From:             paul underhill
To:               marie_evelyn@eng.cam.ac.uk
Subject:          Who are you?
Send reply to:    underhill@unios.un
Date sent:        Wed., 3 August -- 11:18:524
Status:           Confidential
Encrypt ion:       XLV-MorseBinary

My dear Marie,

I'm glad you finally cleared your mail, and was mazed at the speed of the reply! 
You must still exist p there in the real world. (everything is "up" - and we're situated at the 
very arsehole of the map.) If I were a better corespondent and had more time I would 
have written back at once, but, as usual, it's taken me a couple of months. I'm pleased 
that Charles is doing so well. Isn't he a little young to be crawling? I expect that soon he'll 
be poking his little fingers into light-sockets and rubbing peas into the carpet, if he's not 
doing such things already. 

Things are certainly hotting up down here in the land of the perpetually cold. I don't know 
what you've been hearing at home but there have been some of what are affectionately 
known as "interesting developments" around here. I've managed to wheedle security 
clearance for another summary report, which will give you some hints, and I'll try to fill in 
some of the gaps. You're the one who likes the stories and gossip.

The first big change since my last letter (I hauled it up on the screen a moment ago to 
check) is the business with Carol Staghunter. Do you remember her? Tall woman with 
silver braids, fiftyish. She was at the "Language Theory and Social Order" conference in 
Pittsburgh back in 20--. I can't remember what her paper was about (something hard with 
lots of graphs and numbers I'm sure.) Anyway... she heads one of the translation teams, 
and sits on the TCC (that's the Committee which co-ordinates the project. The Gods, as 
they're known hereabouts.) She had the bright idea of duplicating some of the output from 
the DT and projecting it holographically into the input space. (DT is for Damned Thing - 
our local acronym, leading to all sorts of jokes about I'm getting the DT's, said whilst 
shaking theatrically and downing a couple more vodkas.) I see that I'm really rambling - 
that's the strain, coupled with the long periods between writing (consider great guilt 
expressed.)  

Well, that's what she did. Came here with a shithouse full of machines that go ping and 
after a few days of buggering about they managed to align and project an entire output 
back into the input. Well, what happened then? Nothing, that's what. She tried a couple 
more, with the same result. DT just ignored her. Eventually (and I was looking over her 
shoulder, back-seat driving; we were the only two present; it was 02:00 GMT, and way 
past everybody's bedtime. I know how you always like to get the actual words of
conversations. I'll try to reconstruct this one, my personal moment of Glory, but I may no 
get it all right.) she typed in the words "Who are you?" and clicked on Translate and
Transmit. Two symbols hovered in the DT's maw, blue-green with a twinkle of orange,
then the output space lit up. We stared at each other and at it, and she started jumping up 
and down and chanting "Did it! Did it!" 

We weren't very sure what she'd done, but it was clear that she'd achieved something.
Made it talk without using the metal pricker, for starters. She clicked Capture to record the 
image and we went and stared at the output. It looked like all the others to me: heaps of 
little wigglers. She looked at them and decided that they looked different, but couldn't tell 
me why, except to point out a "grainy" quality. 


Truly, the speed of our mechanical genii is a wonder to behold.  I took over the computer
 interface. As soon as the image was scanned and saved on disk, we opened the tight-
beamed link to the CUNY Linguistics Department Mainframe, woke up AIN-SOPH-V, the 
first-phase translation software domain. AIN-SOPH's a smart program. Here's our 
conversation with her. 

Paul Underhill:Stop whining. Bye.

Well, there it is, a straight dump from the historic file! What had arrived 
in our printer was a schematic, almost readable version of the first of 
the output translations that I'm sending with this batch.  We stared at it 
in silence. We'd got through. The DT was talking! It has told us what it
was! Well, implied that it was some sort of supercomputer, cyborg or 
something. Math-man from the planet Algebra. The piece had the 
usual disembodied quality of the others. It seemed authentic. 
Sambodhi, the little Tibetan psycholinguistics boffin, came in. Carol 
looked at him and whooped. Never mind the security instructions she'd 
just given AIN-SOPH —she  gushed the whole thing out to the first 
person who turned up.

He got all excited when she showed him the output, and, and started 
shouting, and two guards came to see that everything was all right. Of 
course the whole thing must be on holo-file somewhere. I dread to think. 
He said "Show me, show me. Do it again. And we did. She typed in the 
question again, clicked Translate and Transmit. The input space lit up 
exactly like before. Then the output filled with lights. I looked at them. 
They had the same new "gritty" quality that Carol had pointed out. But 
the set looked different from the first one. We captured them and sent 
them to AIN-SOPH again. AIN- SOPH kept saying that she wanted to 
talk to us, and we just kept telling her to shut up and damned-well 
translate. She would have wanted to interrogate us endlessly about 
contexts for words, and we just didn't have time. We were reading the 
second translation in under 20 minutes. It was different, told another 
story from the first. I felt strange, confused. We took seven image-
dumps that night, all in response to the same keyed-in question. Then 
we went to bed.


By the time I woke up, the place was popping. Altmann himself had 
'coptered in, through a storm. They were making more dumps, and 
everywhere were outputs of translations in different stages of 
refinement. I got Sophie by phone and told her she MUST come...  Her 
voice was tired. She had known for hours. Yes, she would come, but 
only in ten days. In the meantime, she asked for a moratorium on any 
more stimulating of the object. Altmann agreed. Yet she still managed 
to get in all the pleasantries, ask how I'd been and so on. Ever the 
charmer. So she's coming here day after tomorrow. I'm excited. They 
keep moving more equipment into the dome. 


Sambodhi is under everyone's feet. He's an old pal of Altmann's, but 
since he's been here he seems to have done nothing but consume gin 
and spend time locked up with his rather jouncy "co-researcher".  He's 
a little bald guy who smiles a lot and pinches bums of either gender. He 
says that he knows Sophie "very well" but I can't recall his ever being 
mentioned by her. Please tell me something about him.

I'll have to be signing off now. Shit, look at that computerese! I promise 
I'll hand write the next epistle. Till then, be back into the input. Well, what 
happened then? Let me know if this is delayed more than ten days.

Much love

Paul