Tag Archives: self

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.

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.