EUe had never been happier about his decision to take an elective course in formal language theory at university. The payout was absolutely gushing. As he'd learned back then, communication had two components: the medium, and the message. By giving the Impactor vessel examples of two non-equivalent forms of information, he's given it a medium the two of them could use to communicate with one another. While using sequences of communions to communicate was nice in theory, it was also tiring and time consuming. So, the first order of business?
Teaching the vessel how to write.
Language was, in its own way, a core component of runetic engineering. The Gods didn't speak the way mortals did, and so, in crafting webs for communion, EUe had had to learn about the logical underpinnings of language itself in order to have a chance of getting any complex messages across to the dreaming deities.
That had been one of the reasons he'd taken that formal language theory course. (It helped that he'd had the instructor before, and knew that he was a highly entertaining lecturer.)
At the theoretical level, a written language was a collection of symbols—an alphabet—arranged into sequences called strings. In this semantic sense, grammar was the collection of rules used to assign meaning to an alphabets' strings. The larger your language's alphabet, the more efficient it was at encoding information. EUe figured that, in all likelihood, he'd have to introduce other combinations of communions to create new "symbols" for the alphabet he was developing with the Impactor, but, for the time being, he felt his priority was to get to some kind of conversational fluency with the vessel, even if that meant restricting himself to short messages in binary.
The Gatherer fluttered his wings nervously as he realized he was going to have to do some math. Thankfully, he had some pretty good motivations, such as the existential threat of annihilation by a hostile, extraterrestrial entity.
Also, the vessel had closed its entry hatch. The hole was just gone, as if it had never been there in the first place.
EUe sympathized with that. If he'd been desperately looking for someone—anyone—to talk to and some poor sap had done him the kindness of answering, he'd have probably blocked the door, too, at least until he knew his new contact was about to bail on him and leave him alone once more.
On the plus side, he no longer had any doubt about the nature of the Impactors' intelligence.
This was a thinking, feeling being. It had shown excitement in its reaction to input it could finally understand, as well as anxiety and fear in having sealed the exit to keep him from leaving. Better yet, that desperate move showed that the Impactor had an understanding of causality and time; it had taken preëmptive action to prevent a future outcome—him leaving—that it wanted to avoid.
Fortunately, there seemed to be plenty of air to breathe. EUe was also thankful that he'd had the foresight to fill the phials in his nectariat to the brim. He had enough nectar for almost two days, though he hoped he wouldn't need to use it.
"Focus on the positives," EUe told himself.
And he did.
After a moment's thought, he settled on a plan for teaching the vessel what writing was. To improve the chances of it actually working, he tried using his two established "symbols" on the wall: the sequence of fire, and the sequence that alternated between lightning and web-manipulation. It took four communions in a row to get the wall to respond, either four gouts of fire, or two pairs of electric sparks and web-manipulation, and it responded by creating the ripples associated to those communions, followed by a burst of frenzied activity as it tried to use this new alphabet to tell EUe whatever it was that it so desperately wanted to tell him. EUe didn't understand a word of it—he didn't know if it contained anything that could even be called a "word"—but that wasn't the point. The point was that it had no trouble recognizing his two symbols.
This was progress!
"Now, I just need to get this thing to accept a different form of input."
Popping the joints in his claws, EUe walked up to the wall and launched four flame communions at its silvery surface. Immediately after, before the ripples had dissipated, he used his claw to draw the symbol for the number zero on the wall:
–
Removing his claw from the wall, EUe waited a moment for the ripples to fade and for the horizontal slit he'd made to fill back in. Once it had, he repeated the procedure, except this time, he carved the zero in before spraying the wall with four gouts of flame.
"Now for the test," he muttered.
He clawed a – into the wall, only this time, he didn't accompany it with a communion. For a second, nothing happened; EUe anxiously tapped his talons on the floor, and just as he was about to give up hope, triangular ripples spread across the wall. Ecstatic, EUe then pelted the wall with fire from his hand, and the wall responded—and this time, much more quickly. It made a horizontal slit: a zero.
And EUe hadn't even needed to move his finger!
He leapt up and whistled.
"Yes!"
He then taught the vessel the symbol for the number one:
|
and got it to associate | with the alternating sequence of electric zaps and web manipulations.
He knew it worked when ripple-quaked walls suddenly broke out in tight, coiled spirals of zeroes and ones, tens of thousands of symbols spilling out all around him.
"Okay, slow down, buddy," he said, "slow down." He sunk his claw into the main wall. The inscriptions vanished, filling in with a sound like sliding glass.
He really, really hoped it would understand the concept of numbers.
EUe inscribed the binary representations of the first few integers on the wall, starting from zero. He skipped down a line each time between each one, hoping it would teach the wall about the importance of neatly arranging text.
–
|
– |
| |
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– – |
| – |
– | |
| | |
EUe was halfway through inscribing eight when the slits for the digits carved themselves into being, and not just for eight, but for nine, and ten, and eleven, and twelve, on and on.
It understood numbers!
A spark of triumph shot through his wings, tempered only by the knowledge that he still had no way out of this place.
Hopefully, it wouldn't stay that way for long.
For everyone's sake, EUe figured that understanding the concepts of yes and no would be the best choice for his next goal-post. The plan was easy enough: teach it the concepts of "true" and "false", and then use them as substitutes for "yes" and "no". Of course, that meant introducing new symbols. So, he picked two new sequences of communions, drawing from three and four different lEs, respectively, and linked them with the symbols lU-twO and E.
For whatever reason, the astrophysicist's name was the first thing that had popped into EUe's mind.
With that done, he got to work inscribing strings of symbols on the wall, corresponding to the statements, "Zero plus zero equals zero", "Zero plus one equals one", "One plus zero equals one," and "One plus one equals two":
– lU-twO – E –
– lU-twO | E |
| lU-twO – E |
| lU-twO | E – |
Now, to check if it understood.
"I hope you don't mind a pop quiz," EUe said, muttering under his breath. He inscribed "one plus two equals", but left the answer unfilled:
| lU-twO – | E
A | | | appeared to the right of the E a moment later.
"Yes!" EUe pumped his arms in excitement.
This was excellent! They were almost there.
Since the vessel seemed to be a fast learner, EUe decided to skip the step where he introduced a sequence of communions to expand the Impactor's vocabulary of symbols and proceeded to directly introduce new symbols solely through inscriptions on the wall.
He inscribed an O and a V and a • and a / and several others symbols, and, each time, copies of the symbol spread all over the wall, as if the wall was shouting them at the top of its lungs—not that it actually had lungs. Or maybe it did.
At this point, EUe felt like anything was possible.
Next came "true" and "false". EUe decided the best way to get the point across would be by listing examples of true and false statements and accompanying them with the symbols corresponding to their truth or falsehood, and hoping that the vessel would be able to infer what the extra symbols meant.
– E – O
| E | O
| lU-twO | E – | O
Three true statements.
– E | ◊
| E – ◊
| lU-twO | E | ◊
Three false statements.
"Now for the test…" EUe muttered, anxiously pulling at his feathers.
He sipped from one of the phials in his nectariat, and then inscribed:
| | E – – |
| | | E | | |
– | lU-twO | | | E | – |
– | lU-twO | | | E – – |
The wall filled in four symbols on the right-hand sides—◊, O, ◊, O—correctly determining the truth and falsehood of all four statements.
Next up: asking questions.
Wait… how am I going to do that?
EUe tapped his foot on the floor, arms crossed in thought. Then, the idea came to him, and he chirruped and swore.
He was going to have to remember his truth tables for propositional logic.
First, though, he needed a snack.
Zeroes and ones spiraled over the floor all around him as EUe reached down, opened his nectariat and pulled out a phial. He'd barely begun to slurp up the nectar within when he heard a familiar sliding sound from behind him, followed by a yell:
"EUe?! EUe?!"
lU-twO came buzzing into the Impactor a moment later, looking disheveled and more than a little on edge.
"You've been locked in for hours!" he said. "We were getting worried. You weren't responding to our slabboard communications."
"I didn't receive any communications," EUe answered.
lU-twO shook his arms in frustration. "Just tell me what's going on," he said. "Are you alright?"
EUe placed his hand on the floor. The churning surface of zeroes and ones rose up through the gaps between his fingers, positively bubbling with excitement.
lU-twO squawked in shock as he saw it.
"I'm better than alright," EUe said. He whistled happily. "I've made progress."
— — —
Back at camp, it was mid-afternoon by the time EUe finished recounting everything that had happened so far. Even the scientists who'd been wary of him at first began to warm up to him as he shared the exciting news. Without exception, everyone was thrilled to hear of his progress.
"Best of all," he said, waving the empty nectar phial in his hand as he paced along the path, "I'm pretty confident that the Impactors don't mean us any harm!"
"What makes you say that?" a scientist asked.
"Well, if they did, the Impactor wouldn't have let me go after having gone to the lengths of trapping me in the first place, now would it?"
Of course, there was always the possibility that the drones and the Impactors weren't on the same page about everything, in which case the twEfE race might soon find itself caught in the middle of an alien civil war. However, EUe made an executive decision not to tell the group about that particular possibility.
Let them savor the good news while it lasted, he thought. They certainly deserved it.
Speaking of news…
"How is gEl doing?" EUe asked.
"He's in the thick of it, now," lU-twO replied, "but that's to be expected. My brother isn't trained to perform healing communions, so we've put in a request to have a specialist sent out to take care of it, to get gEl back in the air as soon as possible. The specialist should be here by this time tomorrow, at the latest. And, hopefully by then, we'll have a drone ready for gEl to help us study."
"You haven't captured one yet?" EUe asked.
"We would have," somebody said, "but then you failed to reply to your slabboard messages, and everyone panicked."
"We'll be setting off on our 'hunt' once we finish lunch," lU-twO said. "Will you be joining us?"
"No." EUe shook his head. "I'm going to take a nap in the nest you've kindly provided for me, and then it'll be back to work on the Impactor. I might just be tooting my own song, but I have a feeling that this Impactor likes me, or that it at least enjoys working with me. I'm worried that participating in a hunt to capture one of the drones might antagonize the Impactor or the others, and I don't want to risk that." Pausing, he then added, "On that note, uh… maybe uh, you guys might want to wait a bit before you head out to capture one of the drones?"
"Why?" one of the scientists asked.
"The drones and/or the Impactors might react badly to the abduction of one of their own," EUe replied.
"I appreciate your concern, Gatherer," lU-twO said, "but there's no need to worry. We'll be using strictly non-violent methods."
"Don't be kwekek," the other scientist replied.
Sighing in defeat, EUe walked off to enjoy his well-deserved nap.
The nest was smaller than what he was used to back at the GTS; just two floors tall, with a bathing area on the second floor. The egg-shaped wood and ceramic hut was simple, yet functional. It even had multiple options for accommodations: both a hammock and a perch. If anything, it brought back to mind his quarters in the gladiators' village, back when he was still competing as an arena fighter, struggling to find a reason to keep on living. To this day, he still wasn't sure he'd found one, though, he had to admit, working on this first contact project was the most fun he'd had in a long time. He just wished the people he cared for were still around for him to share his joy with them.
EUe set an alarm to wake him up after three hours. He awoke feeling refreshed, and relied on his dreamshard power to take care of the rest. Then he grabbed his slabboard and set off for the Impactor, back to the daily grind.
The next few hours' work was tedious, but rewarding. The old adage that progress bred complexity was on full display. If anything, things seemed to be going too well. Having introduced truth tables, if-then statements, inequalities, subtraction, multiplication, and Gods-knew what else, EUe was getting a sinking—yet thrilling!—feeling that he was beginning to fall behind. With every new concept, quantity, or operation he introduced, he had to come up with a symbol for it, and the end result was that the symbol pidgin he and the wall were using to communicate with one another was getting really impractical to use. It was taking him longer and longer to figure out how to express himself in the symbol-language and parse the vessel's replies. To make things worse, the wall never slowed down; it used the language with astonishing swiftness. If EUe had to guess, it might have even been getting annoyed with him, which had forced him to introduce a symbol to indicate when he was finished writing, to keep the Impactor from interrupting with a premature reply while he was still busy inscribing his message.
"I'm sorry buddy," EUe said, watching geometric figures snake in a circle around the ceiling—something the Impactor did when it was frustrated—"but I'm trying the best that I can."
But practicality wasn't the only problem. Logic and mathematics could only discuss a limited universe of concepts, and most tangible realities went far beyond those two languages' rigid vocabularies.
Bottom line: he needed to teach the Impactor how to speak.
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