From: paul underhill
To: marie_evelyn@eng.cam.ac.uk
Subject: a dance with planets
Send reply to: underhill@unios.un
Date sent: Thu., 9 July 20-- 09:25:44
Status: Confidential
Encrypt ion: XLV-MorseBinary
My dear Marie,
First of all, let's take all the platitudes about how long it's been since we
communicated and so on as done. You must understand how busy the
project is keeping me. It's a black hole, really, which sucks up exactly as
much of one's time as it can get, 24 hours of a day if one lets it.
I know we both miss Sophie, though I've been lucky enough to have
been able to watch her from a distance (a quarter of the way round the
globe, peering, as it were, down the labyrinthine tunnels of intercontinental cable.)
Well, here's the summary report, (attached) the only one on which I can get
security clearance. I battled like mad to get it and I suspect that the
public dimension of Your past friendship with the now-famous Dr.. Sophia
Zaar is what did it. So there can be a positive outcome to scandal, after
all!
I know that you've been watching the news for anything about her, but
you really ought to ignore everything you see or read. They are so careful
to feed the media only misleading drivel. One thing that you will have
read, though without any detail beyond the usual speculation, is that
Sophie's made a "breakthrough" with the "mysterious output from the
Object." The ludicrous term "Zaarist" has also crept into the news. Even
here at Object Study Headquarters (that's the South Pole) I hear it used,
and you'll see it in the report. At first it irritated me· Then for a while I
chuckled and now I just ignore it. I do know that she would never want
to have her surname associated with any "ism", but there it is. She
objected to the coinage when she heard about it, and wrote in a memo
of "the irony of a linguist's name finding its way into the language"
Well - Sophie's breakthrough.... But you'll need some authentic
background before you'll be able to make head or tail of the thing, so
here goes:
First a few basic facts about the Object and its "output" - I don't like
"output": it prejudges the Object as some kind of computer but its the
official usage so I'll stick to it.)
The Object: The Damned Thing seems to have turned up about three and
a half years ago and was discovered by a Joint US - Norwegian Antarctic
Research Team. It is exactly at the south pole (a position which moves a
little, and the object completes in an 11.3 m orbit daily.) It's bloody cold
down here and conditions are difficult. Now it's housed in an enormous
dome, surrounded by all sorts of machines and dials and displays and
little flashing lights and things that go ping. The floor in the middle of
the dome is clear smooth ice like a circus ring, and the Object creeps
around the ice in a circle, without even leaving a mark. An international
team varying from thirty to a hundred or so hover around it and spend
most of their time having arguments. It changes its shape a lot.
Sometimes it's a pillar, sometimes a blob or a regular or irregular
polygon. Nobody knows how or why it does these things.
The Output: The thing has only two parts which haven't been
seen to change. Both are tetrahedral hollows, like the one
I've drawn. You've heard about them and they are what the
whole translation business revolves about. They've been
called the input space and the output space.
All sorts of people have studied and written things about the Object's
shape and form and the way it changes from time to time and so on, but
most of us think that the two hollows are the most interesting thing,
perhaps the only interesting thing, about it. You stick something (it must
be pointy and made of metal) into the input space and the output space
lights up with all these precisely arranged moving, three-dimensional
symbols, or thingies that look like symbols. What I mean by moving is
that, though each thingie stays put in its position in the tetrahedral grid,
they wiggle, a bit like paramecia or maybe little bugs.
There is room in the output space for about 17,000 wiggling bugs but
there are always a lot of unoccupied slots and it's never full. There've
been many thousands of different symbols recorded (I forget the exact
number). Some are quite common and others have been seen only once
or twice. After the pointy probe has started a display going, it stays put
for about half an hour and then abruptly disappears. We can't find any
energy source for the symbols - there's no laser beam or light wave-front
or whatever, as we might expect if they were holograms. The bloody
little things are either there or not. They emit only visible light between
blue and orange-red and they're completely insubstantial. I've passed my
hand through the display and felt nothing, disturbed nothing. Our
physicists are totally baffled and it was one of them, a chap called
Ibn'Attar, who started referring to the Object as the "Damned Thing,"
and that's what most of us call it now - or sometimes just the DT..
We capture the displays using an HP-5487 holoscanner, which has the
best resolution around. The images are tight-beamed to a geo-stationary
satellite and transmitted to various databases for study. Thus far we've
got hundreds of sets of wigglers on file, and get a new set whenever
someone pokes the probe into the input space.
So there you have it! Now we can get to Sophie's part in this. I don't
know how she came to be involved - probably because of her reputation
as a linguist, or maybe because she knows Altmann, the man the UN has
appointed to lead the investigation. Anyway, Altmann asked her to head
one of the "Translation Teams" as they so grandly refer to the boffins
who work on trying to make sense of the output. The team she heads is
the seventh of twelve, and it's located somewhere in Cape Town, South
Africa. She chose the site for its Southern location, its convenience and,
imagine, for its natural beauty. The place is a fairly sophisticated
metropolis, less primitively African than you might think, and has
wonderful scenery.
A bit about her team: there are three others: Paul September, a South
African object linguist, Andre Aujourdhui, the French Neo-
Deconstructuralist, and Desiree Arjuna, an Indian specialist in, of all things,
linguistic code-switching. As usual, Sophie has managed to surround herself
with an aura of gossip: there has been a lot of talk about Sophie and Paul,
Sophie and Desiree and so on, but I ignore the lot. Ms. Zaar can do what
she likes in her spare time. Hell - why do I even mention it? Maybe I DO
have a prurient interest in her affairs and "affairs". Anyway.... The team has
a budget for ten support programmers and administrators hut as far as I
know they only employ six computer folk. She has, of course, found a
place for Ralph as project secretary.
Sophie and Team Seven began, liked all the others, by staring at holo-
projections of output tetrahedra. I suppose they were asking themselves
"What the hell are these things, how are they organised, how can we
approach them?" and so on. They decided that the stuff was from an
intelligent source (Occam's Razor) and not random, not some natural
formation. At first they treated it like an unbelievably huge, difficult four-
dimensional crossword puzzle. I don't know how she arrived there, but
Sophie eventually came to the conclusion that the output samples
themselves were intelligent, and/or were designed specifically to
communicate with intelligence. She wrote in an early report:
"I dreamed that I stood at the centre of the tetrahedron, the place
equidistant from the four points, and was very aware in the dream of
this placement. All around me were the symbols, but now they were
also living creatures, and they were speaking to each other, and they
wanted me to speak with them. But I couldn't speak because I was
in a vacuum and no sound would come out of my mouth.
 | Now comes the part that's difficult to describe. Sophie hasn't offered any
explanation (although she's been requested, almost ordered, to give one) of
exactly why she did so, but she created, in computer space, a three-way
communication system between herself, a holo-model of several output set
and six networked XNN-340 Neural-net computers. Each symbol was
rendered as a seeded fractal. Well, that's one way of putting it. I know
you're not computer-minded so I won't go into any further detail. That
stuff's all in some of the technical appendices which I'll dig out for you if
you really want to see them. Anyway, she seems to have recreated her
dream in a computer environment. Using a human-interface suit, she
situated herself within the symbols and literally sang to them, or sang
them. They changed, and the neural-net computer learned the changes
and fed them back to her as sound and light, and she sang and talked
and danced until meaning emerged. It took something like two or three
hundred hours of immersion in the symbols over many sessions before
she felt sure that meaning was emerging. I've watched a recording of an
early session and it's, well... I've not seen anything like it. Sophie,
unrecognisable, suited and dripping with umbilical fibre-optic cables,
moves and dances among the much enlarged wiggling holographic
symbols. Her voice pounds and echoes, talks, sings, chants. The shapes
of light move around the clumsy interface suit. The last image was of her
emerging after what must have been three or four hours. When the
helmet comes off, her face is puffy and sweating, her eyes unfocused.
She smiles briefly.
|
Of course, the team's activity didn't all consist of taking swims in virtual
reality. Sophie and the others had to work like hell to come up with a
theoretical framework to contain it all. After five months, they released
their work to the other translation teams, and nearly a year into the
project they released the first "translations", of which there are twenty
samples attached to the report. The world is not all Sophie's, though she
has master-minded and directed it. Several of the teams have been
swayed to her way of thinking and have also used her methods. Some
also try to enter computer-space to fish for new meanings. Some work
on extending the lexical net and some have become "object
lexicographers." I ought to tell you that quite a sizable minority of
translators still reject her methods partially or totally. Cutler, the Harvard
man, is a leader of this faction. But, since none of them have been able
to come up with an alternative which offers to oracle the code, the
project's money (and there's a hell of a lot of it) is still on our Sophie.
It's unbearably cold here, as you can imagine, only two weeks away
from the southern midwinter. Brrrr. We keep warmish, but can't risk
getting too hot, for fear of melting the ice around the damned thing. It's
dark and awful, and the aurora, far from cheering me up, seems to cast a
glow straight from Hades. I incline more and more to the Norse idea that
hell is icy entropy and not fire. William Blake would support me on that,
I'm sure. Cambridge seems an eternity away. Our endless wranglings,
the swans on the Cam, bitter ale, lust and love... I miss you all, miss my
own past. Please give my warmest regards, no, my love to Alexis, and
hug Charles for me. And don't forget that this stuff is still confidential!!
I'II get my arse kicked if you so much as murmur anything of this to
anyone! Look after yourself. Spare a few thoughts on those endless
summer evenings for your night-bound and chilly friend
Attachments: Summary Report