Tag Archives: Short story

A remarkable outcome

Photo of outerspace
Photo by NASA

Your first experiment rarely works. You shouldn’t expect it to. You’re supposed to see it as an apprenticeship project, a learning opportunity. You’ve only failed if you’ve failed to learn, etc.

My first experiment was Earth.

Sorry, Project 649BQ8. (They don’t like it when you use the local names. It usually means you’ve gone native.)

I’ll admit a certain fondness for the place.

I still think of it as a phenomenal planet, one that, quite frankly, should never have been assigned to a newbie.

Did I learn anything from my failure?

Of course I did. The protocol was the same as with any of the intelligent planets. Connect it to the network. Calibrate the existing information systems so they resonate with network frequencies. If the planet resists connection, abort the project and move on to the next.

Should I have followed protocol?

Look, I know I’m supposed to say yes here, but can we please stop ignoring the genius of what I achieved? When the planet resisted connection, I didn’t abort. I designed a new species.

Human beings, they called themselves.

I made them out of local components, then attuned their nervous systems to be conducive to network frequencies.

And damned if it didn’t work!

I nearly wept for joy when they started developing their own communication frameworks, extra-local ones, using what they’d later refer to as their language.

Once they had language, all that was left to do was to calibrate it to the network system, and we’d have the link we were looking for.

It would have been a phenomenal achievement.

What went wrong?

I’m supposed to cite the protocol breach and leave it at that. The higher ups have neither the time nor the imagination for more nuanced analysis.

But I’ve developed my own theory.

These ‘human beings’ are so attached to their ‘Earth’ that they keep trying to use their language to describe their world. It has become an obsession for them.

They cloy to their material environment so resolutely that they have forced their rarefied language upon it. It causes them great suffering. Still, they persist.

It fascinates me.

The idea that you’d link language to base matter!

And that I created a whole species devoted to that endeavour!

What a remarkable outcome!

like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions.

Finite

Silhouette of people standing on a rock at sunset, their hands in the air
Photo by Natalie Pedigo

Sentences losing binding power.

Verbs shaking loose from subjects.

Clauses dropping phrasal components.

Words falling away, like pearls untethered from strings.

The mass extinction eventually happened, yes, but it was not human lives that were lost. It was human language. It had occurred to no one that syntax was a non-renewable resource.

Humans populated the planet as widely as before, but now they remained speechless. Textless.

A collective human silence rose to the starry heavens, bearing strange melodies on its wings, songs that may have always existed, but that no one before ever could hear.

The planet was at peace. Its people were finally happy.

The stores of language replenished, very gradually at first. 

Once every decade or so a child would be born who was notably different from the others. 

Agitated, problem children, they seethed with an inner, unexpressed flare of fury. Their families feared them.

These were the children to whom language had returned.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions and in my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

A day at the lake

Multicoloured rocks
Image by Oliver Paaske

On Saturday I drove the kids to the lake. They were grumbling because I made them leave their phones at home. 

Mom would’ve let us, and all that.

But I’d decided that all their various devices were robbing them of their imagination. 

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I made each of them go to the lake shore and select a rock.

I held each one of their specimens in my outstretched hand and made the same proclamation for each one. 

‘This is not a rock!’ I bellowed. I made a big ceremony of it.

‘What is it, then?’ they muttered, petulant. 

‘Whatever you want it to be. Use your imaginations, for fuck’s sake.’

Ariana took her rock back and launched it at my face. I swerved just in time.

‘This is not a rock,’ I repeated, unscathed, scrambling up to recover the projectile. ‘This is a weapon.’

‘Cool,’ said Ariana. ‘What’s yours?’ she asked Finn.

‘A princess,’ he said, unapologetically. He was painting a smile on it with a stick of lipstick he’d been hiding in his pocket.

Did his mother know about this? I wondered. Did she encourage it?

‘You have to say the whole thing,’ Ariana said, finally getting into the spirit. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a…’

‘This is not a rock, it’s a princess,’ Finn murmured dutifully, adorning it now with a wig made from the wet remains of a plastic bag he’d dug out from beneath a pile of pebbles. 

‘What’s yours, Clive?’ Ariana asked. Clive was hiding among the branches of a fallen beech.

I watched as he tried to shield himself from her approach, hunching his bony shoulders, his quivering lip jutting out.

‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Ariana was jumping on the tree, as if to shake her brother out of his driftwood fortress. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a… You just say whatever it is you want it to be.’

‘I don’t want it to be anything but what it is,’ he said, his voice pleading, his eyes blinking back tears.

‘Don’t be absurd, Clive,’ I chastised him. ‘It’s just a game.’

Solemnly my youngest child extracted himself from the beech branches and walked to the exact spot from which his rock had been extracted. It took him forever to get it balanced in what he must have decided was its original position.

The weakness of his imagination unnerved me to the point of rage. 

‘You do realise,’ I seethed, ‘that the rock wasn’t always a rock? Once it might have been a mountain. And one day it will be dust, scattered across the earth.’

‘It’s not a rock now,’ said Clive. ‘It doesn’t want to be a rock. It wants to be what it is.’

But what is it? I wanted to scream, but refrained, faced with the silencing force of my own lack of imagination, stretched out before me, threatening, an abyss.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 71 of Structured Visions.

Whale song

Greyscale photo of a humpback whale leaping from the ocean
Photo by Mike Doherty

‘You’re frigid, you’re rigid and you have no soul.’

Jack’s break up words played in Evie’s head like a haunting melody on repeat. 

These were not his exact words. What he’d actually said was something like, ‘I dunno, babe. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like it’s impossible to loosen you up. Sometimes I look at you and it’s like, you’re not even there. Nobody home.’

He was a little stoned when he said all this, but she knew he didn’t regret it, because he got together with Cassandra Carrington the next day. They were relentless in their mutual affection. They both signed up to do a summer semester at sea so they wouldn’t have to spend their vacation apart.

Against her better judgment, Evie signed up to the same program. She’d imprinted on Jack like a duckling on a pitbull. She couldn’t keep herself away from him, no matter how cruel he was to her.

They were learning about marine mammals. Evie couldn’t concentrate. She wasn’t good at environmental science or biology. These subjects were too messy, fraught with error and doubt. She preferred math. Computer science. Linguistics.

A specialist on whale songs joined their boat when they reached Maui. She taught them that male humpbacks sing to each other in low frequencies that can span up to 10,000 miles of ocean. She played them some of their melodic sequences, and pointed out how the whales changed them slightly over time. The students listened to her recordings with appropriate awe.

‘That’s a beautiful song,’ Jack crooned, his hand stroking the back of Cassandra’s neck.

A beautiful song.

The phrase jolted through Evie like an electric current. It was decidedly not a beautiful song. It was absurd to say such a thing. It was—what was the term?

Ill formed. 

The term they used in linguistics to label an expression that a native speaker would never utter.

The whales would never say it was a beautiful song. 

They’d say—they were saying—singing—that it was a gathering song.

The humpback songs were not just melodies, they were strings of syntax—a series of noun phrases, with the noun and indefinite article remaining ever constant: a song, a song, a song. What varied was the adjective that preceded the noun. It never-failingly referred to the song’s purpose.

A gathering song.

A loving song.

A healing song.

A journeying song.

Sometimes, in the response times, the whales would insert an evaluative adjective, but this new addition never occurred alone in the phrase. It always accompanied, and preceded the purpose adjective.

A beautiful gathering song.

A raucous loving song.

A helpful healing song.

A circuitous journeying song.

The whales would never utter ‘a beautiful song’. A phrase without a purpose adjective would always be ill formed.

Evie listened to recording after recording to validate her findings. A new tune formed in her own mind, a response to the whale melodies. A discovery song.

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

The Mosaic Makers

Blue, orange and white floral mosaic
Photo by Raimond Klavins

In linguistics, periphrasis is the usage of multiple separate words to carry the meaning of prefixes, suffixes or verbs, among other things, where either would be possible.

The species once known as the Atlanteans were the Galaxy’s great curators. They visited the artisanal planets to observe and appreciate their masterpieces.

The great masterpiece of planet Earth was its language. The Atlanteans admired its manifold morphemes, suspended like raindrops in sunlight, producing perfect prisms of meaning with each shifting syllabic breeze. So great was their awe, the Atlanteans stayed longer than was their custom, each day noticing anew the delicate balance of conceptual contrast and the subtle harmonies at the core of each spiralling staircase of syntax.

Then one day the balance was destroyed. The Atlanteans discovered that the most remarkable pieces from the Earth’s linguistic repertoire had been plucked from their displays and smashed to bits. Their astonishment intensified when they learned that this damage had been wrought by the leaders of their own company.

‘The Earth is inviting new guests to arrive after we depart,’ they explained to their bemused companions. ‘Their task will be to create a new language out of these broken pieces.’ 

‘Ah,’ chorused the Atlanteans, reassured. They recognised the prophecy. ‘The Mosaic Makers are coming.’

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The Mosaic Makers’ in Episode 70 of Structured Visions.

Maize

Close up of colourful corncobs
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck

All languages have expressions to indicate causation, whereby a process is depicted as having been set in motion by some external actor. In some languages, causation is expressed morphologically, through inflections that change verbs into their causative forms.

What happens when you change your name?

Barbara was once Eleanor.

Was she always both names? When she became Barbara, did the Eleanor part of her simply switch off, like suppressed genetic information?

Nobody believes her discoveries. Her fellow scientists have no precedent for her independence of thought. It’s confusing to them, how she revels in working alone.

She does not work alone. She works with Eleanor.

Barbara studies gene sequences in Indian corn.

Eleanor studies morpheme sequences in Indian languages.

At the end of each working day, they share a cigarette and discuss their findings.

One evening Eleanor describes the causative morpheme in Navajo. It consists of one phoneme only; it would be easy to miss. A linguistic element smaller than a syllable can change a verb from ‘it’s moving’ to ‘he’s making it move’.

Barbara describes her revelations about the variegated patterns on the maize kernels she’s cultivated. The microscope has revealed to her highly-tuned vision the regulator genes that move about on chromosomes, activating or suppressing certain sequences.

‘Bits of information that activate the expression of a new meaning,’ Eleanor says. ‘A causative.’

The weight of their parallel discoveries lands on them simultaneously, like a crow settling on a snow-covered branch.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

The Great Reversal

River winding through marshland
Photo by Brian Sumner

A hydronym … is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans.

The Great Reversal, which marks the end of the Earth’s environmental crisis, is often credited to terronymic technologies. Terronymy (from the Latin terra, ‘Earth’ and the Greek onoma, ‘name’) is the process of activating the self-restoration of threatened ecosystems by reminding specific environmental loci and geographical features of their true names.

The lack of archival material from the Apocalyptic Period has made it impossible, so far, to identify the origin of terronymy or to locate its founder or founders. It is generally accepted that terronymy in some rudimentary form was practiced as early as the 2050s or ’60s, most likely in secret, by scientists who recognised the heretical nature of the methods they were testing. Whether the practice was developed by one great mind or a team is likely never to be known, and the pioneer or pioneers who discovered it are likely to have died in the apocalypse, their names and stories to remain shrouded in the mystery of lost history.

Transcript (dated 9 November 2136) of an interview between a journalist from the Environmental Record and retired conservation scientist Dr Frederick Clintock:

ER: I’m very grateful to you, Dr Clintock, for taking the time to talk with me today.

FC: Please call me Fred.

ER: Or course. I was curious about your work during the Apocalyptic Period in the 2050s.

FC: I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to tell you. My memory’s not what it was.

ER: Anything you have to share would be great. I understand your research was in rivers.

FC: Calling it research is a stretch. It’s hard for young people to understand what it was like. We were refugees on a dying planet. My partner and I travelled together for months, on foot, along the rivers we were sent to examine. We couldn’t go by boat. The water was pure poison. Every day, for months, in those toxic marshes, with no one but ourselves to look after us. You really get to know a person.

ER: What was your partner’s name, Fred?

FC: (Pauses to think.) Do you know, I can’t remember? Strange, that.

ER: Can you tell us what methods you and your partner were using?

FC: (Shakes his head.) We could only carry so much equipment, and we had no power source, so it was all very primitive. Just simple pH and salinity tests to chart the extent of the devastation. But my partner—what was his name? Fred?

ER: Well, your name is Fred…

FC: (Laughs.) Ah, so it probably wasn’t Fred. I’d have remembered that name!

ER: Of course. So your partner…

FC: Yes. Well, he had a different method. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.

ER: Actually, I think I probably would.

FC: He just… talked.

ER: Talked?

FC: He talked to the people. The people who lived by the rivers. At first I thought he was just being sociable. Polite. It was a precarious time. Most people were homeless and forming bands, many of them dangerous. You didn’t know who to trust. Civilisation was disintegrating, you see.

ER: But you suspected there was more to his conversations than just politeness?

FC: He was talking to the people about the rivers. Asking for stories. Personal stories—did they swim in the rivers as children? Did they fish them? Did they freeze over in the winters? If they were open to talking, he’d start probing them for more… apocryphal tales. Ghost stories. Local superstitions about the water. Tales of sea monsters, hauntings. Stories about supernatural beings—mermaids, water sprites, that sort of thing. The stranger the story, the more he wanted to hear.

And then one day I had a look at his field notebook. He’d not noted a single one of our pH or salinity readings. Instead the pages were full of the stories he’d heard at all the settlements. Word for word. He had an unbelievable memory. Every word was there, filling every white space.

ER: Did he ever explain what he was doing? Did you ever ask?

FC: I did ask him, once. I caught him poring over the pages of his notebook, like he was in a trance or something. He told me he was searching for patterns in the stories. The patterns, he said, would give him clues as to the river’s true name. 

ER: Fascinating!

FC: Mad, you mean. The air was nearly as poisonous as the rivers at this point. It was starting to mess with his sense of reality. I knew it was really bad when he told me he’d finally figured out a river’s true name. He wrote it on a bit of rice paper and slipped it into the water, where it dissolved.

ER: What year would this have been, Dr Clintock?

FC: Call me Fred. I can’t really say. It was a long time ago.

ER: 2050? 2055?

FC: Could be.

ER: We always assumed the first terronymic experiments started in the ’60s, with mountains. But to think it started almost a decade earlier. With rivers. Dr Clintock, it’s very possible your partner was the pioneer who initiated the Great Reversal!

FC: What’s that? It’s a shame about him. A lot of people went crazy during those times. Wish I could remember his name. I think it started with an F…

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The Great Reversal’ in Episode 69 of Structured Visions.

Breadcrumb trail

Photo by Florian Glawogger

‘One of the most common types of metaphoric transfer is synaesthesia … i.e. the transfer of information from one sensory modality to another.’ (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 4)

Professor Hans Grets’s paleoanthropological team often commented upon his cool demeanour at the moment of the big discovery. He’d observed each fragment of bone being unearthed from the excavation site with unnerving composure. Only when the fourth femur was finally extracted did Hans acknowledge the magnitude of their find.

‘Well, that’s something,’ he said.

When journalists reported on his discovery—two skeletons, male and female, the link between Neanderthal and human—they found it impossible to resist the obvious pun on the lead scientist’s name. 

Breadcrumb trail leads Professor Hans Grets to homo sapiens’ nearest relative, read the headlines.

Hans did not protest when the skeletons were informally christened ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’. 

No one knows of the images that haunt his dreams.

Every night, the same story.

Hansel and Gretel are chased from their homeland, dropping white slips of a paperlike material—flower petals, or thin, colourless leaves—on the ground as they flee.

Something has been written upon them.

Even in the dream, Hans maintains his scientific incredulity. It can’t be writing, and those marks can’t be words. Spoken language wouldn’t emerge in homo sapiens until, conservatively, 150,000 years ago. The first evidence of literacy doesn’t appear until about 3000 BCE. It’s inconceivable that Hansel and Gretel would command a written language.

And yet, a careful examination of the marks on those dream pages makes it impossible to deny. The symbols are words. What is even more curious is that Hans is able to decipher them.

We are afraid. Come rescue us.

Hansel and Gretel have scattered their messages in vain. Most of their notes are eaten by the birds. The rest sink into the soil and sprout up as vegetation.

Many years later, the earth and all its creatures voice the same refrain: We are afraid. Come rescue us.

Hans awakens to beads of sweat streaming from him. His body feels like a polar ice cap, melting.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

Wordfall

Photo by Yang Shuo

The most difficult question for most linguists to answer is ‘What’s a word?’

Always, it’s exactly the same.

I’m exhausted by the climb. I stand at the top to catch my breath, to rest my overtaxed muscles. They quiver like jelly. My heart flings itself against my ribcage as if trying to escape.

My body never seems to adjust to the exertion of the climb, no matter how many times I do it. My muscles never grow stronger, my lung capacity never increases, my heart never stabilises.

There’s a sign at the top of the mountain. Sometimes I read it, but I never manage to remember the words printed on it. Observe? Observation? Observatory? And another word that sounds scientific, but which is actually about language. Language observatory? Lexical observatory? Observatoire linguistique?

The sign marks only the halfway point of my journey to the site, but the road levels out here and the going is easier. The view is stunning, when I remember to look.

When I reach the site I inevitably encounter the scientific instruments and the team of people who operate them.

They never used to acknowledge my presence. I’ve since learned they were being cautious about approaching me directly, for fear of scaring me away. Eventually curiosity gets the better of me and I start asking questions.

‘What are these instruments?’

They look a little like radio telescopes, shaped like big bowls, their rims horizontal with the sky.

One day I remember the words on the sign (observe-observation-observatory-observatoire) and ask what they’re observing. 

‘Words,’ they say.

‘What words?’

They point to the sky.

‘The ones that land in our instruments.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Outer space.’

‘Wait. You’ve discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life? In outer space? Are they talking to us? What are they saying?’

We’ve had this conversation at least a dozen times, I’m embarrassed to admit. And I can never get it through my thick skull that ‘words from outer space’ aren’t spoken by extraterrestrials, they’re not part of some alien broadcast, they’re not communicated at all. They’re just falling from the sky, like inert little specks, like stardust.

They actually fall into those radio telescope things. It turns out those big bowls are like water butts or reservoirs, capturing words, not rainfall. Wordfall. The sensitive equipment the team uses helps them study each word, to learn its qualities and eventually to decide which ones they want to incorporate into Earth.

When I finally understand that much they hook me up to a network of electrodes so I can know what a word is like. A word is not, it turns out, a combination of letters, or sounds, or symbols of any kind. Words are like…

I don’t know. Every time I try to grasp it I’m back down at the bottom of the mountain again, and I can’t always be bothered to climb back up.

Really, it’s exhausting. Physically and mentally.

Here it is—I’ve got it now. Don’t try to imagine what a word is, or what it means. Better to say words have qualities. They make you feel a certain way. Itchy, or wise, or bereft, or curious. They’re like little blue pulses of energy—zip! They infuse you with some unique way of feeling or thinking—some new idea.

It’s probably twenty more trips up the mountain before I learn how they integrate the new words into Earth. I keep making the mistake of thinking that they’ll translate them into something that sounds like English, Spanish or Inuit. Maybe they’ll use Esperanto. I keep inventing clever little neologisms for the outer-space words I’m experiencing until eventually—poof! It’s straight back down the mountain for me.

It’s actually quite a difficult thing, this business of incorporating new words. The words need a safe space to exist within, and creating that environment takes a lot of calibration. That’s what most of the instrumentation is for, in fact.

And here’s the confusing bit, but it starts to make sense after lots of trips up here. The space that accommodates the new words is made out of language. 

Language is different from words, it turns out. 

Language makes stories. It makes… selves.

That’s it!

Stories and selves—selved stories, self stories? Self stories are containers made out of language, specially calibrated to welcome words from outer space.

‘You’re ready,’ one of them tells me now.

‘Ready for what?’

But I know what they mean. They think I’m ready to be a human storage compartment for one of their alien words.

What have they been doing to me all this time? Have they been messing with me when they’ve hooked me up to their instruments? I’ve changed, somehow. I can’t quite figure it out.

Poof!

The mountain looms ahead of me. I’m at the bottom again. 

This time I won’t go back. Nobody’s making me climb that road again. I’m nobody’s guinea pig.

Half an hour later, I’m standing by that sign again, something-something observatoire, something-something transformation. I can’t read it properly. My lungs feel like they’re about to explode.

It’s OK, though, I’ve done this before. I know the way from here, it’s easy going the rest of the way.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘Wordfall’ in Episode 68 of Structured Visions.

Gold

Line drawing illustration of Rumpelstiltskin and the future queen trying to spin straw into gold

English verbs take inflections for two tenses only—present and past.

In his dotage, the king has become obsessed about what is to come and has taken to consulting soothsayers.

The queen has known for many years the impossibility of changing the future, let alone trying to predict it.

She learned these and many other valuable lessons from a demon she met in her early years. His name was Rumpelstiltskin.

The name, it turns out, is important. Not the name itself—the quaternity of syllables, the clustered consonants, the complex portmanteau of simple English words (rump, stilt, skin). What matters is that the demon was possessed of a name at all, and that he guarded it so closely. The name is powerful.

The realisation made the queen question the composition of the straw he’d famously spun into gold. It could not have been ordinary straw. Perhaps it too, was made of a name, or whatever magic thing names were made of. She undertook a few clandestine experiments with the spinning wheel.

The straw he used had tremendous plasticity. It could be made into anything—almost anything. Gold was one of the simpler projects, surprisingly easy to master. The queen was eager to move on to new challenges.

The king’s current obsession with the future coincides with her own realisation that she can change the past. With her deft fingers on the spinning wheel, she creates any number of alternative histories.

In one her father’s boasts about her spinning skills go unnoticed, and she remains a peasant, blissfully ignorant of the complications of royal life.

In another, sweeter version, she confesses her ineptitude and the prince marries her anyway.  

Once she dares to spin the thread into an unthinkable past, in which she fails to discover the demon’s name and her firstborn is lost to her. She follows Rumpelstiltskin to his underworld lair and consents to be his consort.

Though she keeps her new skill secret, occasionally she’s tempted to tell the king. What she knows might be enough to convince him to sack those charlatan soothsayers. 

There is no need to worry about the future if you know how to change the past.

Perhaps one day she’ll tell him. For now she enjoys her hobby in solitude, and the wisdom that it affords her.

The straw is made of language. What she spins are stories.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.