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Member
Join Date: May 2007
Location: Hudson, Quebec
Gender: Male
Posts: 18
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Some Science Fiction to wet your appetite?
Hello,
First time poster here. I don't know if it's considered cheeting to post something that's already been published (albeit for free in a student magazine), but here it is. To anyone who isn't familiar with science fiction, they usually feature an empassioned scientist who must make the case for his groundbreaking discovery to a team of impassionate and hard boiled military personel who have a secretive agenda.
But I'm not putting my story down, I'm celebrating it's strong ties to convention! Anyways, enjoy it if you have the time to read it.
The Linguistic Machine
Christopher Olson
“How do we initiate dialogue?” General Darion asked the technician.
The man in the long lab coat pointed to the microphone on the desk.
“Just ask any questions you have into here, and our machine will provide an accurate translation for our guest.”
Admiral Lerner pushed the microphone aside and clasped his hands together. “Exactly how accurate?”
“Well, it depends on the type of question. You have to take into consideration that he might not be able to understand what we take for granted in regular conversation. I’d advise that you keep your language as simple as possible--like you were talking to a child.”
Buoyed by his companion's hasty comment, Frederick Loewe rose from his chair. “But we’re not talking about a creature with child-like intelligence. It’s our fault if we cannot reproduce the nuances of their language- the nuances that make the difference between communicating information and conveying wisdom.” he said, but his passion was rebutted by the cold faces of the military brass, whose concern was mainly political.
“Could you maybe elaborate on that?” said Darion. “I’m not sure I understand you.”
Loewe pulled open a drawer and removed an hourglass filled with sand, a wooden antique that clashed with the modern decor of the room, and placed it on the table. “The creatures create vibrations in the sand, which are then interpreted as words in the brain just as humans interpret vibrations in the air as sound. Because we utilize different sensory organs for communication, we’ve had to create a kind of bridge between us.”
His hand swung to the side in presentation of the machine, a tall mechanism which also assumed an hourglass shape. It was more than just a computer program; its impressive size concealed a large amount of activity. A series of pumps and pressurizers designed to rattle and shake could recreate the subtle variations of the alien tongue and set to its maximum setting it could simulate the tremor of a seismic earthquake. “Its frequency has also been demonstrated to attract insects,” said Loewe. “We thought it might be an error, but then we realized that we were replicating the creature’s natural hunting ability.”
A beetle crawled across the machine’s surface and passed along a series of wires and steel beams that exited the machine’s side. They connected to a metallic object laid along the floor horizontally, which contained the new life form.
“The vibrations resonate through these wires, just like a telephone pole. Let me demonstrate,” said Loewe. He pulled a keyboard out of a slot in the wall, and typed some text which appeared in luminescent colours on a computer panel. Just as the faint green glow dissolved into the screen, a light humming sound was heard from the machine.
“The process is sort of like translating ancient Latin into German and then converting it to Braille. The machine’s interpretation is then fed into an English translation program which attempts to reproduce substance while providing the correct grammar and intonation,” said Loewe.
He took the hourglass and turned it upside down, so that the sand came pouring through the center and into the second glass compartment. The floor shook, forming small ripples in Lerner’s coffee. A short silence was followed by a gentle tapping from the inside of the creature’s cell. Each fluctuation of the wires was met with a hysteria of lights on the monitor while letters jumbled together in no ordinary sequence, but gradually adopted syntax and sentence structure up on the screen.
“What does it say?” said someone in the back of the room.
“I told him it’s nighttime," replied Loewe,
"And he agreed with me."
Admiral Lerner threw his pencil down on the desk. “Isn’t this a little too much? Haven’t we got better things to do?” And then he shrugged, ready to cast aside millions of dollars in tax payer’s money and research in the way only an unelected official could.
“What makes you think they aren’t worthy of study?” said Loewe.
“Enough people thought so. Enough to fund this research.”
Lerner undid the top button on his collar. “I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Maybe this project has some benefit, which I’m not yet aware of. But I know when my dog’s hungry and I know when it wants to go outside, and I’ve never had to create a clever contraption to put it into words that you and I can understand.”
“Will your dog say ‘thank you’ when it’s done?” asked Loewe.
“We’ve actually been able to speak their language for some time. A week ago, we acted as interpreters between two creatures who were separated by several miles. By using the linguistic machine like a telephone, they spoke to one another without suspicion of any interference between them.”
Darion shook his head, “Of course they can understand one another, but can they understand us?”
“Well,” Loewe paused, “There are impressive cultural barriers to overcome. Their culture is relatively minute in this stage of their history. Their language hasn’t adapted to a culture that has science and history to necessitate so many words--and the bureaucracy! You might say their language lacks the clutter ours has accumulated, which is especially evident in our efforts to condense this clutter. But you might say that there’s something almost... poetic about their language.”
“Rubbish.” Lerner waved his hand like he was erasing a chalkboard.
“All this is conjecture based on your partiality towards a creature that’s soon to be put on the endangered species list.” Lerner sunk into his chair, confident in the words that he had unexpectedly chosen. Meanwhile, the hourglass sitting on the table had completely drained of sand, flooding the lower compartment. Time stopped for a moment.
Loewe was growing tense. “But there’s another thing I’ve noticed. They possess a considerable level of curiousity. That chance ingredient that convinced man to spread out of Africa and escape the bounds of...” His hand cut through the air as if tracing a flight path through the cosmos, but now it hung idly. “I think they're curious of what we’ve been up to on the surface, and the damage we’ve caused.”
The Admiral’s eyes glowed like two burning coals. “When you send somebody to settle new territory, you don’t expect them to start protecting the land from you. You expect them to do their job."
“What do you mean?” said Loewe. “This was my assignment. I was contacted by the IEPA and instructed about establishing communication with the indigenous life forms here. I took over for another scientist from whose original idea this project evolved. I was ordered to do this!”
Lerner looked over his shoulder and mumbled to a private audience,
“And why is an environmental agency allowed to dictate orders all the way in deep space? This planet is as much an army base as it is a colony.”
“But we’re not at war,” said Loewe, with a discerning ear.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said General Darion before breathlessly changing the subject. “Admiral, believe it or not, the IEPA still has precedence here.”
Lerner took a sip of bottled water to wash away the spit he had drawn to the front of his mouth.
“We have to work within these parameter," said General Darion. "Now Admiral, it is the desire of the board of review to bring closure to this issue. It was by neglecting our findings that this problem developed in the first place."
He addressed the entire room now. “When the miners on the colony notified us about what they saw five years ago, that information was promptly forgotten by the administration. Some of those early reports indicated that flesh and shreds of dry skin, apparently chewed up by the machinery, would appear among the raw ore that came up to the surface. Because the drilling equipment was entirely self-sufficient, there’s no telling how many times this may have occurred. The human intuition to raise questions was simply unavailable. When the mine’s resources were nearly exhausted and crews of men were sent down to dig out what was left, first hand contact became inevitable--and frequent. The drilling must have triggered their response.”
“It nearly drove them mad,” interjected Loewe.
“In any case, they were worked into a frenzy. There were skirmishes, but what was most peculiar was the level of coordination they developed in their attacks. A memo was sent to the IEPA requesting an immediate investigation. Admiral, it was a colleague of mine who oversaw and approved a phase two investigation to determine whether the creatures really did possess ‘sapient’ thought. The results of this research are considered to be of critical importance,” Darion concluded, pivoting in his chair to catch the reaction from the room.
Loewe whispered under his breath, “Because if it could ever be established that they possessed intelligence, then they would be given rights.”
The room remained quiet, until the pregnant silence was interrupted by a young officer who had been standing guard beside his two superiors. “Can we see the creature?”
Loewe replied in a definitive tone, “No, you can’t. They can’t handle the light very well. It isn’t a danger to them, they just prefer darkness.”
“What he means is,” elaborated a companion researcher, “to keep one safely in captivity, it’s best that conditions remain absolutely perfect. We want to avoid agitating them.”
There was a silent consensus of agreement.
While others were stooped in silence, Loewe was at his desk, flipping through large papers on a table that was lit from underneath. The contents of each page were projected onto the wall behind him. He paused at one, and for a moment a diagram was blurred onto his chest. He took it and then moved to the center of the room, hoisting it above his head.
“This is what the creature looks like,” he said. There was a slight burst of commotion, and then a hushed silence.
An unidentified voice said, “It almost looks like a...”
Thwack! A hand struck the table, drawing the room’s attention to the young corporal who slammed his desk.
He raised his hand and then attempted to wipe it on his shirt, but chose the ankle of his pant leg instead. “I’m sorry, sir. That was the biggest bug I ever saw! It was scurrying around for half an hour before I had a chance to nab it.”
“It’s all right,” Lerner chuckled, “We all saw it.”
Darion slammed his fist down on the table too and once he had regained everyone's attention, he asked a question. “Frederick, is our creature an insect?”
“No,” Loewe replied. He had intended to say nothing more, but he wanted to avoid any more awkward speculation. “It’s more crustacean than anything else. It has a hard shell and requires large amounts of calcium. But you’ve got to stop looking through your human eyes; this creature is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
“And yet it looks like a beetle.”
Loewe turned his head around with blank expression towards the graph, which prominently displayed the creature. “Perhaps.”
Admiral Lerner smiled as though he were just provided ample opportunity to air his thoughts, although he seemed to be about ten minutes behind on the conversation. “One thing I know,” said the Admiral rolling up his sleeves “Is that what makes humans so special is this,” he opened his palm, stretched his fingers, and then clenched them into a fist. “Dexterity; our hands perform complex tasks. How do you think we finally crawled onto land, or developed tools for hunting? The only way an animal can interact with its environment is by snapping something in its jaws, but it only ever learns if something tastes good. Unlike that creature, we’re equipped to learn and evolve. Your machine is what makes you special, not them.”
“What makes us special,” said Loewe, “is that we are privileged to view the world with critical eyes and not be limited by our own.”
“But can they?” asked Lerner.
Loewe’s head sunk in concentration, “I think so.”
“I can’t see how, living underground away from sight, sound, and smell, with only the cold touch of rock," Admiral Lerner placed his open palm on the table.
Loewe utilized the Admiral's little speech to retrieve an item from his desk, while gently unwrapping it from rolls of protective foil. With an enormous thud, he dropped something cold and dead on the table, which the Admiral could only regard disapprovingly.
“This is the creature’s hand.” Tendons and veins stuck out of its severed wrist in petrified presentation. It had two large mandibles that stuck out menacingly. He gently lifted several wormy extensions.
“These are its fingers. With these, it can touch, taste, smell, and even shake hands.” He lifted it up to the Admiral, who raised his arm in a defiant gesture, ready to swipe it across the desk. But he slowly sat down in his seat, when he took a second look at those sharp things.
Loewe paced around the room, “The thing is, no two creatures have the same shell.” He looked at Darion, “So they don’t all look like insects. That’s because the creatures make their own shells, with those fingers.” He lifted it up for everyone to see. “So they actually have very good dexterity.”
He stopped in his tracks and the sudden shift sent a jolt through the expectant audience. He began looking at the alien arm closely, raising it in short increments to his face. Then, he grasped it by its claw and yanked it from its socket. The sudden motion sent out another wave of tension.
“You see. They are not born with these claws, and they don’t grow them. They make them,” said Loewe. He passed the claw through the air like a prehistoric man banging rocks together to create sharp spears. “They’re tools for digging, like your expensive drills only they’ve used them to travel to depths that send your machines to breaking point.”
He looked up with a faint expression of wonderment. “You may ask, what use do they have for eyes which can scarcely handle the light, if they live deep in the crust of the planet? Perhaps they are already evolving, and need eyes to see those brand new horizons?”
Lerner had had enough, “Some men suffer from illusions of grandeur. You suffer from respect for something below you!”
The Admiral was quietly quaking, but nobody noticed. They could only see Loewe and the crude tools of an intelligent species. His calm and refined posture settled the tension in the room.
“I’ve been wondering," said a junior Lieutanant. "How were you were able to translate their language?”
Loewe smiled.
“By examining cross sections of its brain, we can compare the mood it is experiencing with the vibration it creates. The sound it creates while certain sections of the brain are active are indexed and used to create words that express its current condition.” He paced steadily through his files and displayed charts and illustrations that others pretended to understand.
“While it performs certain tasks, it creates vibrations of a distinct and specific pitch. If we detect this level of vibration outside of the situation that corresponds to the hum, we believe it is expressing the recurring memory of that event. After hundreds of different scenarios, we’ve made something of a lexicon, or vocabulary.”
The Admiral’s fist was shaking. He grabbed a microphone, and said,
“Am I to believe that they’ve got a word for liberation, emancipation and freedom? For Christ sake, they live in the soil! How could they--how can they--possibly compare with us, or understand the rights we are going to give them?”
In haste, Lerner had grabbed the receiver of the machine, and while he stopped to consider what he had done and what he had said, the machine was busy translating his words.
It was too late to turn the machine off now, for a light vibration began to tremble and shake the desks and walls of the room. In near split second response, vibrations began to emanate from within the chamber that contained one of the creatures. The linguistic machine displayed a response, which would remain frozen in Admiral Lerner’s mind:
“How easy to speak about freedom, when you’re not locked in a cage!”
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