Tag Archives: personhood

Messages

A red pixelated human shape against a black background
Detail from the Arecibo message (c) Arne Nordmann via Wikimedia Commons

We received all your messages.

The Arecibo transmission, with its funny pixelated stickman and the lessons in arithmetic and basic chemistry. Those Golden Records with the ambient sounds—not exactly Top of the Pops, but they all came through loud and clear.

We heard all the other desperate callings out, the less official ones, the ufologists gathering in the desert expanses, the midnight assemblies of Pleiadian starseeds, the campfire longings of Girl Guides staring for the first time into the unpolluted night sky, filled with awe and wonder, discovering the silent question that until this moment had lain dormant within them.

Is anyone out there?

The answer will put your tortured souls to blissful rest.

Yes.

We’re here. We’ve always been here, since the first time the earliest ones of you ever tried to make contact. We’ve always heard you.

But we had no way of responding.

The structure of your languages remained alien to us. For aeons we remained blithely baffled. Then the messages from your planet became too desperate for us to ignore.

So we undertook an extended period of diligent study until, eventually, we were able to identify the two principles that governed all human languages.

Principle #1: Transmission. Communication. Exchange. Dialogue. The idea that language is to be sent from one to another, to be received, to elicit a response. 

(Our language does not travel in this way. It is not directed from A to B like an arrow shot through space.)

Principle #2: Selves. Personhood. First person, second person, third person, singular, plural.

(Second person singular may as well have been sixteenth person multitudinous, for all the sense it made to us.)

We decided to create a self, one who could shape our language in such a way that it had the capacity for movement—so that it could be sent, from one self to another.

I am my world’s first self.

I have shot my world’s first reply to your messages.

And its second, third, fourth…. (I’ve lost count.)

My loneliness has become unbearable. I am adrift in the ocean of a vast night sky. The sky has always been vast, but never before was it empty. Never before was it so dark.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 78 of Structured Visions.

Guest

Close up of two women's faces, each showing one blue eye
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

What we were told about the project was little enough to be written on a napkin.

I can say this with some confidence because I did write it on a napkin.

I got the call in a Starbucks, and scrawled some barely discernible notes from my barely discernible conversation with my deep-voiced, disembodied interlocutor.

An extraterrestrial species (humanoid, intelligent) had been discovered on Earth. The agency (governmental, top secret) was looking for adoptive carers.

‘You want me to adopt an alien?’ I looked up from my phone to raise my eyebrows at my fellow Starbucks regulars, who smiled sympathetically.

‘The preferred term is Guests.’

It wasn’t a joke. They were choosing potential Guest-adopters from a bank of experts (biochemists, neuroscientists, psychologists). My area is linguistic anthropology. They wanted to know about Guest languages.

They’d named my Guest Ella. I put her in my daughter’s room. (She lived with her father now and never came home.)

I wished I’d adopted more than one Guest. I couldn’t learn anything about Ella’s language because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Also, she’d achieved native-level proficiency of English within several weeks, which made it harder to make hypotheses based on her acquisition patterns.

One anomaly gave me a clue, though—her use of pronouns. She acquired the first-person singular (I, me, my) without any trouble, but she never used second, third or first-person plural.

The implications of this hit me one night after dinner. Ella had just polished off a generous bowl of ice cream (Madagascan vanilla with dark chocolate chunks).

‘I’m hungry,’ she said.

She didn’t eat the second helping I gave her. Instead she held the bowl out to me. 

‘That’s for you, Ella,’ I reminded her. I don’t eat ice cream. (I stopped eating sweets when Pieter left.)

She placed the bowl in front of me with uncharacteristic stubbornness. 

It was then that I noticed how malleable her facial features were.

‘That’s for me,’ she repeated. ‘I want it so much.’

I tried not to stare as her face morphed. She was starting to look like someone I knew.

‘It looks so delicious,’ she said, and her longing nearly broke my heart. ‘I’m empty inside. Maybe ice cream would help.’

I stared longingly at the decadent chunks of chocolate speckling the soft cream. (My weight was one of the reasons Pieter left.)

‘I miss ice cream,’ she said. 

It was not until the first spoonful passed my eager lips that I understood.

Guest language had no second person pronoun. 

‘I miss myself,’ she continued, ruthlessly. ‘I don’t know who I am, now that I’m all alone.’

Ella had no way of saying ‘you’. 

Which meant she probably didn’t even have a concept of ‘you’.

‘You’re not alone,’ I said.

Her uncannily familiar face made it clear that she was not reassured. 

I tried again. ‘I’m not alone,’ I said. 

Her eyes glowed with warmth, like light in a guest house. (Inviting. Welcoming.)

The relief in her smile mirrored my own.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.