“Alright Serg, the program is reading…I don’t know it’s some number.” “What color?” “Green.” “No what color is it? And what does the output read” “Um, like I said green. It says, again, in green letters, 200, three last-tier matches found.” “Hold on”.
Serge arrived at the computing center of the station two and a half minutes later, breathing very heavily.
“You’re sure it’s green?” he said in the doorway, catching his breath.
“Damn dude, if you were in better shape I’d be less impressed but that was definitely the fastest anyone has made it from lookout to computing.”
Serge was a slightly roughled, bespectled man in a t-shirt and the middle part of his fourties wearing a t-shirt, a few strands of grey interpsperced through his wiry cloud of black hair.
“I know what colors are my guy. Check it out,” Antonia said, pushing off so that her swivel chair made room for Serge.
“Holy shit,” Serge said.
“Language,” Antonia laughed. Her mentor didn’t dress too professionally, but he was always very respectful.
Serge looked over at her. “Holy shit,” he repeated, eyes wide.
Something about the way he said it made Antonia sit up straight for the first time in a few hours. She scanned the three monitors in front of Serge and started to feel dumb. Had she become a cynic and missed the moment she had sacrificed two years of her life to already? Had she been so impatient that two years had been too long for her to help to accomplish something that had never been done? But then she looked down at the bottom of the screen, where the program proposed what the matched response was in english.
Fuck you, you fucking assholes.
“Serge.”
Serge looked back at her, those same wide open eyes. Not a blink.
“Serge someone’s fucking with us.”
“There is is, there it is and, not you too Antonia - our view of language is so rigid. It is the profanity. That’s part of language! It has been the whole time!”
“You can’t be serious. A four ton sperm while is parroting back Fuck you, you fucking assholes.”
“Antonia, you really think that when communicating with another species we should not take it at face value?”
“Um no, I think we should take it as a prank from ops, like it usually is. They pulled this shit last month.”
Serge’s expression slacked somewhat. “You’re not wrong. It wouldn’t be the first false alarm. Well we know what to do, right?” Serge looked over at her.
“If by ‘we’ you mean, do I know what to do, well, we should re-run the simulated chatter with a random noise variance of, I dunno, 5% and a random phrasing rate of 40%. Run it for four days maybe?”
“That sounds…good. My instinct is, six days. Random noise of 12%. We don’t want to get a false positive on something like this and have to waste our time. But random phrasing, I think that could be at 20%. Like, if we got it, we got it. We know what the phrase is.”
“Okay,” Antonia’s eyes lit up and her fingers coasted over the clunky old keyboard, setting the variables for the simulation. A large robotic whale they had given the pet-name Harold was recieving instructions for the low-frequency whale-mimicking calls he would be doling out over the next six days.
“Fuck, this is huge. If it’s the real deal. This would validate so many of our guesses. The story-retelling ritual, emotional vocabulary…”
“Profanity,” Antonia threw out.
“Well, not necessarily. That’s such a complex distinction, hard to…”
“Accountability…”
“Yeah. That is true, isn’t it. Accountability.”
“Well if this is really it,” Antonia said cautiously, not wanting to get Serge’s hopes up,“Then how the hell do we respond? I mean, assuming they’re talking about the dying corals and not the fact that Harold is just really annoying, that is.”
“How indeed.”
Inspired by Contact, by Elizabeth Kolbert* *A new yorker article about the future possibility of contact with animals, which reminds me of the ESP project, which is a collaboration of scientists and technologists to decode animal language. This topic is fascinating to me because it seems like the most possible impossible thing to me. Technically, it seems like it can be done - it is just a very very very hard puzzle, after all. The information is there. Different human cultures can, eventually, figure out each other’s languages, although we are much more similar. Also, Elon Musk should spend 40 billion dollars on this, instead of Space Travel. Or twitter.