saw his parents bringing him home, playing with him as a child. However, within a few minutes, everything started to look different. There was no violin handed to him on his 4th birthday. Instead, he was in a room full of adults in black. 

He stopped playing. “What happened?”

“Your parents passed away in a car crash.”

He watched silently as a tired looking lady came over after the funeral, and told him that his parents hadn’t appointed any guardians, but his aunt in a small town had been willing to take him in. 

Wolfe’s eyebrows shot together. “Einen Moment bitte. Is this Tante Helga? She’s always late to everything, and always smells…”

Wolfe watched as his dreaded Aunt Helga opened the door with half a cigarette hanging from her mouth, a stein in her hand.

“..of beer and cigarettes.” He watched as the 4 year old version of him quietly walked into the house with his nose scrunched up. “I didn’t stay here forever, did I?” 

“You did run away a few times, but were always brought back by the neighbors in the village. You stayed with her until you ran away to Vienna at 16 and never came back.”

Wolfe watched, his violin forgotten, as his aunt constantly ignored the four year old child, fed him a diet of plain bread and moldy cheese, and on some of the worse nights, took her alcohol-fueled rage out on him. As he grew older, he got more adept at getting food from sympathetic neighbors, picking up on hints of his aunt’s alcohol levels, and staying out of the house for hours until his aunt had gone to bed. Most days, he’d spend an extra 2-3 hours in the fields outside her house, delaying going back home for as long as possible.

In one of these many field rambles, Wolfe could hear his 11 year old self as he hummed a chirpy refrain that mimicked the birds and the babbling brooks in the village, with a hint of sadness woven through it. In the room, he picked up his violin and repeated the refrain, adding to it, riffing on it as he continued to watch the LifeVideo play out his alternative life.

The teenager eventually grew up on a diet starved of adult supervision, healthy food, any friendship or any form of music outside of his own humming. As Wolfe watched, he felt the lack of the last to be the most painful to watch – no baby violin at 4 for this life’s version of himself, no father shuttling him to piano classes at 5, no mother to argue with his cello instructor who deemed him too small for the instrument at 6, no baby grand for his 7th birthday or the full works of Bach for his 8th, and definitely no world tours for the child prodigy every single year after the age of 9 with his string of professional coaches. To date, he had seen this progression of events in his own life as his natural right – which musical child prodigy would not be nurtured with exactly these tools after all?

As the LifeVideo got to his mid-teens, Wolfe softly spoke for the first time in many minutes.

“Erfolg hat viele Väter, aber Misserfolg ist ein Waise. (Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan). I always appreciated the deeper meaning behind this phrase, but it’s true even at its simplest, no?”

The LifeVideo slowed to an 8th grade version of Wolfe being followed out of school by a girl in pigtails. Hesitant at first, she eventually plucked up the courage to run faster to catch up with Wolfe.

In the room, Wolfe suddenly broke the silence with a crinkle in his eyebrows. “Müller. Mara Müller. Cello. A near perfect Brahms symphony no 3.” 

Wolfe’s enormous working memory had instantly delivered the musical memory associated with the face he saw on the screen, but as always it took a little longer for the rest of the context around it to come through as well.

“2011 Wiener Philharmonic auditions for the cello section. Near perfect classical solo, an oddly folksy piece for her Caprices, stumbled on sight reading and so had to be turned away.”

On screen, Wolfe was sporting a burst lip that day – he had gotten too engrossed in his math homework to escape his aunt the night before.

” Hi, I’m Mara. Wolfe, right?”

Wolfe looked up, mutely staring at Mara as if she was an alien. “Ya.. Hi?”

“I thought the song you were humming just now was beautiful.”

“Umm.. Thanks?”

“Hey listen, I noticed you don’t head straight home right after class everyday..”

Wolfe’s eyes suddenly turned suspicious, his small shoulders visibly tensed for the next line for questioning about his home life.

“..and I was wondering if you want to come practice in the music room with me? I usually go in there after school, the teachers don’t mind, they gave me a key so I can lock up after I’m done. And I want to try out that tune you were humming on my Cello! So I’m hoping you’ll come with me?”

Wolfe was stumped. And also could think of no excuse to say no. 

By the time the final bell for the day rang, Wolfe was a ball of apprehension. As Mara bounced up to him and dragged him to the music room, some of his tension seemed to unwind – at least she wasn’t lying. As Mara started setting up her cello, Wolfe browsed the motley collection of instruments in the room, many that had gathered several layers of dust. He kept searching aimlessly, until his eye caught a small box at the back of the room. 

As he picked it up, a plume of dust went into his nose and eyes, and he coughed his way back to where Mara was setting up. He pulled out the violin, and gave it a tentative pluck. 

Next to P154, Wolfe abruptly stopped playing – no doubt jarred by visceral realization in this moment that THIS 14 year old version of him was discovering something that was like a second limb to him his whole life. Almost as if a human watched a teenager discover how to use their fingers for the first time.

On screen, every pluck of the string seemed to breathe some color into the teenager’s cheeks. When Mara started tentatively playing behind him, his whole being just unfurled – his chest expanded, his shoulder lay back, his head tilted up and he stood taller, eyes closed, trying to soak in every note coming off of Mara’s cello. When the music finally stopped, he opened his eyes to find Mara’s, and thought, ‘I’m in love’.

Mara seemed nervous, and not at all like the boisterous girl who had barreled into him earlier today. “Was that right? Was it good?”

Wolfe had never been one for smiles – not since his parents. But for the first time in what felt like forever, Wolfe felt his cheeks move out of the way for his lips to take up more space on his face. 

“That was…beautiful.”

Mara seemed to immediately regain her bossy energy, and huffed. “I knew I could replicate it from memory! But, if you want, you can hum it again so we can be sure…”

 “If I hum for you again, will you teach me how to play?”

She seemed disarmed by this question. “I.. I… I’m not a teacher, you know. I just like to try to copy what I hear on the radio sometimes, that’s all.”

“That’s ok, I just want to do what you do, that’s all! I’ll do anything! I’ll hum 100 more songs for you if you want.”

 Mara sniffed, seeming to consider his offer, as Wolfe looked on nervously. 

P154 startled as Wolfe next to him spoke up.

“That small smile she’s trying to hide – she’s excited, like my mother would be when Herr Lehrer reluctantly gave me compliments. I can tell she will agree to this” 

He picked up his violin to continue the tune Mara had started – hopeful, chirpy and fast paced. It seemed like the perfect background music to the montage of the next few years, as Wolfe and Mara spent their afternoons, often late into the evenings, practicing together, coming up with new tunes. 

At 18, they watched as Wolfe convinced Mara they should audition for the MDW. The two scraped together enough savings for tickets to Vienna. Mirroring real life, Mara got turned away once more for stumbling on sight reading. While Wolfe’s performances went nearly flawlessly, he got turned away for not having enough expression on his Paganini caprice. They rode the train back home in utter silence that evening. 

“I didn’t even have to audition. MDW gave me an honorary degree when I was 11.” Wolfe narrated, even though he must know that P154 already knew this. Some things just needed to be said out aloud.

They watched as the two went back to their countryside life – her as a music teacher now, and him taking over his aunt’s farm. The LifeVideo zoomed through a few decades of their life together, with 4 children born and raised on the same farm. In their 80s now, the video slowed down to an evening in the Bauer household, with Mara on her cello, and Wolfe on his violin. 

The house was decked with the usual Christmas decorations, and the four kids, with their own kids in tow, were piled into the sofas and rugs in the living room, with some visible excitement as grandma and grandpa Bauer got their instruments ready. Mara’s eyes twinkled, as she turned to her companion of 65 years, and said “Shall we start with the Bauer Sonata No. 1?”

Grey haired and wrinkled, Wolfe’s laugh lines deepened at that – in this life his cheeks had given way to his lips much more frequently it seemed.

“Freilich!”

And they began. Wolfe and P154 immediately picked up the hints of that first hum in the music room, but it had evolved, blossomed, seasoned in the decades since. P154 was quite enjoying this matured version of it.

‘He’s crying.’  P118089 remarked, abruptly.  P154 turned in disbelief. Sure enough, Wolfe’s arms lay limp at his sides, as the man cried silent tears. 

“I would have never… I could only.. I was taught only in the classics and would have never ever taken this piece in this direction. This is beautiful! But I would have never.. ” 

He turned to P154, “I now feel sorry for Fraulein Mariana. She kept telling me, ‘theory suffocates art’, but I kept telling her she needed to teach me the next piece, that she wasn’t going fast enough. I did not know what she meant. Until right now.”

P154 nodded, there was nothing much to say, and it had a job to do. “Well, let’s watch the diagonal branch on your life tree now, shall we?”

As Wolfe nodded mutely, the Lifevideo started up again, zipping through the childhood years, back in the familiar environs of his Vienna life with his parents and his intense musical training. He closed his eyes for the brief period with Fraulein Mariana at age 7, cringing now at his drive to learn every musical piece ever written to perfection. 

More composed now, Wolfe wondered “This branch was very thin, why is that?”

“There is an event at age 19 that has a 0.00001% chance of happening, and shifts the course of your life.”

As if on cue, the video slowed to a scene of Wolfe walking along a street, lost in thought, fingers on his left hand doing an invisible dance. 

“March 18th. That is my usual route to the philharmonic, and I was practicing the first movement of Sibelius – I couldn’t get a note right because my middle finger didn’t move fast enough, and it was bothering me. Not that anyone else noticed, but I knew.”

Wolfe slowed to a stop at the light, still staring up at the sky, reading his invisible notes, when it happened. In a flash, Wolfe’s body had been tossed towards an incoming car, the impact shattering the windshield and leaving Wolfe half-way inside the car. 

He slowly crawled backwards, his head mostly unharmed but his hands looking blood soaked and mangled, dotted with shards from the windshield. They watched as Wolfe slowly sat up, staring at his mangled hands, numb to the mayhem that had erupted around him.

“Scheiße!! Can you rewind that?! What happened? I was just standing by the road!”

“Sure. Let me slow it down as well, so I can tell you why this was so very unlikely an instance”

‘I thought we do not allow rewinds?’ said P118089, sounding like quite the rule-follower. 

‘We don’t when the motive is just to relive moments – that serves no purpose for the soul to move on. However understanding the intricate decisions that lead up to major events can be instructive. Humans even have a term for it – the butterfly effect ‘

On screen, Wolfe was back to standing at the intersection, playing his invisible instrument, this time in an ethereal slow motion.

“See that cyclist? He was in a rush to get to his exam, and forgot his glasses. Which he only ever does 20% of the time. In 18% of those, that lady sees him coming and steps out of the way. But this day she’s searching for her phone because her husband is calling to say he’ll be late. Getting knocked by the cyclist makes her step on this St Bernard’s tail – who is normally the most docile animal but today his owner is preoccupied with her impending decision to break up with her boyfriend, a decision that in 90% of her lives she made right after their lunch together ends in another fight. But today, this means she forgot to feed her dog his breakfast, and….. there. She neglected to hold the dog back when he freaked out on this stranger. This large man, while he hid it carefully, was terrified of dogs and was already on high alert when this dog sat down next to him. At the first hint of the dog jumping up, he took a big step backwards… straight into you. You were pushed on to the traffic, and before either you or that driver in the black Audi realized what had happened, you had gone through the windshield at 50 kilometers per hour. You used your hands to protect your head, but the shards of glass cut through your bones and tendons completely. In 99.99999% of your lives, this series of events never came to pass”

Wolfe stood there, mutely absorbing this, while on screen with the predictability of a movie, his doctors informed him of his prognosis – he’d never be able to play the violin again. Cue a montage of painful looking physiotherapy, attempts at playing anyway and failing, being unable to sit through recitals knowing what he had lost, and a whole lot of staring out windows. 

The only bright spots in the montage was getting recruited into the audition committee for the university – the one place his knowledge was useful and his hands were not required.

“That’s .. Mara again. That same flawless Brahms, and the same odd Caprice. It all makes sense now – she had a flawless ear but no teachers, so she was never trained in sight reading”

As Wolfe walked out of the auditions, suddenly she appeared in front of him.

” Hi, I’m Mara. But you already knew that, because of.. you know.. the audition?” she rambled nervously. “Wolfe Bauer right?”

Wolfe looked up, and in an eerie echo of the teenager from his other lifetime, and mutely stared at Mara as if she was an alien. “Ya.. Hi?”

“I heard about your.. umm” she bit her lip, clearly looking like she was trying hard to not look at his scarred hands.

Wolfe continued staring back in silence, and when she didn’t say anything, started to step around her. 

” Will you teach me how to play?” she blurted out.

That stopped Wolfe in his tracks. At 19, no one had thought of him as a teacher. “I.. I am not a teacher. I am still a student myself.”

“That’s ok, I just want to learn as much as you know already, that’s all! I’ll do anything! I’ll practice a 100 hours a week if you want!”

‘..and now he’s smiling? The handbook says prodigies are supposed to be less emotional than the average human.’ P118089 was rifling through the manual trying to make sense of the situation. 

‘Newbie, stop looking for answers in the manuals and just look at him. Why do you think there are 323 editions? HSS souls are never predictable.’

P154 watched the smile crack open Wolfe’s face as he watched the interactions on the screen, and thought to itself, not for the first time, that it was a fine division it had chosen to stay with. Never a dull moment.

Once more, with a movie-like predictability, the student became the teacher. Mara practiced  diligently and with the occasional streak of rebellion against the rules of classical music. Even as Wolfe seemed to be frustrated by her refusal to follow the norms, he also seemed charmed by it, and soon they became more than just a student and a teacher. 

Predictably, Mara’s wild streak didn’t win her any spots on the philharmonic, but lucky for her she had started her career in the era of YouTube. A few riffs she posted to share with her family went viral and shot her into international stardom. She and Wolfe travelled all over the world to perform, initially to fan-hosted indie venues, but eventually to more established classical venues that had started to struggle with staying relevant for the younger generation, and saw Mara as someone who could help them bridge to the gap to make classical music interesting to the latest crop of college students. 

In each city, Mara would constantly challenge Wolfe’s notions of classical music and push themselves to be more inventive. In India, they invited a Tabla pandit, their Paris show featured an accordionist, their Kyoto tour had a Kotoshu and their Istanbul shows had an Oud player.

P118089 chimed in ‘His music almost seems… thoughtful?’.

‘Indeed, the word humans use is contemplative.’ P154 signaled back. This newbie seemed to be getting the hang of the HSS species. Perhaps he was finally ready to do a processing himself.’

“Vor lauter Mauern, die ich um meine Träume zog, sah ich die Weite der Welt nicht mehr” (Amidst all the walls I built around my dreams, I could no longer see the vastness of the world). I knew the philharmonic was constantly worried about filling seats, and thought that was because our performances were sub par. But no, we were not what they wanted to hear. They wanted to hear this.” he pointed up, as Mara finished her solo piece with distinct influences from samba music to a standing ovation in Brazil. 

“What a tragedy that I could not see it.” He continued muttering to himself, as the video came to a close, the lights dimmed, and P154 led Wolfe to the door in the corner. 

“You’re now on your way to get processed for your next life, once you’ve completed the exit questionnaire. I have three questions for you. First question, Would you replace the life you lived with any of the ones you watched today?”

Wolfe looked back at the now darkened screen, and softly remarked. “Ya. Even though my hands did not make it, the music in the third life was undoubtedly the best.”

“Second question. Would you like to have memories of this life to be available to you in your next life?”

“Natürlich. If I can know what already exists a little sooner, I hope in my next life I will create what does not exist instead.” 

“Third question. Would you like to repeat any experiences from your current life again in your future life?”

 “Nein. The knowledge is sufficient, I do not need to repeat the gaining of it, it will serve no purpose.”

P154 walked out of the room, hoping P118089 would pepper it with the obvious question. All its previous trainees had disappointed him, but it was starting to have hope with this one.

“So, will he become a prodigy in his next life too? I mean, he has to, right? His brain will be filled with memories of all the music he created in this life!”

P154 smiled in satisfaction. “Indeed, the likelihood is quite high, eighty-nine. Are you ready to do your own processing next?”

It didn’t know what made P118089’s steps falter and jaw drop – the smile, being acknowledged as ‘eighty-nine’ for the first time, or the offer to do its first processing. Likely all three.