Tag Archives: science

An image of an astronaut in the dark

The last stage of the Earth’s evolution

An image of an astronaut in the dark
Photo by Nate Holland

‘Go tell your grandmother the good news,’ Mum said, and begrudgingly I obeyed. I was given sweet marjoram and lemon balm tea, the leaves freshly plucked from Gran’s herb garden. Three teaspoons of sugar made it just about bearable.

‘I got my A-level results today,’ I told her. ‘I’m off to uni.’

‘To study science?’ she asked.

‘Natural sciences,’ I confirmed. I was surprised she remembered. I almost never talked to Gran. In my teenage years she was even battier than when I was little, and it made me nervous.

‘Will you learn about the Earth’s evolution?’

What other planet did she think we’d be studying, I wondered, but I choked down my sarcasm with another sip of tea. When I looked up again Gran was having one of her episodes.

‘The last stage in the Earth’s evolution,’ she intoned, ‘was the formation of human language. It enveloped human bodies like space suits. Whatever consciousness could make its way in struggled to flow back out—by design—so that humans were as lonely as they were inventive.’

I took advantage of her trance state to check my phone. My friends were organising celebratory afternoon drinks at the Rusty Nail.

‘As tyrannical,’ Gran continued, ‘as they were miraculous.’

‘Hmm. Interesting,’ I said. I drained the dregs of the disgusting tea, made some lame excuse and fled.

Over two decades later, I’m standing by her grave to ask the questions I was too self-absorbed to ask then. What were you saying in the garden that day, Gran? I’m sorry. I wasn’t listening.

But whatever wisdom she’d once held in her linguistic envelope had long since dissolved into space. Retrieving it, let alone getting it into the hermetically sealed suit of my own consciousness, would require some kind of crazy miracle.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 102 of Structured Visions, ‘How to belong.’ You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

To meet you

Curved bookshelves and corridors of a multi-tiered library
Photo by Anna Hunko

‘You’ll wake Ellie,’ Matt warned, but Rosa was too giddy from the ceremony to heed. She headed tipsily upstairs to check on their three-year-old while Matt paid the babysitter.

‘Did you win the prize, Mama?’ Ellie asked, her eyes drunk with sleep.

‘We sure did, Baby,’ Rosa said, the pride in her voice unmatched by the confusion on her daughter’s face.

‘How did you win it? What did you make?’ 

The hour was too late for an explanation of how artificial intelligence software could draw upon large language models to predict new strains in the most recent pathogen. But Rosa knew how well her daughter had been schooled in the basics of virology. Not through her own educative efforts. It was just the way of things now.

‘We made something to teach us about the virus,’ she said. ‘A computer that helped us learn its language.’

‘So now you can talk to it? And it can tell you stories?’

Rosa geared herself up to clarify, but Ellie, enchanted by the idea of raconteur viruses, had already drifted back to sleep.

That night Rosa found her own sleep enchanted, by fever dreams produced, ironically, from an infection of the very virus her software was designed to map. Its many variants appeared before her like ridiculously long words in the books of an impossibly large library. 

Rosa opened one of the books to discover she could not read.

Her dream self channelled the bedtime conversation with Ellie. What was the point of learning a language if there were no stories to hear?

A disembodied voice emerged from the page like RNA shaking off its protein envelope.

‘The words are not the language. The membrane is the language.’ 

She watched it drape itself in the lipid bilayers of her own cells, which gave it form. It stood before her, strangely familiar.

‘There you are,’ she said, her heart swelling with recognition and welcome.

‘Nice to meet you,’ said the word, now alive, now a self. It extended its arm to the vast tomes of the expansive library before her, each book a story of her own life, as yet unread.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 83 of Structured Visions, ‘Language goes viral’. Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.