Gift of the Future

alien clam shell in Hollywood
WHY ARE THEY HERE?

Yes, I'm fascinated by stories about time travel, so I saw Arrival. Sadly, this film is not about time travel.

I'm also fascinated by stories about alien life forms. Sadly, although Arrival presents an interesting depiction of an imagined alien form of life, the film is not about space aliens.

Heptapods
In Arrival, the alien heptapods apparently come from a world where the atmosphere is much denser than that of Earth. We learn almost nothing else about the aliens, in particular, nothing about their advanced technology. We don't even know if the 12 big black boxes clam shells are spacecraft; they just magically appear on Earth and later magically disappear.

Why they are here

Abbott and Costello routine:
Once they get their soldiers inside,
you're a dead heptapod.

The heptapods are here on Earth to make a movie. Their purpose as characters in Arrival is to remind us that in Hollywood it is almost impossible to tell a story about meeting aliens without playing the military card, having at least one explosion and pretending that the arrival of space aliens might herald the end of the world.

The heptapods seem very careful to not harm anyone on Earth until one strange scene (never explained), briefly on the screen in Arrival, in which one of the 12 alien spacecraft black schoolhouses settles down on some power lines, starting a mad scramble for safety by a crowd of hapless humans.

Extraordinary rendition: the focus group
decided that Arrival was too boring
unless someone in the Middle East got electrocuted.

Of course, by the end of the flick, peace is restored and the world has been saved. Whew!

Language

written heptapod language (source)

Arrival is a fairy tale about how we Earthlings all need to communicate better and get along with each other. Towards that end, the heptapods set up 12 floating one-room schoolhouses on Earth and wait for their star pupil (Louise) to show up.

spectral analysis of what might be an alien spoken language

Sadly for the token physicist in the story (Jeremy Renner), he never gets to learn anything cool about the advanced alien technology such as how the heptapods can control gravity.

Renner does not have much to do in this flick. He gets to name the two aliens in Arrival "Abbot" and "Costello" and he provides one magic sperm cell to Louise. The alien schoolhouses are language schools, not schools of physics or technical colleges for teaching primitive apes about advanced technology.

Alien schoolhouse: a tough nut to
crack for our star pupil,
the linguist Louise

The heptapods seem to have a spoken language, but they teach Louise a written "universal" language that has circular sentences.

Along the way, during the months required for Louise to learn the alien language, as a distraction from the boring language lessons, and because this is Hollywood, we get tanks rolling across the wheat fields of Montana, nut job internet fear mongering and a squozen-in domestic terrorism bombing.

This is Hollywood,
someone break out the
automatic weapons!

But then, after the union-required effort to build suspense, not only is the world saved by the end of the movie, but the nations of the world have come together for some sort of unification party. Kumbaya.

Nanotechnology

nanotechnology?

The aliens squirt what looks like ink out of their feet. The 'ink" magically forms into circular sentences. At one point in the film, after she has started having "visions" of the future, Louise seems to be able to take control of the "writing" process. What's going on?

Louise (Amy Adams) interacting with the black "ink". I want to believe that these are clouds of nanites.

The obligatory explosion

What if the heptapods are artificial life forms that are part biological (poor 'Abbott' proves the mortality of the heptapods) and part composed of nanites?

Technology-assisted telepathy

futile attempt to teach
English to the heptapods

We never actually see the heptapods speaking their presumed whale-like "spoke language" (do they even have mouths?). What if they usually make use of a form of technology-assisted telepathy? If so, then (and only when dealing with primitive creatures such as humans?) maybe they can use telepathically guided clouds of nanites when they need to "print out" messages in their universal written language.

decoding the "universal"
language of the heptapods

During the film, we are told that Louise learns the heptapod-created  universal language, but she learns amazingly little about the heptapods. For one brief time in the movie, we see linguistic reality: when Louise and the heptapods are sharing actions and concepts and words such as "walking". However, the heptapods never seem to put much effort into the process of teaching their language to Louise. Maybe it is some kind of intelligence test, the heptapods may wonder: is there an ape on this planet smart enough to learn our language, to receive our gift? Or, since they can see the future, they already know.

vision of the future: the
unborn daughter of Louise

Suddenly, in the middle of all the hard work required to learn the new language, Louise has a vision of a book that she will write (in the future) about the universal language and she then magically knows the language.

What if the heptapods have access to advanced technology that allows them to know about events in the future? (ya, I'm not buying the silly idea that by learning the "right" language you can magically view the future.) They state that humans will be useful to the heptapods 3,000 years in the future, so (because 'cause' and 'effect' are meaningless technicalities in Hollywood) they must give a "gift" to the people of Earth here in the 21st century.

The heptapods finally provide an info dump

After learning the heptapod language, does Louise suddenly have a new cognitive ability: the ability to "see the future"? It is far easier for me to imagine that with their advanced nanotechnology, the heptapods can provide Louise with implanted "false memories".

Imagine that those false memories are experienced by Louise as visions of the future, a future that the heptapods have already viewed by using their advanced technology for  viewing future times. At the start of Arrival, Louise, narrating for her future daughter, tells us that she has had to re-conceptualize how memories "work".

Time Loop

fake covers

"We claim the South China Sea
and no aliens are allowed!"

In Arrival, here's how the world is saved from fear-mongering and military finger-on-the-trigger twitchiness. 18 months after the Chinese almost go to war with the benevolent heptapods, the war-mongering Chineese general whispers to Louise the magic words that will stop the war. The Louise of that future time does not know what the general is talking about. But the Louise of 18 months previously gets the message from the general of the future and relays it to the general of the past and so Louise prevents the war. Hurray!

The first rule of Hollywood: never
pass up a chance to start a fictional war.

Eh? Well, nothing need make sense in Hollywood. We reached the 2 hour point of the film, so we needed to wrap things up quickly. Just turn up the volume of the violins and roll the credits.

This could all possibly make sense if it was the heptapods who learned the general's magic words in the future. Just before the war was to start, they could have used their nanotechnology to make Louise speak the magic words to the general, preventing the war. Or something.

the needed sequel

Contact (1997 film)
I was encouraged to go to the theater and watch Arrival after seeing some reviewers favorably compare the two movies. Unfortunately, Carl Sagan and Robert Zemeckis set the bar quite high in Contact. Ted Chiang and Denis Villeneuve don't measure up.

Ever since Herbert Wells made the first famous alien invasion story, writers have milked the analogy between alien invaders and human invaders. Hollywood really can't seem to escape from that myth.

Martian: War of the Worlds

The fundamental fact is, if space aliens ever visit Earth, they are likely to be far more technologically advanced than we Earthlings. A Wells-type alien invasion is very unlikely. Carl Sagan managed to keep Hollywood's adaptation of his story about First Contact from going down the conventional alien invasion plot hole. The folks who made Arrival could not resist the temptation to make human fear of alien invasion central to the film.

War of the Worlds

The alien heptapods seem complicit in fulfilling Hollywood's need for explosions, death and mindless conflict arising from fear. Supposedly they can foresee the future, but they let everything play out according to the Hollywood script. In fact, it goes deeper than that: the meek and mild heptapods seem to have gone to a great deal of trouble to provoke a human fear response. In Hollywood, there must be a crisis that the hero can suddenly diffuse in some miraculous way at the last possible moment. Yawn.

The Horror

Language 101

I have not read 'Story of Your Life', the short story by Ted Chiang that inspired Arrival. Arrival was written by Eric Heisserer who put in all of the Hollywood-flavored nonsense about the Chinese planning an unprovoked attack on the peaceful heptapods. As a science fiction fan, I wish Arrival could have been spared the riots, saber rattling and explosion and instead viewers could have learned more about the heptapods, their advanced technology, and their alien physiology.

“This isn’t sexy, do we need this?"
I must ask: in creating Arrival, why select a screen writer (Heisserer) who has previously worked on a series of horror flicks? In "How I Wrote Arrival (and What I Learned Doing It)", Heisserer writes, "science fiction was my first literary love" and as he tells the story of his own life, it was a fluke that the folks in Hollywood tracked him into writing mostly for horror movies. How very sad.

Hollywood 101

In my view, science fiction is a literature of ideas. It is unfortunate that in Hollywood there is a bias against thoughtful exposition and a bias towards mindless acts of violence. I guess we should be pleased that Arrival turned out as good as it did after passing through the Hollywood sausage grinder.

Given the alien forces at work in Hollywood, we can be thankful that Arrival only has one explosion and only one shootout. We also bump up against the Hollywood maximum limit for rational exposition about the heptapods, but then, Arrival is not about the heptapods. For science fiction fans looking for an interesting story about aliens, we mostly come up ◯.

Should we be thankful for this Arrival?

2023 update. Here is a sonnet that was composed by Bard...

Stardust & Spoilers (Sonnet of an Alien Cinephile)

With eyes like quasar cores, she pierced the black, A chrome-skinned traveler on a starlight whim, To Earth he'd journey, by cosmic whispers backed, Drawn by the flicker of a celluloid hymn.

In velvet halls, where heroes rise and fall, She found a solace alien eyes could claim, In whispered epics, tragedies enthrall, And laughter's echo, fanning joy aflame.

alien by WOMBO Dream

 She'd gasp at cliffhangers, stars in nebulae, Her tendrils twitching, secrets yet to bloom, "xD," she'd whisper, when twists set plots awry, Her chrome cheeks dimpling, escaping temporal doom.

But oh, the spoilers! Cosmic gossip's sting, A plot unraveled, futures laid bare, She'd wince and sigh, beneath the Milky Way's ring, "Such human drama, spoilery to despair!"

Yet still she wanders, seeking silver gleams, A lonely stargazer in a world of dreams.

 I changed the alien to a "she" to match the AI-generated image. I asked Mr. Wombo to make an image depicting Bard's imagined movie-loving alien with eyes like quasars and chrome skin.

Related reading: the Search for Interesting Hollywood Aliens

Next: the sentient spaceship Many Sails

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Sci Fi Event Horizon

Here in 2016, I have been celebrating several science fiction milestones. Recently I celebrated the 75th anniversary of Isaac Asimov's robot story, 'Reason'. Shown in the image to the right on this page, I am working on a new blog post called 'Scientific Romance' that is a subjective and very personal look back at the first 150 years of the Wells Era.

Retrofuturism
I've also recently blogged about 1) the fact that we are now at a point in time 200 years after the publication of Frankenstein and 2) 100 years into the Vance Era and 3) we are now also 50 years into the Star Trek Era. With all this gazing into the past, I want to explicitly explore the idea that science fiction stories are ephemeral products of their time and they all come with an expiration date.
 
Language Barriers

'Runaround' (first published in 1942)

One problem (that is not unique to science fiction) is the transient nature of languages. Each generation of readers falls in love with the literary works that are written in their time. Then, slowly, times change, language itself changes and eventually new generations of readers can no longer understand those wonderful old stories that were written in earlier times.

Science fiction often has additional related problems. Some science fiction stories are set in a future time. Then, when readers of an old story find themselves living in those future times, they can feel disappointment that the imagined future of the old story failed to align with reality.

That's no moon!

Historical Example. Many early science fiction stories failed to "write into the future" the ubiquitous radio communications technology that we now take for granted here in the 21st century. Asimov's robot stories from the 1940s provide a case in point. In 'Runaround', the story takes place in about the year 2015, but in Asimov's imagined future, radio communication techniques have hardly advanced beyond the state of the art in 1940.

source

Right at the start of 'Runaround', Asimov sets the scene by explicitly commenting on how rapidly robot technology is developing in the early 21st century. However, only 12 hours into their mission on Mercury, robot trouble-shooters Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan are confronted with a problem arising from a glitchy robot, a new model of robot that they brought with them from Earth and who was sent out on the surface of the planet to get a desperately needed bucket full of selenium. This task should have been easy for the robot, a device that was designed to survive the super hot conditions of Mercury where there are pools of pure liquid selenium.

source

However, after the robot reached the nearest selenium pool (17 miles away), it began endlessly circling the pool. The base of operations on Mercury and this robot (called 'Speedy', serial number SPD-13) rely on antiquated equipment that does not allow for radio communications with robots who have gone more than two miles into the "sunside" of the planet.

source

For readers here in 2016, Asimov's story quickly gets itself into trouble from a technical perspective. Around 1965, astronomers realized that Mercury does not have a "sunside" that is gravitationally locked so as to always face the sun. Personally, I find this fact about Mercury's orbital dynamics to be an annoying feature of our Solar System, similar in nature to the terrible idea that there is an upper limit to the speed of travel through the universe. For the purposes of science fiction story telling, I prefer an imaginary Solar System in which Mercury does have a "sunside" and I prefer a fictional universe in which it is possible to both travel and send communications signals through the universe at faster-than-light speeds.

The Future!

In 'Runaround', Asimov imagined that the antiquated radio equipment available to Donovan and Powell does function in a low-bandwidth mode that allows them to track the positions of robots like Speedy who are sent out to complete tasks on the sunside. However, verbal communications are not possible with poor Speedy, so Donovan and Powell can only watch helplessly while Speedy marches in an endless loop around the selenium pool. Sadly, they had brought to Mercury new "ultrawave" equipment that would improve communications with robots working on the sunside, but they will need a few weeks to set up that new ultrawave equipment.

For younger readers here in the 21st century, Asimov's story and these technical constraints might be nearly incomprehensible and unbelievable. They are likely to ask: you went all the way to Mercury, but you could not bring along the kilo of selenium that you would need for the photo-cell banks? It will take you weeks to install and start using the new ultrawave equipment? And, of course, Asimov imagined humanoid robots who would speak English. He did not imagine a future like our 2016 with the type of non-speaking, non-humanoid radio-controlled robots that are actually out there exploring the Solar System.

source

Out of Touch
Not only are Donovan and Powell severely limited in their ability to communicate with Speedy, but they are depicted as being cut off from communicating with Earth. This kind of communications deficiency for spacemen was also part of Asimov's story 'Reason'. While on their mission at a solar power station in space, Donovan and Powell never send or receive radio messages from Earth or spacecraft.

Lucky for me, none of the many "flaws" in Asimov's robot stories ruin them for me. 'Runabout' is a "hard science fiction" romp, a kind of thought experiment for exploring the potential implications of the Laws of Robotics. Asimov's language from the 1940s still feels alive and it is not cluttered with too many dead and dying words.

L-Tube

cover art by Chris Moore?

In Asimov's youth, electronic devices were powered by vacuum tubes. When he wrote 'Reason', he imagined that a solar power station would be built around an L-tube. It does not matter what an L-tube is, but readers who were born in the transistor age might not have the same appreciation for 'Reason' as someone who has actually worked with glowing vacuum tubes. Still, all of science fiction from the late 1920s on is still accessible to me as a reader in 2016. I worry that some aspects of Asimov's old stories are gradually becoming incomprehensible to younger science fiction fans.

cover art by Robert Schulz

Proto-Science Fiction
For me, proto-science fiction (such as the 'Scientific Romance' stories of H. G. Wells) is slipping away beyond the science fiction event horizon. Wells was writing for an audience that could be amazed by scientific advances and new technologies, but that was just an industrial age extension of the same sense of wonder that had for centuries before been stimulated by magic and pre-science-age fantasy.

When H. G. Wells wrote about a time machine, he made absolutely no effort to explain how it worked or how one man, working alone, built it in his back room. There was no science behind the time travel in The Time Machine.

cover art by Stephen Youll

In my view, it is not useful to view old stories such as Frankenstein or The Time Machine as science fiction because they were not written for a scientifically literate audience. I suppose reader interests change through the centuries, but it is almost impossible for me to imagine the reader of 200 years ago; someone who could be content to plow through a 3,500 word account of Victor Frankenstein's uneventful trip across Europe. Of course, I grew up reading Doc Smith's stories about travel to the stars and I'm thankful that styles in story writing have changed: Smith could move readers between galaxies in just a few short paragraphs.

Les Robots

Flowery stories written in the English language of 200 years ago have become almost unreadable for me. In Frankenstein, among the hundreds of exclamation marks and 19 cries of "alas" I suppose we can be thankful that Mary Shelley used moderation and only 13 of these are cries of "Alas!" Stories by H. G. Wells are in a gray zone where it is clear that he was writing for a different kind of audience than what Asimov had in mind. And Asimov was actually trained as a scientist, which is a huge plus for a science nerd like me.

H. G. Wells in an alternate Reality

I'll continue my look back at the stories of H. G. Wells in my next blog post. Fair Warning: I view Wells as more of a political fiction writer than a science fiction writer. I don't think it is sensible to look back at an old story like The Time Machine and say, "Golly, Gee! A time machine! This must be science fiction!" However, I do think that Wells was an important influence on both of my favorite science fiction writers; Asimov and Jack Vance. And I can't resist having fun by imagining what might have been, in some alternate Reality, where Wells actually did write science fiction stories.

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The Languages of Exode

In his novel The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance described the transformation of the people living on the planet Pao by a kind of social engineering project that involved introducing new languages.

When I was first discovering Isaac Asimov I read The Feeling of Power, a story that was written just when the existence of electronic computing devices were starting to have wide impacts of human society. Asimov had fun with the idea that people might stop doing calculations themselves and become totally dependent on calculating devices.

In the same Asimov short story collection where I read The Feeling of Power there was a story called Profession. In this story Asimov created a depiction of the future in which "learning machines" would transfer knowledge and skills directly into human brains. The main character in the story cannot be "programmed" in this way and he feels like a freak and a failure. However, at the end of the story he discovers that he is one of a special minority of humans who, rather than be programmed by machine, can exercise his capacity for original thought and become one of the precious few humans who will discover and create new things.

human genetic engineering

During the past century science fiction authors have had great fun speculating about how human existence might be altered by changes in how we use language. Many science fiction authors are not content to limit their efforts to stories about humans. In the novel Assignment Nor'Dyren, Sydney Van Scyoc imagined an alien species that wanted to change its culture and so modified its language in an attempt to change how people would behave.

I've previously mentioned that while the Buld (a people similar to we Earthlings, but slightly altered genetically) use spoken language like we do, in general they do not make use of a written language.

I enjoy science fiction stories that tackle the issue of how humanity might change following a self-imposed "design change". Sydney Van Scyoc and M. A. Foster are examples of authors who took on the challenge of trying to imagine how we might shape ourselves through genetic engineering.  In Exode, the Prelands are human, but they have been significantly modified through a long process of artificial selection and they no longer use spoken language in the way that we view as characteristic of humans.

The rest of this blog post elaborates on the languages in Exode, a story set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe. Exode is under construction and collaborating authors are welcome.

Exode
Like other stories set in the Exodemic Fictional Universe, Exode is a story in which we humans are relatively late arrivals upon the stage. About a billion years ago on a planet in a distant galaxy the Huaoshy developed a technologically advanced civilization. Unlike other technology-wielding species, the Huaoshy managed to survive and spread, first between the stars of their home galaxy then outward to thousands of other galaxies. Long ago the Huaoshy transformed themselves into a form of artificial life that is as different from our human form as we humans are from a bacterium.

language lateralization

The spreading Huaoshy influence reached our galaxy about seven million years ago. That influence arrived in the form of the pek; artificial lifeforms that are less radically transformed than the Huaoshy themselves; we might comfortably think of the pek as robots. In the way that we humans might send a robotic submarine to explore the floor of the ocean, the Huaoshy deploy the pek as the means by which the Huaoshy explore and consolidate control over distant galaxies. Soon after reaching Earth, the pek took some great apes off of Earth and "cultured" them on distant planets.

One of the long-debated issues in human evolution is how early the capacity for spoken language arose in the great ape lineage leading to humans. The first human-like apes that used a spoken language lived on a distant planet near the galactic core; such Earth-derived creatures are called Genesauts and in Exode, the most prevalent Genesaunts are known as Prelands. With the help of the pek, some of those language-using apes became the first Interventionists and Overseers. Gradually, almost imperceptively, gene flow began from the Genesaunts back to the planet Earth and in time our human ancestors on Earth attained the ability to use human language. In essence, the human species is an artificial construct arising from the process by which the pek "domesticated" primates on distant planets.

What I've said above about the origin of human language should not be taken to mean that we humans came to use language as the Huaoshy do. The Huaoshy long ago abandoned their biological form and they make use of much more advanced modes of information exchange than any human language. Human language, as we know it, is an extension of naturally-evolved primate abilities, but it is viewed as a hopelessly inefficient means of communication by the pek. The Huaoshy find it very difficult to even pay attention to primitive creatures like we humans and our quaint vocalizations. The Huaoshy rely on the pek to function as an essentially automated system by which primitive creatures like we humans can be transformed into more advance forms of life with communications abilities that are more like those used by the Huaoshy.

The Exode story is set in our time, but the Prelands, subjected to extensive genetic engineering by the pek, have almost completely abandoned the use of spoken language. However, some of the Prelands have been relatively slow in abandoning spoken language; the Preland population of the planet Hemmal provide a good example of this. The pek make use of worlds like Hemmal as training grounds for Interventionists: those Genesaunts who are sent to Earth with the intention that they can gradually shape Earthlings into a biological form that will eventually merge successfully into a galaxy-wide Genesaunt Culture.

Most Genesaunts live in cultures where the people lack the ability to pass their language along to their descendants. With rare exceptions, Genesaunts have been genetically altered so as to be hermaphroditic. There are no males or females in the conventional sense and all individuals produce two kinds of gametes and have a uterus. Genesaunts have been engineered so as to give birth when the embryo is very small, like marsupials do. In general, Genesaunts never become aware that they are pregnant. When a pregnant genesaunt comes to term, a pek will manage the birth while the mother sleeps and take the newborn Genesaunt to a pek-managed facility where the children are raised by pek. The pek who function as surrogate parents are in complete control over which languages are learned by young Genesaunts. Upon passing through adolescence the young Genesaunts gradually merge into mainstream adult Genesaunt Culture. Since the pek adopt the conventional Preland body form, most Prelands do not make a significant distinction between the period of their pre-adult years under the guidance of the pek and their adult years.

Prelands

For Prelands, language learning is a very different matter than for we Earthlings. Juvenile Prelands have some capacity for speech, but most adults are nearly mute. There is no physical impediment to speech, but Preland culture usually imposes no opportunity or benefit for Prelands to speak. Prelands communicate efficiently by what they think of as telepathy. Large regions of a Preland's brain can "resonate" to match the activity of a fellow Preland's brain. In practice, this allows Preland members of a cultural group to essentially share conscious states. This neural resonance is made possible by the fact that Preland brains are host to swarms of nanoscopic devices (nanites) that can communicate using hierion technology. Prelands take for granted the existence of their pek servants and they never give a thought to the nanite technology that has been provided to them by the pek.

Prelands have some distinctive physical features. For example, in Prelands the typical human adult teeth never develop; Preland adults retain the "baby teeth" and have small mouths and a child-like jaw morphology.

Juvenile Prelands are spoken to by their pek caregivers, and Preland adults retain a fairly sophisticated ability to process and understand spoken language, however, they have essentially no capacity to read, write or communicate their own ideas using spoken words.

As mentioned above, the pek control which languages are heard by juvenile Prelands. In general, each planet with a Preland population uses one language that is spoken on Earth. For example, American English is spoken on the planet Hemmal. This choice of language is made systematically so as to assure that every human language spoken on Earth is used on at least one Preland world. Earthly languages that are spoken by large numbers of Earthlings are used on multiple Preland worlds, essentially assuring that every major dialect is familiar to a population of Prelands. What is of more importance to most Prelands is that these populations of Prelands are also made familiar with aspects of the Earthly cultures that share their language. This process of familiarization generally begins with pek caretakers of the juvenile Prelands telling their wards stories and heroic epics that reflect actual Earth history.

This extensive passing of Earthly culture to worlds of the galactic core is made possible by the fact that Earth is under constant Observation. The pek are automatically kept informed about events on Earth.

Buld Clan
While Preland brain structure has been significantly altered so as to facilitate nanite-mediated communication, the Bulds are only slightly modified from the form of contemporary humans on Earth. Bulds retain the normal human ability to read and write, although most Buld cultures do not make routine use of these skills. Bulds have a limited amount of capacity for nanite-mediated synchronization of brain activity, with most of the neural synchronization that does occur between the Buld taking place outside of their conscious awareness.

The image to the right shows the major regions of the Buld brain where there are high levels of nanites (yellow, Buld normal, top). The "patient" (bottom) is a "false" Buld who has reverted to the Earth human brain pattern. The Buld populations of worlds like Hemmal are like the Prelands: unaware of the existence of nanites. A subgroup of the Bulds are the "scholars" who are at least aware of the biological difference between typical "true" Buld and the "false" Buld. The major engineered genetic differences between the Buld and Earth humans are all determined by a synthetic chromosome that is unique to the Buld. In each generation, a few "false" Buld lose the extra chromosome and revert to the normal human chromosome set and brain structure.

The "true" Buld can only read with difficulty since they usually suffer from a form of nanite-induced dyslexia. The "false" Buld have no problem reading, but they are often culturally isolated from the small Buld subpopulation that makes use of written language. In general, the Buld "scholars" on worlds like Hemmal try to quickly identify newborn "false" Buld, make sure that they learn to read and write and recruit them into the ranks of the scholarly class.

The Buld Clan originated long ago as those human Genesaunts who were provided with spaceships (generation ships that can travel between stars at nearly the speed of light) by the pek. Many Buld now live on planets such as Hemmal. The on-planet Buld scholars originated many thousands of years ago as part of a Buld effort to understand the origins of humans.

For the story Exode, a particularly important cultural group of Genesaunts are the Interventionists. Interventionists are a Buld Clan subgroup that is not allowed to exist on planets with a Preland population. In general, Prelands reside on worlds that have been more-or-less successfully terraformed over the course of the past seven million years. Interventionists usually make do with less hospitable planets and planetoids. For example, Oib is a large asteroid orbiting about 100 million kilometers from the orbit of Hemmal. There is an Interventionist base inside Oib and this is where Parthney goes to be trained for his mission to Earth.

The interventionists have learned to isolate themselves from the pek. This allows some "true" Buld to live at places like Oib without having their brains colonized by swarms of nanites, thus preventing the nanite-induced dyslexia that inflicts the Buld who live among the pek. However, "true" Buld are dependent on pek for successful reproduction. This makes it a continual struggle for the Interventionists to maintain a stable population: they must continually recruit new members from the mainstream ranks of the Buld. Highly prized among the Interventionists are the "false" Buld who are essentially Earth-normal humans. The pek are careful to make sure that the "false" Buld never have a chance to become to numerous.

So, these are the conditions under which Parthney and Kach grow up on Hemmal as two false Buld. At an early age Kach is recruited by Buld "scholars" and she becomes committed to learning about the Prelands of Hemmal. Kach learns to read and write both English and the "old language" of the Buld Clan.

Growing up on Hemmal, Parthney resists being recruited by the Buld "scholars" and so he reaches adulthood without becoming a skilled user of written language. He can speak and understand English but he never becomes very good at using written English. When he decides to pass the story of his life on to his grandchildren, he leaves them a spoken account of his life. The recording device that Parthney uses is a hierion-based device that functions by means of the type of "telepathic" brain resonance that is used by Genesaunts. This communications method is not a very efficient way to share Parthney's story with the people of Earth. When Parthney's grandson Izhiun decides to leave a copy Parthney's story on Earth, he wants to find a way to make sure that the story can be easily accessed by Earthlings.

As mentioned previously, when Izhiun is on Earth he finds Hana's long-lost husband who is a writer. Izhiun leaves a version of Parthney's story with Hana's husband. Hana's husband translates Parthney's story into written form.

Cables the man

by John Schmidt and Multi Babel

(told by alien who has lived here a lot a much time)

They can call me cables the man.

And a lot was that, so that I could make that in order to wait for that. You have been firm and you have observed a clock for a day completely? It is good as that a lot of my years on the Moon was.

It transmits, however, the beginning approximately 6,000 years that the Earthlings have controlled a technological outbreak and have produced the artificial duration. So I have continued to wait for. And ago an attempt. And the majority that time, that it thinks their four is, from which the small stupid adventures of the entire group are filled up with those that tried Intervention, a length of which on the Earth to send along. In particular I have carried out a great role in the Greek flask.

It wonder to me during this determined time. Long history short circuits: we here. The human Earth, at last is returned to a virtual world; I can appreciate the digital spirit without the video, a possibility has existed to come from the other origin to me and I sit down so so so much here, download in Earth's waxes as a combatant of the Internet, to survive to in this digital jungle, originally. It does not include, if you believe my history, because my history can be localized like vociferations of spirit-sick luminous pointer. Tasked naturally me, here I spirit-sick, since I have lived here a lot a much time.

As that hour was determined years, since has arrived on the Earth. I was at the beginning instance like the digital spirit in a university's great computer. I searches and I does not demand in order to say nothing of some detail, because this nodal point of the computer is still in service, like gate, so that the spirit reaches Earth's Internet from the base of the Observer on the Moon.

The majority of people, that they demand that, indicates that they are not situated over the Observatories, so it wonders to me: specify one of the human Observers that be announced on the Earth. In the first instance, you left it like saying to me: not excuses for! because I do not put the Observatories outside. In the first instance, before they left to leave the Base of the Observers on the moon, all were contained in my memory, the identities of the Observatories of the Earth. In the second instance of the job, if the Observatories of Earth were discovered, it would be impossible to indicate that they are of the Moon. Since I have cited the first instance, single part the normal type of human beings leave Earth, go down, in order to go here and to appear like Observatories of the Earth. And one only affords to the Observatories of the grounds to use the technology that can exceed like the technology of the Earth.

I know that the Observatories of Earth have channels with the Base of the Observers on the Moon, but details of the type, in which contained my era and the job of my spirit...if really you knew the method. I would have to cite that except the Observatories, there are also Controllers. They are not many Controllers, but they are like police presence, return it good, who the Observatories follow the Rules of the Observation. In particular they control if, all the same ones that go from the base of the Observer on the Moon to crush, can be still persecuted to its origin.

It is equally the case, that the Observatories based on Earth, slowly they are eliminated. Since the Earth-human technology becomes more complex, is more and more possible that the Observatories use the automated techniques of the acquisition of data. My history is good. If you to this point can dig determined initiative in the country of contact that supports test of my history sufficient in order to hunt a good job to you of excavation and you can a card exclude the function of this Victoria of the cliff. You, that it supplies the analytical clues, ungrateful of the country over this option, is my job in the duration.

Ventilated for the music of the argument to "you are received; Left in the river of Quai" in his title and you say "of English uproars; Manmahtiti Bebobinmahtiti" they are following the end to say my name. They understand equally, because people call cables to me the man.

I must be ill delay of the alcohol, the end to say my biographies in the public of the tribune, but of the volume of I he taste of the challenge. Hatred the fact the fact that the majority of people does not create to me therefore, if says my history to her, opens to its small and loans of the human alcohol the attention.

A good place, so that it begins, is with that "life" intersections for me, the section the real life of those and the new substance, also Here, of that leaves the version to the work: Now they are a digital alcohol, but my interior of the alcohol comes a distant world from the biological module, where the inhabitants are not straight they like being human. They die and they obtain themselves here here, but probably embankment to him that I only interested for him equally, of that I did in the track… and of that you scare to me, I nevertheless I who I have become could. Despite leave to bother to me with some facts to the station of the work of, this I comes. Where they are developed me, it is the thing, that is simple to travel between the asterisks. They could say that they are inoperative to wish the end to visualize a another world. Naturally they had called it "transmigration" , it was the extremity of my physical body and only thinks always to the face of that extremity about my length. It naturally had my length after the inoperative women.

The biological organizations do not adapt for the flight of the station of the work of the well-being, therefore, than my alcohol in the transference of Klenanennieieie (insane person, only has a word for this here. Klenanennieieie is a type of server for brings back to consciousness of the group.) When I left my Klenanennieieie, I that I keep released, function excluded here in the system of the asterisk of the solenoids and in the part from later in a body he was. He especially had loathing of demanded the course of an original one of the world, but of the era of I sufficiently of my new agency. I consider that you called the country a similar agency the robot, but had some biological members. In way can you follow the alcohol of the impact? It was inside, this that you would call a body of foreign, my alcohol I that I incorporated a generator of the virtual truth (Klenanennieieie) for the along loaded course here, therefore my alcohol presents me in a local body of server.

What was next of I, since you are, the car to "equally introduced and the return of the hour to the chronometer; enjoy" Habilis of the culture of the transferences. It transmits to me arrived in this system from the asterisk 17,000 years. Now of the country you are ingenuous for you, but in another one piece biologicals that worked the canceled track to him of the track and for the one hundred of million years. It has plus the broken limitations derived from the length and the artificial length of the track, of that in the track.

I can think all you they country of ignoramuses, the end to want the knowledge, "How can the east be?" The observatories of the foreigner had observed the track here during the time very very… in billion years. It always had a party of the foreign country, of what satisfactory to the right that is being observatories. And the process of the commentary is manufacture understood in the slow possible order of the empty excluded from the modules of the function of the life of each person of the kingdoms of the length of the planet like the track. The truth will be happiness, the observatories is interests generally very, with these cultures more excluded the track from the function, when to play those that are the track with the commentary it continues.

The skeletal agreement is that one has the human being the important disturbance of the track and is disputing when considering the human being of the activity because is difficult, indifferent, the end to receive that one with the really complete work the end to observe the track. Nevertheless it is the one that I register soon after the fact which I meant that he would come to this system of the asterisk. I have the connection the majority 17,000 years slipped that the lives inferiors, of which they are worrisome of the commentary of the track. And an interesting stay had that will be observed, a little while, when the human project in an age of the cultural experience and the technological development.

The some observatories dozen To the maximum diminished receipts typically, the function now excluded in the track during a year and to the end from the reached one, where it almost has a course to break. It does trust me. The wave of the objections of the UFO of the foreign country during the 50 past years is only ideal. In case of mine 17,000 years of hard work that a planet is of the card it came downwards. The series is I processed the drinks, the end to reach, where it is today. I say "fit of down" in the action; specific due to the rule of the observer who you reach, in the order a planet like the track the end to only visualize, if you cannot be remarkable of a natural one. When in sequence trying on the satisfaction of this rule inside it fits added-self in the action, my alcohol in server similar of the robot of the human introduction of the beings body/of. Equally this taking of the form activated in the base of the moon of the commentary the end to live. The base of the moon was my phase of the test and the base that conclude outside with thousands the years of the commentary of the track of the extremity. The majority of people to the base of the observer is to be of the human being and to also assume that it was of I a robot, of which never freaked still in the mine other is east origin… is.

THE END

Translator's note: see a newly translated version.