Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  “Hmm.” Thomas frowned but nodded.

  “For a language itself, not codes, even with some guess at the meaning of a particular text, translation is extremely difficult. Without that guess, it’s very nearly impossible.” Mike swept one hand slightly upward and outward, as if lecturing in front of a classroom. “Egyptian hieroglyphics had been studied for a long time before Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799. This stone had Greek, demotic, and hieroglyphic inscriptions each repeating the same message, and even with a direct translation into a language we fully understood, it wasn’t until twenty-three years later that Jean-François Champollion managed to decipher the basics of hieroglyphics.”

  “Oh,” Thomas said.

  “Yeah.” Mike leaned back. “So it isn’t easy.”

  “I see.” Thomas paused. Then he added hopefully, “Well, they didn’t exactly have the computational power and technology that we have.”

  “Is this from the simulated universe?” Mike asked again.

  “Yes.”

  “Hah! I knew it.” Mike swallowed. “So it isn’t likely that we have a translation of this text into any Earth language, is there?”

  “That would be true.”

  “Are the originators of this language human?”

  “Very humanlike.”

  Mike shook his head. “Even then—we have no way of knowing if the writers conceptualize—if their thought processes are even remotely similar to our own.” He shook his head more vigorously. “No. Impossible, then.”

  “I see. What if you could learn it, though?”

  “What do you mean, ‘learn it’? How is that different from what I just said?”

  Thomas scooted to the edge of his seat. “Surely there are ways to learn a language beyond deciphering. Children learn languages within their first few years. You teach languages to students. It is possible to learn a language with no reference point, right?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose.”

  “What would it take to learn it?”

  “Immersion. It would help to observe children—the young of whatever this is—learning it, like watching a family. Or a classroom. Even then, spoken language and written language can be two distinct—”

  “How long would it take? Immersed.”

  “A month or two, to learn the basics of a language from scratch. More, if their neurology is significantly disparate. Even Neanderthals’ brains are speculated to have been wired differently than our own.” Mike exhaled heavily through his nose and pressed his fingertips together, approximating the children’s charade of a spider doing pushups on a mirror. “Can I talk to them?”

  “No.”

  “That would make it harder.” Mike’s spider collapsed onto its belly and then morphed into nothing but clasped hands.

  Thomas asked, “Do you want to do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come here, work for us, crack this language.”

  “It’s not that simple. I’m finally in a tenure-track position.”

  “We’ll double your current university…” Thomas smirked. “…salary and guarantee you a job for five years.”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “Well, I’m glad you asked, because there are a few.” Thomas paused. “First, you’ll have to work a lot harder than you ever have as a professor. Speed is critical on this. But my hope is that if you are as passionate about languages as I think you are that won’t be a problem.”

  “I doubt that will be an issue.”

  “Second. You won’t be able to publish. For a long time, if ever.”

  Mike frowned.

  “I carefully control all publications. That paper you read on the plane will be IACP’s first major publication since our initial announcements around the big bang models. As I am sure you are aware, single-celled organisms do not write. As you have implied that you’ve already guessed, our work is now far beyond what that article even hints at.”

  Mike swallowed again and nodded. His spider was back. “All right. I can live with that.”

  “Third. You can’t even talk about this stuff outside of the office. We must keep it secret until we fully understand what’s going on.”

  “Exactly what is going on?”

  “We’ve got what appears to be an intelligent civilization that we’ve effectively created in a lab—and…” Thomas paused for a moment. “We don’t know what they’re saying.”

  “I see how that would be a problem.” Mike laughed.

  “We’re not sure how people will react to this. That’s the reason for the secrecy. At some point, we certainly want to talk about it—then you’ll be able to publish, a lot. But for now, we need to stay quiet.”

  “I understand.”

  “No need to decide right now.” Thomas stood and smiled a broad, warm, God-it’s-great-to-see-you-again smile. “Let’s grab dinner and catch up. Tomorrow, you can see it.”

  “Tomorrow.” Mike nodded and breathed heavily. “Wow. Yes.”

  The view outside Thomas’s office and in the hallway leading back to the elevators had shifted to orange. The vultures were gone, but whether they had circled down homing in on some carrion or given up and flown away, Mike had no idea. He was having a hard time wrapping his head around the last few hours.

  Chapter 25

  Week 3: Friday

  Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

  —Max Ernst

  He was floating in a sea of pillows when the phone rang. It caught him off guard. He didn’t have a phone, not an old-fashioned, plugged-into-the-wall, loud-ringer one, anyway. Yet it was going off. He looked around for the phone, finally zeroing in on the obnoxious ringing.

  A female voice said over the phone, “Hello, Mr. Wilson, this is your wake-up call. Would you like another call in ten minutes?”

  Mike glanced at a clock. It read 8:02 a.m., but given how he felt, it could simply have read, “Too early,” and still have been correct.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Thank you. We’ll call you again in ten minutes.”

  He fell back into the sheets as it came back to him. He and Thomas had gone out and eaten a huge, top-notch dinner at Eddie V’s, a steak and seafood restaurant. It had quite the wine selection, and both of them had partaken liberally. He might have had a whole bottle himself.

  His head was pounding.

  He closed his eyes and was finally drifting into that perfect, almost-sleeping state when the phone rang again.

  “Yeah, I’m up.”

  “Have a great day, Mr. Wilson. Thank you for staying at the W Austin.”

  It took a minor effort to hang up the phone and a major one to pull himself out of bed. He threw open the drapes to a panoramic view of Lake Austin…and way too much light. He slammed his eyes shut for a few minutes while they adjusted.

  His bag was in the closet, and his computer bag was next to the desk. He didn’t remember bringing them up. He wondered if Thomas did this to all of his potential recruits.

  He took a quick shower and headed to the lobby, where, he discovered, Bob was already waiting for him.

  “Good morning, Dr. Wilson. Your car is waiting.”

  And just like that, he was heading back to IACP.

  ***

  By the time they arrived, Mike was mostly awake. Jules was waiting for him in the lobby. Mike was amazed at how smoothly they seemed to handle all this stuff. He knew Thomas wasn’t this organized, so he figured Jules must be a master at juggling and keeping things on track.

  “Good morning,” she said with a smile that Mike thought was just a bit too chipper for this early in the morning.

  “Morning. Thanks for getting me here.” He grinned.

  “No problem,” she said as they walked to the elevator.

  She handed him an ID badge with his picture on it.

  Wow these guys move fast, he thought. I didn’t r
eally think I’d committed, and I already have an ID badge. He also didn’t remember getting his picture taken, but the picture was from yesterday. A mild shimmer of paranoia touched his spine, but he quickly ignored it.

  They didn’t head to Thomas’s office as Mike expected but to another room, Rendering Room 1.

  “Rendering Room 1?” he asked. “Is that where we go into the other universe?”

  “Yep, but I’ll be leaving you with the gang.”

  Mike went into the room, Jules closing the door behind him, and Thomas asked him with a knowing grin, “How are you doing this morning?”

  “Great!” Mike said, implying more gumption than he actually had.

  “Let’s get going, then. This is Stephen Eggleton. He’s in charge of technology—software, computers, all that stuff.”

  “Hey,” Stephen said as he shook Mike’s hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” Mike said.

  Thomas proceeded around the room, introducing Ajay, Lisa, Don, Jenn, and Ross.

  “So that’s most of the core group,” Thomas wrapped up the introductions. “OK, on to the main event.”

  Ajay, Lisa, Don, Jenn, and Ross bowed out to do other work, leaving Thomas, Stephen, and Mike in the rendering room.

  “Given our discussion yesterday, I think you’ll be working a lot with Stephen to crack the language. Plus, he never turns down a chance to hang out in the SU.”

  SU-N11 Time: 338 PC [+13,508,915,556 Years]

  Thomas started them outside the universe this time, to give Mike the full experience, beginning with that strange moment of entering the expanding forward edge of the universe from outside—from nothing. The vista of galaxies came into focus as they continued their rapid flight.

  Mike was awestruck. It was like being in a science fiction movie, navigating through space. The spiral galaxies and cloudy nebulas painted the wall with an amazing cosmic beauty. He couldn’t find words to describe it.

  Then they plunged into one of the spirals, things slowed, and after a few minutes, he saw planets orbiting a large star that looked like the sun.

  “This is the Alpha system,” Thomas said. “Life has developed on the second planet.”

  Mike watched in silent awe.

  They slowly approached the planet and descended. It was both eerie and amazing. Mike just shook his head.

  Then he saw the town. It had already grown well past the village it had been when they had originally found the writing, but it still wasn’t quite a city. It bustled with activity, especially in what was clearly a large town square, which contained a massive market. A palace marked the north edge of the town. He noticed three large pyramids on the other side of the river.

  “Wow!” Mike finally said.

  “They are evolving fast,” Stephen said, “although time continues to slow.”

  Stephen was surprised by the numbers at the base of the screen. About three hundred years had passed since they had found the first village. He felt like he should be paying closer attention to that.

  “So?” Thomas asked Mike, clearly with a deeper meaning.

  “I’m in,” Mike said with a smile.

  “Sweet. Welcome aboard.”

  Chapter 26

  Week 5: Monday

  To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

  —Charles Baudelaire

  Someone had brought in breakfast tacos, and the smell had drawn Mike out of his office and into the office kitchenette area. He had never had a breakfast taco in Illinois but had quickly become addicted to them here. As he walked into the room, he found Stephen rummaging around in one of the refrigerators, probably looking for yet another Red Bull.

  Stephen looked up. “You getting settled in?”

  “Yeah. I haven’t really moved yet, but Jules got me a temporary place.”

  “That’s good, I guess.”

  “It’s not too bad. Thomas is really gung ho on my spending all my time on the language work, so I guess I won’t have much time to move for a while.”

  “Speaking of that, you have any thoughts on how we crack this language yet?”

  “I do, in fact.”

  “OK, hit me,” he said. “Ah!” he exclaimed, pulled his head out of the refrigerator, closed the door, popped the top of the Red Bull he’d found, and took a sip.

  The breakfast tacos were from Taco Shack, and there were still some bacon, egg, and cheese ones left.

  “Awesome!” Mike said.

  He grabbed two of the tacos and two of the small salsa containers and headed to one of the tables. Stephen followed him and sat down. Mike carefully unrolled one of the tacos and poured the entire contents of one of the salsa containers onto it.

  “I love these,” Mike said with a big smile before biting into it. He mumbled as he chewed, “Almost makes up for the heat.”

  “The language?”

  “Right.” Mike swallowed. “Three things are key to figuring out this language: its lexicon, its syntax, and its system of graphemes.”

  Stephen scowled at Mike. “Speak English, will you?”

  “Those three things roughly equate to vocabulary, grammar, and an alphabet.”

  “Why is alphabet last, not first?”

  “Because we can understand the oral language with the first two. Obviously, we have to crack their system of graphemes to understand the written language.”

  “Graphemes are letters? The alphabet?”

  “Basically.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  Thomas walked into the room and rummaged through the breakfast tacos until he found the kind he wanted.

  “Aha!” he said, grabbing the taco, and then focused his attention more on Mike and Stephen. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “We’re talking about talking,” Mike said with a chuckle.

  Stephen said, “We’re trying to figure out how to translate everything.”

  Thomas sat at the table with them and began his own breakfast taco ritual.

  Mike said to Stephen, “So I have this idea. Tell me if we can do it.”

  “OK.”

  “We set up a bunch of video feeds. There are two types of these. The first is easiest. We just record conversations. The computer incrementally builds five lists,” he said, “which should quickly turn into two or three. First, it records every phone; second, morphemes; third—”

  “What are morphemes?” Stephen asked.

  “The smallest unit of meaning.”

  “You mean words?”

  “Sort of, but it’s more basic than that. For example, ‘daylight’ is one word, but it’s made of two morphemes, which also happen to be words: ‘day’ and ‘light.’ We’ll eventually need to record all words, but ‘day’ and ‘light’ separately will suffice at level two.”

  “What was level one again?”

  “Phones are the individual sounds, consonants and vowels, basically. They differ from phonemes by—”

  “OK, OK,” Stephen said with a dismissive waving motion. Then he nodded, smiling. “So phones are like bits. Morphemes are like bytes. What comes after morphemes?”

  “Words, phrases—”

  “Like individual lines of code…”

  Mike imitated Stephen’s pacing, grinning. “Sentences…”

  “Subroutines.”

  “Entire conversations and political and religious theory.”

  “Entire functional programs. Got it.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Bizarre combination, you two.”

  Stephen said, “Language and programming? Not really, I guess.”

  “No,” Thomas said, “you two.” He pointed at each of them. “You and you. Bizarre.”

  “Well, you put us together.”

  “And I’m glad I did. This is super-high priority.” He waved them on. “Don’t let me interrupt. I’m just hanging out for a bit.”

  Stephen turned back to Mike. “OK. So do we distinguish morphemes based on pauses? That wouldn’t work
for ‘daylight.’”

  Mike raised his forefinger. “But pauses are a big help. Pauses will give us ‘daytime’ and ‘daylight,’ and once the computer—or we—figure out the correlation, we deduce morphemes—”

  “Got it. And we tell phrases and sentences by what?”

  “Changes in pitch, stress, pacing—any kind of oral or visual hint of a division greater than a pause…or when someone else speaks.”

  “Oh, that’s pretty clever. So we’ll probably want to link the database to the video clips, too, for the visual clues.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Easy. Well…” Stephen blinked twice. “…in theory.” He pursed his lips. “No, it’ll be easy.”

  Mike smiled widely. “Over time, maybe we can match common phrases and that will help us crack the syntax and whether they rely more on inflection or word order, differences between things like ‘man bites dog’ and ‘dog bites man.’”

  “That’s simple enough. Depends on which one comes first.”

  “But what about ‘him I hit’ and ‘I hit him’?”

  “OK, not so simple.”

  “But doable, especially with huge databases and superfast processing.” He looked at Thomas. “Much easier than the Rosetta Stone, especially with a speaking, writing, learning population. And with time travel, basically. We can go back in time and double-check our work.”

  Stephen nodded. “It looks like we’ll be able to get a lot of leverage from our technology.”

  “Once we figure out how we’re going to do it.”

  Stephen asked, “Do you only want all the phones, morphemes, words, and phrases recorded, or do you want them counted, too?”

  “Absolutely! Count them. Yes. Most languages depend on a tiny portion of their lexicon for the majority of their communication. But this tiny pool includes body parts and names for parents, core words like ‘Mother’ and ‘Father.’ Absolutely key.”

  “Hmm, we’re going to have to tokenize them to do that. And there will be clusters that we’ll have to separate ourselves.”