Resister: Space Funding Crisis II

by Casey Hattrey

  “Well, as I see it, there are two possibilities. One: the convergence is a natural property of some linguistic process. And two: someone is pulling the strings.”

  Holt frowned slightly and leant forwards.

  “Couldn’t it just be a chance occurrence?” he asked.

  Kotlin sat a little more upright, but continued typing as she explained.

  “No. Imagine languages as points in a space - each dimension is a way that languages can vary, for example whether they mark the past tense on a verb or not, or their exact word for ‘banana’. Languages that are similar are close together and languages that are very different are far apart.”

  Holt nodded and Kotlin continued.

  “Languages started on Old Earth in roughly the same spot. But as far as we know, for the last few hundred thousand years, languages have been moving away from each other. On Earth, this was restricted by the limited room on the planet, so that people kept bumping into each other and the languages didn’t expand too far.”

  “I thought there were thousands of languages on Old Earth?” said Holt.

  “It’s true - there are so many ways a language can be different that any movement by chance is almost certain to make it more unique. But when space travel really took off, cultures could go for light-years and millennia without meeting another and needing to reign in the way they spoke. And that’s without mentioning ‘lators making it unnecessary to even be exposed to other languages. So language diversity exploded. And although sometimes a language changes its word order back to an earlier configuration, by then there are so many other parts of the language that’s changed that it will never go back to the way it was entirely.”

  Holt nodded, but didn’t look entirely convinced.

  “But what if -” he started, making an expanding motion with his hands, “... the space of possible languages just … filled up.”

  Arianne chuckled, and Kotlin responded calmly.

  “I’m in charge of a small database of language typology” said Kotlin. “It’s currently got about 300 binary variables that describe some possible ways that grammar can differ. There’s enough possible different settings that every planet in the universe could have ten thousand languages without any two being the same. Actually, every atom in the universe could have its own unique language. In fact, each atom could speak a billion unique languages, or - ”

  “Alright, Kotlin, we get it,” said Arianne.

  “So there’s been a kind of big-bang for languages,” said Holt. “Could there also be a big crunch?”

  Kotlin shook her head. “The analogy doesn’t make sense.”

  “Well, hang on,” said Arianne, “physicists used to think that the physical universe might one day collapse under its own gravitational pull. Now, language isn’t affected by gravity but there are biases in the human brain that pull languages towards being one way and away from another. For example, very few languages have an ergative case system - it’s just slightly more difficult for the brain to process information like that, so over a long time people just avoid using it. That means that the space of probable language is much smaller than the space of possible languages.”

  “Hmm - running with that -” said Kotlin, “we know that even a small bias can be amplified over a long time into a reliable pattern.”

  “Convergence to the prior bias,” nodded Arianne.

  “What if,” continued Kotlin, “for the first few hundred thousand years, languages were changing by force of momentum - like the big bang.” Here, Kotlin managed a glance towards Holt. “But we’ve never reached an equilibrium until now. Now we’re at the point where cognitive biases are really starting to kick in, causing languages to drift in the same direction.”

  “Like the big crunch?” said Holt, uncertainly.

  “That’s right,” said Kotlin in a way that indicated that Holt was wrong in several ways, “but in this case, languages are finally settling comfortably into a format that best fits the brain. Like sediment settling - a kind of universal equilibrium language.”

  “Hmm, interesting,” said Arianne, “but even if this was an emergent phenomenon, why now? Languages have been around for a long time, and this phenomenon looks much more rapid than you’d expect from weak biases. And anyway, I bet that there’s someone pulling the strings.”

  She placed her hands on the table and spoke carefully.

  “So here’s the question: who would benefit from the convergence?”

  Holt and Kotlin considered this for a moment. Finally, Kotlin spoke.

  “How about the Panini Press?”.

  “What’s the Panini Press?” asked Holt.

  “The Panini Press,” blared the exbot, “is a pejorative term for a school of linguistics more formally referred to as Active Theory Alignment”.

  “Oh Jeebs”, sad Arianne.

  “ATA researchers strive for elegant and complete descriptions of linguistic systems, harking back to 4th Century BCE linguist Pāṇini, whose tactic for describing grammatical systems was to assert general laws, then invent special laws to describe any deviations. This general drive to explain away problems was combined with the approach of some mathematical and computational theories from the 20th century which claimed that some theories of linguistics must be correct, and therefore any deviation from the accepted patterns was either an incidental distortion of the true underlying laws or simply the result of catching the language on a bad day. When faced with new phenomena that contradict accepted laws, ATA researchers go further by seeking to actively fix them. An ATA field linguist will document a language, analyze its weaknesses and then attempt to fix them using a range of strategies including prestige modelling, prescriptive propaganda, hostile language contact and climate change.”

  “Holy space ghost, the exbot just gets more annoying,” said Arianne.

  Holt was looking confused. “I think I heard about this group, but I didn’t think it was real.”

  “Oh yes,” said Kotlin, “I met a Panini Presser once - a nasty piece of work. He’d ask people to say sentences, on the pretext of just learning how the grammar worked, like “Could you tell me how you say I slept with my sister?”. But then he’d threaten to release the recording to their family unless they stopped using long range dependencies.”

  “Hmm, I can see how that might start causing problems,” said Holt.

  “But I’ve never known any Panini Press tactics to have any real effects, especially in the long term,” said Arianne.

  Kotlin screwed up her face. “True. Also, they’ve always done things in person – and there’s nowhere near enough members to have blackmailed all these communities individually.”

  Holt was rubbing his chin in thought. “Kotlin, would you send that list of languages over to me?” he asked.

  Kotlin swiped a finger across the screen and data streamed into Holt’s terminal. Holt considered the stream for a moment, then made some swipes of his own.

  “Hmm, interesting,” he said, “I’m trying to find some overlap with reported cases of ebrain hacking in the affected areas.”

  “You think this is a hack?” asked Arianne. “Zapping is pretty hard to pull off these days.”

  Holt pursed his lips and looked at the ceiling, perhaps in an attempt to hide some military secrets from spilling out of his eyes.

  “You said yourself you think there’s someone behind this,” he conceded.

  Kotlin was shaking her head.

  “Nobody would be able to hack this kind of change,” she said. “A few drinks companies getting people to mention their products more often, sure, but -”

  Holt tilted back in his seat by a fraction of a degree in what could have been his version of a slump.

  “Well,” he said, “I can’t find any patterns. You’re right – there’s just nothing as widespread as the convergence.”

  Arianne didn’t want to give up this line of thought, however.

  “What about ebrain software?” she asked, “Any new apps goin
g viral?”

  “Yeah, maybe. It would still have to be on the same scale as the Pokémon Go outbreak, though.”

  “I heard the spread of that app was pushing at the theoretical limits of information transmission,” said Kotlin.

  “Proving once again that nostalgia is the key to time travel …” said Arianne, dryly.

  Holt was still tapping away at his terminal.

  “Hang on, here we go,” he said, reverting to his bolt-upright self. “There’s no big app outbreaks, but there was a very wide firmware release that overlaps with many convergence events. Something to do with ‘lators.”

  “’Lators?” asked Kotlin.

  “Lators: short for translators!”, chirped the exbot excitedly.

  “Oh space dust,” said Arianne.

  “Lators are small electronic devices that transmit audio via bone conduction and can monitor parts of the motor cortex of the brain. They create the sensation of sound directly, relating (or “lating”) digital information from a local terminal to the user. Sub-vocalized utterances by the user can also be picked up by the lator for interactive use.”

  “It was a rhetorical question!” barked Kotlin, to no obvious effect.

  “Natural languages can be used for lating, with most users able to receive input at many times the typical speed of conversation. However, the majority of users learn a specialized lator language which has been adapted for a medium that does not require physical articulators. Lator languages typically allow information intake at up to one hundred times the speed of conversation, though some specially designed languages are optimized for particular media or topics.”

  The exbot finally stopped. They all breathed a sigh of relief.

  "If the convergence -" started Arianne, before wincing at the reappearance of the tinny electronic voice.

  "This message was brought to you by Proxima Experimental Insurance."

  Teeth around the room gradually unclenched. Arianne started again.

  “If the convergence has something to do with lators, I know the person who can help us.”

  Kotlin froze in the middle of her typing and looked pleadingly into Arianne’s eyes.

  “Please”, she said, “not her.”

  Arianne shot a wicked smile across the room.

  Chapter 7

  Vala Dart was smiling, too. She had every reason to be - across her dusty desk sat her first potential clients in weeks. They wore plaited plant fibers tinted blue, and brightly colored, tight-fitting headdresses with jutting peaks shielding their foreheads. For some reason they had come out to this desolate asteroid, and Dart could not be happier about it.

  She flipped her braids back over her shoulder in an effort to get them to look up at the holo-sign that had cost so damned much.

  Dart Language Consultancy

  “Thank you for coming in - I’m normally very busy at this time, but a space has just opened up. So - let’s get right to it.”

  She turned, gesturing effortlessly to a shared screen on the desk.

  “You’re here as representatives of your native language, Sài Snek, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right”, said the client with the dark plastic circles covering their eyes. “We’re a bit worried about the number of speakers.”

  “A serious problem,” said Dart, trying to disguise her delight, “but that’s why I’m here. I like to start with the grammar. Let’s take a look”.

  On the screen in front of the clients, a set of trees and rules appeared.

  “Now, can I just be the first to say that this is looking really great. There’s a lot of regularity and harmony here - it’s just very well organized.”

  The clients seemed pleased by this.

  “However, I can’t help noticing that you use a verb-initial system.”

  The clients’ smiles halted halfway up their faces.

  “Now, there’s nothing wrong with that - many languages of your age drift towards this. But it’s not doing your on-line processing any favors. One of the first steps we’d like to take to get your language into better shape is to shift that verb into the middle of your phrases, get your dependency lengths down, smooth out those information density profiles, improve predictability and streamline your incremental planning routines.”

  “Well, that sounds good, I suppose,” said the client with the decorative paint on her lips.

  “That’s the spirit - word order changes can be tough, but they are absolutely worthwhile. We have a grammaticalization package that is guaranteed to bring about a word order shift within the next 10,000 years.”

  The clients eyed each other briefly, but Dart was already moving on:

  “Great! Now let’s have a look at the lexicon.”

  A graph appeared on the screen, showing a series of points rising in a sharp curve.

  “It’s a really great set of words you have here - a healthy amount of onomatopoeia, and it covers all the major semantic categories you need to talk about. But let’s think about efficiency for a moment. Now, in most languages, words that are used frequently are generally quite short, while less common words are longer. This is a great way to save time, and it looks like your language is doing just fine”.

  Some lines and equations appeared over the graph.

  “However,” continued Dart, “some words are a bit heavier than they should be. Here are the words which are above the frequency-length curve”.

  A list of words appeared next to the graph:

  actually, probably, don't, things, something, about, because, people, think

  “These are words that you’re using a lot, but are a tinsy bit overweight. Making these 9 words shorter would lead to a 2% efficiency saving on face time – that’s an extra 4 minutes of talk time every day.”

  The clients were peering suspiciously at the list of words. Dart cut the screen feed and continued the spiel.

  “And that’s just the start - we’ve noticed a few other areas where things could be improved. For example, you use the same word for 2nd person singular and 2nd person plural. That’s bound to cause some confusion.”

  The clients looked at each other anxiously.

  “Well, it never seems to -” one began.

  “Oh, I know it sounds strange, but you’d be surprised how much clearer everything would be if you used different words. Some of your younger female speakers are already doing this, though, so a low-overhead approach would be just to follow their lead.”

  “Hmm …”

  “A much bigger challenge is with your number system. Now, I know it has a long history and you probably feel like you’re getting by fine, but have you noticed that the numbers in the low-tens are irregular, and that they sound a lot like your higher multiples of ten? That’s got to cause some confusion, if not minor economic disputes, am I right?”

  “Well ...”

  “We can offer you a transition package that’ll help you move towards a more sensible number system.”

  “I’m really not sure if …”

  “Of course, a more direct way to stimulate the economy is by merging your present and future tenses.”

  A frantic array of graphs popped up on the screen.