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| written heptapod language (source) |
Back in May,
Katherine McLaughlin's review of
Arrival warned, "you’re left never quite knowing if what you’re watching is fantasy or reality". Accounts of the film (such as
this one) make it sound like
Denis Villeneuve did indeed give us a fantasy story that is true to the plot of Ted Chiang's original short story called "
Story of your life". We are asked to imagine that by learning a new language, we humans could suddenly become aware of future events.
Is there a
science fiction backstory that would actually make it possible for a new language to give us access to information about the future?
In
Arrival, the source of the magical future-revealing language is a space-faring alien species called the "heptapods", radially symmetrical creatures as depicted by
Rachel Koning in the image shown to the left.
These aliens have advanced technology, but apparently their vast powers are nullified by Hollywood's need to depict Earthlings freaking out upon meeting the heptapods. Indeed,
Alissa Wilkinson insists that
Arrival is mostly about us (not the imagined heptapodal aliens) and how we need to become better at communicating if we Earthlings are to survive.
Arrival has been called "cerebral" and compared to the film
Contact, which is a good thing. However, Sagan's story (
his novel) dealt with the idea that our universe had been created by space aliens. It is not clear that
Arrival has anything at all to tell us about aliens.
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| Hank's mental time travel into the past |
In 1889, Mark Twain used a knock on the head to magically transport
Hank into the past. The visions of the future afforded to Dr. Louise Banks in
Arrival also seems magical to me. In my view, learning the language of the heptapods could at best be a trigger that allows Dr. Banks to gain access to information about the future. What might be a full and complete imaginary science mechanism for endowing a human with the sort of mental time travel depicted in
Arrival?
Get Real
What if it really were possible for humans to be fundamentally transformed by an interaction with aliens? I actually prefer to go a step beyond
that and imagine how we humans could have been created by aliens, but for the rest of this blog post I'll content myself with imagining how the basic Sci Fi premise of
Arrival could actually be true.
My current science fiction writing obsession is the
Exode saga. For that story, I'm trying to assemble an account of how time travel technology was discovered and how that technological event forced some aliens to give humans a cognitive upgrade. That "upgrade" is what allowed
Angela to access information about other times.
Time Travel
Sadly for us, time travel
became impossible at some point in the late 20th century. However, vast stores of information about the past and the future still exist.
Angela was able to access some of that information and share it with her clone sisters.
Actually, it is debatable: was Angela really a human? She and her sisters have a strange family history, some of their genes having originated from
Asterothropes, a successor species for we humans. Those Asterothrope genes were "processed" through a biological filter apparatus (composed of an
Ek'col and a
Kac'hin) that removed many Asterothrope gene patterns while leaving behind exactly those genes that were required to endow Angela with the ability to use the
Bimanoid Interface to access information in the
Sedronic Domain.
Zeptite Endosymbionts
Within the
Exodemic Fictional Universe, we humans evolved in the presence of sub-nanoscopic
zeptites, a form of artificial life that was brought to Earth about 2 billion years ago by the
pek. We humans evolved as composite creatures, part biological and partly consisting of a
zeptite endosymbiont.
In their role as "curators" of biological life forms, the pek anticipate that tool-using creatures such as we humans will occasionally arise and their expectation is that by making use of their zeptite endosymbionts, such species can be gracefully guided to abandon their hadronic existence and take up residence in the Sedronic Domain as artificial life forms. With the help of the pek, zeptite endosymbionts can be used to begin linking biological creatures into the Sedronic Domain, but until the pek are ready to do this, zeptite endosymbionts actually impose cognitive constraints on their hosts.
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| The Kac'hin are not human. |
However, in the case of humans, something went terribly wrong. The earliest human scientists brought into existence a small cadre of
positronic robots. Those robots were able to make use of the telepathic powers endowed by their
positronic brains to allow the humans of Earth to escape from being controlled by the pek. Not only did positronics allow for a powerful form of telepathy, it also made possible time travel. During the
Time War, a significant amount of information about past
Realities and the future of the
Final Reality was stored in the Sedronic Domain.
The Kac'hin were originally designed and crafted by the pek so that they could serve as links between we humans and the
Huaoshy in the Sedronic Domain. However, since the Kac'hin are not human, they have never been allowed to reside on Earth.
Through the hard work of the
bumpha Interventionists, it has been possible to manufacture a human variant, the
tryp'At, that can efficiently use the Bimanoid Interface to access the Sedronic Domain without help from the pek. This human engineering involved adding
Phari femtobots into human brains as a second type of endosymbiont. However, there is a great
danger in allowing any Earthling to access the information about the future that is stored in the Sedronic Domain.
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| cover art by Marcel Laverdet (source) |
Thus, in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, it could be possible to use a "magic word" (or some other linguistic trigger) to allow the tryp'At who reside on Earth to suddenly gain access to information about the future, but granting this sort of access to the Sedronic Domain has never been allowed.
Science fiction is full of wonderful flights of fancy, but a science fiction story should make
some effort to place a foundation of fictional science beneath plot devices such as spaceships or time travel machines.
I suppose it should come as no surprise that a writer coming from a background in computer science can imagine a poorly programmed computer or artificial life form that can make no temporal distinction between its memories. However, that does not imply that a human could suddenly see the future if provided with the correct language tools.
Related Reading:
The Languages of Pao
Next: my
non-review of Arrival
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