Resister: Space Funding Crisis II

by Casey Hattrey

  “Talking about the future in the same way as the present has been shown to increase future-oriented thinking, leading to more long-term planning. We estimate that merging the tenses will lead to a 2% rise in GDP over the next 10 years and a reduction in preventable health problems.”

  The two clients stared blankly at Dart, but appeared to disregard the last statement.

  “Well, really we just came in to talk about …”

  “Branding? Say no more - we offer a great language marketing deal. For example, I see that you have a lot of morphology - that’s great, really helps frame the sentences and gives a boost to predictability. But it’s not a favorite with new speakers. Oh, sure, the younger ones don’t seem to mind, but it’s a big pain point for adult adopters. What I’m suggesting is getting rid of a few paradigms, shifting towards using auxiliaries - that’ll really help grow your brand.”

  One of the clients was shaking their head now. But Dart surged on.

  “One great tactic is to reduce the amount of prescriptivism and start taking advantage of some user generated content. And another great way to growth-hack is news - do you have any crazy attitudes to time or space that would get some press?”

  “Crazy attitudes?” the faces before Dart were now thoroughly disdainful.

  “No, I meant -”

  “Thank you for your time Dr. Dart -” said one of the clients, rising from their seat.

  Dart sprang to her feet, skipping around the desk to pursue her clients.

  “OK! OK! No need to leave so soon. What about a free trial consultancy?”

  The clients paused, halfway out of the door, and looked back over their shoulders.

  “For example?” one said, cautiously.

  “Er …”, began Dart “I’ve been looking at your planet’s climate, and the temperature has been rising steadily for some time”.

  “Yes?” one said, hesitantly.

  “Well, now would be a great time to introduce a tonal system. You see dry air dries out the vocal tract, making tones really quite tricky to control, but with more moisture in the air -”

  “Right, that’s enough now, we’re leaving,” said one, and they both walked out.

  Dart pursued them across the landing yard, desperately trying to get them to turn around. She tugged at a sleeve, causing the client’s sunglasses to fall off, but they shook themselves free without even stopping to pick them up.

  “What about some spelling updates? Or some emoji packs?”

  But they had turned off their lators, and were boarding their ship.

  “Or we currently have a special offer on some new words to cover some inexpressible meanings …” Dart shouted over the hum of the engines.

  The ship blasted high into the air, leaving Dart kneeling, utterly deflated amidst swirling dust in the middle of the yard.

  “... like feeling bad about your life choices.”

  As the dust settled, Dart let a long sigh, deflating further to the point of being doubled-over with her forehead on the ground. How did she get to this point?

  A movement in the corner of Dart’s eye caused her to uncoil. A figure stepped out of the shadows, looming over her. Soft-soled shoes planted themselves firmly on the ground. The figure stooped to pick up the sunglasses. Dart looked up into the weak sunlight.

  “It’s called post-doctoral stress disorder,” said Arianne, slipping on the glasses. “Welcome to the club.”

  Chapter 8

  Kotlin reached the end of a grammar description and pushed herself back from the mess table, trying to pinch the tiredness out of her eyes. When she looked up again, Vala Dart walked into the small space and took a seat opposite. Dart smiled at Kotlin, who blinked and turned her attention back to her terminal. Dart shrugged and took out her tablet. Kotlin breathed a quiet sigh of relief and resumed her reading. The silence between them was punctuated by bursts of typing from Dart. She would descend on the keys in a moment of joyous inspiration, only to be flung back by some error. Kotlin couldn’t help but let out a quiet chuckle. So Dart hadn’t changed at all. But then again, maybe she hadn’t either. She remembered dozens of disputes between them on the right approach to problems aboard the research cruiser The Ends of Science. It seemed like centuries ago now. Which, of course, it was. But they’d once been close. Kotlin resumed her typing, but broke the silence.

  “So what were you working on before you got scooped up by our highly respected leader?”

  Dart looked up, and smiled briefly.

  “Oh - I was doing some work on gene-culture evolution.” said Dart nonchalantly. Kotlin’s typing slowed by a fraction as she frowned.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah - I’m looking into whether there are genetic biases in the cultural evolution of hairstyles.”

  Kotlin’s typing slowed again, and she looked up as if listening for the call of a rare bird.

  “Hmm. Well, I guess if there are genes which affect hair texture and color, then …”

  “Exactly!” said Dart joyfully, putting down her tablet. “We also think that there may be a feedback loop: over long enough timespans, a predisposition to rapidly learn the local culture of hair care would get written back into the genome.”

  Kotlin was nodding along, but relaxed a little, and began typing more evenly.

  “So I suppose you have some big database of social media posts and are cast-mining it for nuggets of correlations?”

  “Ha! That was my usual approach back at the Max Planck Institute for Tiny Effect Sizes. But this time, I’m taking an experimental approach.”

  Kotlin now stopped typing altogether and gave Dart a direct view of her eyes, nestled under the folds of an almost alarming frown.

  “Really? That sounds … almost sensible,” she said with a worried smile.

  Dart was openly enthusiastic now, waving her hands around.

  “Mmm - we get monozygotic twins and separate them for a few months, then observe how they treat their hair. We hypothesize that if one sibling cuts all their hair off, then the other one will too.”

  “Oh, I see”, said Kotlin. “You’re using an MZ discordant design to -”

  “We’re thinking of calling it the bald twin effect.”

  Dart’s words froze Kotlin in mid-syllable, but she eventually returned to her eyes and fingers to her keyboard as if trying to ignore some distasteful taboo. Dart was beaming like a cartoon character. Finally, Kotlin muttered a response.

  “That joke reflects poorly on you, your supervisor and your ancestors.”

  Arianne and Holt walked in.

  “Dart, this is Holt,” said Arianne, briskly, before taking a seat at the head of the table. Dart and Holt shook hands.

  “Ah yes,” said Holt “I read your research summary.”

  Kotlin stirred and sulkily asked “Did it include the fact that she’s blacklisted?”

  Holt let go of Dart’s hand slightly too quickly. Dart shrugged it off.

  “Ah, don’t listen to her – she’s just upset by, you know, everything I do.”

  Holt looked to Arianne wearing a cautious expression as he sat down at the table.

  “Don’t worry, Holt,” said Arianne, “I knew about it. Dart, you’d better explain.”

  Dart gave a sigh, but drew herself up and began explaining.

  “I’d been studying a language that had been used around a Kugelblitz mine. It’s the kind of place where everybody needs to wear crazy amounts of protective material all the time, and the less you can expose yourself the better.”

  “And I suppose you went to this very dangerous place yourself?” asked Kotlin.

  Dart rolled her eyes.

  “No, I was just using someone else’s data.”

  Kotlin shared a knowing glance with Arianne.

  “Anyway,” continued Dart, “it had evolved to express a lot in very short bursts. I realized that it’d make a really good funding application language - because these days the word limits are so strict. It was great! It used almost all known p
honemes, including nose clicks, and it had a 12-level tone system. That meant that there were basically no words longer than one syllable. It also had some space-saving concepts, for example where one language might have to say “take advantage of”, this language had a single word which was equivalent to “advantagise”. And it was very highly agglutinative, which means that most sentences could be expressed as technically a single word.”

  Dart was becoming more animated, re-living her discovery.

  “I started a small service to translate people’s applications into these languages so they had more space to spare. Instead of 500 words for an abstract, they now basically had 500 sentences. However, the funding agencies started changing their requirements. First, they imposed a character limit, but I just got in touch with the original community and registered a logographic written form of the language so that each word could be represented by a single character. They put a limit on the proportions of ink used, so I changed the writing system to an extremely sparse matrix of dots that could be decoded. Then they put a limit on the visual information density of the applications. So I got in touch with the language board of the community and … encouraged them to register new words in their dictionary.”

  Kotlin shook her head in disappointment, but Dart was on a roll.

  “These were extremely idiosyncratic words that expressed meanings that did not exist in any other language. And which happened to be exactly the entire meaning expressed by a given funding application. So now my clients could write a single character in their application form, and the language’s dictionary would have an entry for that character that was as much text as they wanted.”

  Arianne was half appalled and half impressed, a feeling she had long learned to associate with Dart.

  “That’s when things started getting ugly,” Dart continued, slightly more pale than before. “Competing researchers started giving money to the community to change the meanings of characters. Just small things at first, but retaliations came in and suddenly funding applications actually translated to lengthy insults of major fundees and their families. Apparently there were some incidents ...”

  “That’s right,” said Holt.

  “Hmm, yes, well. CAFCA eventually had two options. One: do some serious research on a Planck-level definition of information in language. Two: blacklist me.”

  Dart shrugged. Kotlin had managed to find a way of typing disdainfully.

  “Look,” said Arianne, “we’re here to do a job. Something strange is happening and CAFCA is involved, that’s why I needed a team of people who’ve been out of the loop. Both of you for whatever reason have had no contact with any of the funding empire for some time. That at least means I know you’re not working for them.”

  Dart gave a grateful look towards Arianne, but Kotlin piped up again.

  “What about him?” she asked, looking at Holt for a split-second without slowing her typing. Holt didn’t move a muscle.

  “Kotlin,” said Arianne, and waited until Kotlin’s eyes actually moved to meet hers. “I trust him, OK?”

  Holt’s mouth jerked sideways in what could have been embarrassment, but he gave a curt nod to Arianne. Kotlin turned back to her screen, apparently appeased.

  “OK, so you’ve seen the background documents and you all know the aim: find out why languages have started converging. The objective for this meeting is to decide an action point.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like one of them,” said Kotlin.

  Unhelpfully, Arianne’s ebrain pinged.

  Small Support Grant G67HS995A - Status: Under Review

  She ignored the message and pressed on.

  “Dart - any ideas on what could be causing the convergence?”

  “Aliens!” shouted Dart, jolting everyone out of their personal machinations.

  “No,” said Arianne.

  “Time Travel!” said Dart.

  “NO,” said Arianne.

  “Time travelling aliens?” said Dart.

  “NO!” said Arianne. “It’s never aliens or time travel!”

  Dart deflated to the point of ending up sprawled on the table. Arianne rolled her eyes and turned to Kotlin.

  “Kotlin – you were working on trying to find the source of the convergence?”

  Kotlin nodded and straightened up in her seat.

  “Yes, what we have now is just quite a skewed sample of languages that have been reported. To really know what we’re dealing with, I propose a full-scale survey of each language.”

  There was a short silence, but Kotlin was not forthcoming.

  “In the galaxy?” asked Arianne, confused.

  “Yes - I’ve drawn up a schedule of languages to prioritize. We’ll use my typology database’s coding scheme. If we can employ 90% of all linguists to the task, then they’ll be able to train a usable portion of the human population as coders. I estimate that we’ll be able to complete the survey in -”

  Arianne was shaking her head.

  “Nope,” she said, “it would take too long and besides it might constitute some kind of human rights abuse.”

  “How about this,” chipped in Dart, “I’ve been working for some time now on showing that you can tell a lot about language change from the environment.”

  Kotlin’s face melted slightly.

  “Different languages have different phoneme inventories that require different amounts of exhalation, which can contribute to minute differences in greenhouse gasses.”

  Arianne was drumming her hands on the table, but Dart continued:

  “Using astronomical spectroscopy, we can survey the chemical compositions of the atmospheres of thousands of planets at the same time and find ones that are shifting in the same direction. I’ve already -”

  “Dart,” Arianne cut in, “I brought you here because of your work with lators.”

  Dart wearily swiped a load of scripts into a virtual trash can and tried to refocus.

  “Right, yes,” said Dart, “I saw Holt’s data on lator updates. If languages are becoming similar, then the update distributions should be more compressed. I thought we’d be able to track the compression stats across the galaxy and locate the origin of the cause. I tried some astro-phylo reconstructions, but it converges on multiple points too far apart to be accurate.

  “Hmm, so there are multiple origins?”

  “Yeah, or maybe it was something that lay dormant for a long time.”

  “Could a software update really hang around that long?” asked Kotlin.

  “A ha – that’s the thing,” said Dart. “Part of the update that Holt found was a firmware update. Software changes so often that no one could ever keep up with it. But the firmware - the underlying operating system of the lators - that’s more stable.”

  “What does the update do?” asked Arianne.

  “Hmm, that’s the weird thing - I ignored it at first because it doesn’t really do anything except run software, and as far as I can tell, doesn’t actually have any way of interacting with the lator directly. I mean, it’s a pretty big departure from the standard model of operating system - instead of storing data at fixed locations in memory, bundles of information just kind of drift around, interacting with the software and hardware when they happen to be in the right place.”