Accidental Gods (18 page)

“You mean have it follow them around and record everything?”

“Precisely that.”

“You know, it never occurred to me. I designed the anchor stuff around planets. It’s worth a shot. If it doesn’t work, I can see if I can figure it out.”

“I’m going to need to spend a lot of time with this kid. I’m going to need a lot of your help, too.”

“I don’t know anything about languages.”

“Well, you’ll just need to build the software to decode it.” Mike winked.

Stephen rolled his eyes. “Yeah. That’ll be easy.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Let’s go find us a kid to teach us how to talk like an Alphan.”

Stephen laughed and hit the accelerator, and they blasted off the top of the pyramid back across the river and to the nicer part of the city fronting the river just south of the palace, upriver of all the commerce and less-attractive housing.

As they drew nearer, the homes revealed just how solidly and elaborately they were constructed. The walls were seamless and plastered a bright white. In places, closely seamed mud bricks could be seen, and the arched doorways were flanked by carved marble. Some of the windows even had rows of granite around them. The gateways and doorways were intricately carved out, and the doors, well, they were just as elaborate. The homes featured lush inner courtyards with gurgling fountains, clear pools, and trees bursting with ripe fruit. Only the palace, embraced by its great walls, stood further north.

“How do we do this?” Mike asked.

“No idea. We’re on virgin ground now.”

“Do we just walk into houses?”

“Sure. Let’s give it a shot.”

They glided up to the closest house. It was surrounded by an eight-foot-tall wall of large mud bricks. The bricks were large and solid and fit together with only hairline seams. The wall had a single rectangular wooden door with a wrought-brass handle. They effortlessly passed right through the door.

Mike shivered. “Don’t you find that disturbing?”

“Why?” Stephen said. “No different from virtually any other simulation or game.”

Mike squinted and blinked at Stephen. “You see this as a game?”

“No. But
technically
it’s the same. I mean, as long as collision detection—the techie term for walls and other things that actually stop you from passing through them—is turned off, you can pass through anything.”

Mike and Stephen were in a small interior courtyard paved with colorful tiles arranged in geometric patterns. A large cat, which looked a lot like a jaguar, lounged lazily under one of the two palm trees. Mike was surprised to see such a large domesticated cat.

Stephen walked toward the house and closer to the cat as a result, while still explaining, “Games often had bugs where, if just the wrong combination of events occurred, you could ‘fall through the world’—you know, sink below the horizon, able to look up and see the contours of the land but unable to move. It’s basically falling into a programming glitch’s ‘trap’ in the ground, or some kind of no-man’s-land.”

Mike looked around. “That’s what this feels like, except we can move.”

Stephen stopped and said, “I don’t think it’s the same thing at all.”

The cat looked around, seeming to sense the intrusion. Mike tensed for a split second, but Stephen seemed not to notice and started walking toward the house again, so Mike kept moving, too.

“I feel like a ghost,” Mike said. “We can walk around, through doors and walls. No one can see us, but we can see and hear them. You don’t think that’s weird?”

“Not really. I guess I’ve been around simulated worlds like this most of my life.”

Stephen seemed not to notice Mike’s taking a slightly wider arc around the cat.

Mike asked, “But don’t you think this is different?”

“How?”

“These people are alive.”

“Really?”

“You don’t think so?”

“To be honest, I really haven’t thought much about it.”

From the courtyard, they entered the house itself. Again, Mike shuddered when they went right through the door.

“They developed on their own,” he continued. “They have language and government. They reproduce. They appear to be self-aware. What more do you want?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Well, let me tell you something. I haven’t been with you guys that long, but I’m blown away by all this. Being a ghost in this world, it makes me wonder, is someone watching me right now? Someone I can’t see or hear or touch? Maybe they can see everything I do, effortlessly follow me around. The ultimate voyeur?”

The hair on Stephen’s neck stood on end, and he glanced around nervously, as if he expected a ghost to suddenly appear.

“I hadn’t really thought about it that way, either.” He wriggled his shoulders and neck to get the tiny hairs to lie back down. “That is unnerving. But why would someone watch
us
?”

“Same reasons we are watching these ‘people’ now? Maybe we’re an experiment. Curiosity? To learn our language? Or to see what we do with this new universe we’ve created.”

“OK. Now you’re just messing with me.”

“Maybe a little, but who knows? But to the point: is it not unreasonable to use this as a proxy for ourselves, even though we may not like it?”

While the outside of the house was the natural brown of sunbaked bricks, the inside was painted, mostly white. Its floors were covered with the same beautifully arranged tiles as the courtyard. Stephen and Mike wandered about the first floor of the house, which had two main rooms.

A sitting room was decorated with several chairs and a primitive sofa that looked reasonably comfortable, made from thatched reeds. A mural half a wall high, depicting a large boat with its sail raised, a setting sun, and the pyramids in the background, covered the east wall. Double doors on the western wall opened toward the river, where a single felucca, perhaps the one depicted in the mural, was tied up at a short pier. It looked like a small trail led from the house down to the pier.

The second room was a dining room with a large, low table and cushions on the floor for seating.

Stairs led to a second floor. It had two bedrooms. Both were empty, so after a quick look, Stephen and Mike went back downstairs.

One path outside the house led off to what appeared to be an outhouse. Another, a covered side path, connected a smaller hut.

Carved out of the bedrock just outside the main house was a small underground cellar, barely large enough for one person. It contained dried meat, fruits, and a large fish wrapped in leaves. Mike imagined the cellar had to be their version of a refrigerator, though food would spoil much faster in this heat since it didn’t look like they had ice.

They followed the path to the hut, which had an outdoor fire pit. Mike guessed the fire pit was probably where most of the cooking was done. The hut itself had a storage area and a bedroom with two small cots. A man and a woman napped in the bedroom, one on each cot.

“Must be the servants,” Mike whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Stephen shouted back and laughed. “It’s not like they can hear us.”

***

They spent the rest of the day looking through houses. The setting sun distracted them, or rather, the people’s increased activity at the approach of the setting sun did. Apparently, starting at about an hour before sunset, many of the upper-class families, at first only a few families but soon almost en masse, came out of their homes and, those who had piers and feluccas, strode down to their boats, unfurled the sails, and went for short felucca rides up and down the river. As the sun set behind the city, the feluccas painted the river in a pastel diorama of sails reminiscent of the tile patterns Stephen and Mike had seen in many of the houses.

Chapter 29

Week 6: Tuesday

I think; therefore I am.

—Descartes

SU-N11 Time: 486 PC [+13,508,915,704 Years]

They found her after lunch on the fifth day of searching houses.

Neither Mike nor Stephen had kids or even the prospect of kids, but they were both instantly enamored with this little girl. She was adorable. She made the rounds of this particular house’s sitting room, her mother sitting in a chair smiling and watching. The girl was a toddler, so her walking wasn’t perfect, but she did fairly well scooting about in the room. Each time she encountered an item small enough for her to grasp with her tiny hands, she would lift it proudly up and turn toward her mother, at which point her mother would patiently smile and say something. Then the little girl would laugh and bobble-scoot her way to find another tiny thing. Sometimes, she would pantomime something and the mother would chuckle and name things. The girl would then jump up and down in excitement.

This little girl’s learning game was exactly what Mike had been looking for.

A large cat, similar to the one they had seen earlier, wandered into the room. Its short, mostly black fur was smattered with yellowish dots. Mike and Stephen had seen only the one at the first house before, and this one was easily as large, the size of a fully grown German shepherd. They couldn’t believe a cat that large could be domesticated.

The little girl ran right to it.

“Muuuu muuuu,” she repeated and hugged the cat.

It stopped its languid walk and rubbed its nose against her ear.

It purred.

“That’s a big cat,” Mike said.

“That’s more like a jaguar or a lion than a cat. That thing should be in a zoo.”

“It seems friendly enough,” Mike shrugged. “It’s even purring. Why couldn’t our big cats be like that?”

“Maybe it’s not hungry right now.”

Mike laughed. “It looks as if they’ve domesticated big cats rather than dogs. Maybe it’s a plaything of the rich. Interesting.” He looked at the cat as if he were trying to figure out how to actually pet it. “Wouldn’t you love to have one of those?”

“No.”

Either the little girl or the cat, it was unclear which, guided the other to an empty corner of the room. The cat stretched and reached its front paws almost horizontally in front of it and then unsheathed its claws and dug into the wood of the floor, its rear up in the air, tail swishing. Then it yawned and plopped onto its side. The little girl seemed to suddenly realize she was worn out from running around the room and abruptly sat, leaning back against the cat’s stomach. They were both soon fast asleep.

Stephen and Mike watched for a few more minutes, fascinated.

Mike finally broke the silence. “Well, it looks like we’ve found what we’re looking for.”

“Right. Let’s start dropping the cameras,” Stephen said and started clicking the mouse. “We should be able to record about five of her years in about a week or two of real-time for us after we start recording. Given all the live feeds and that we haven’t done this much recording before, it’s hard to tell how much time will slow down.”

“Two weeks for us, ten years for her?” Mike said. “I’ll bet it’ll take a lot longer than that on our end. We’ll have to scan through months of footage really fast. It will be interesting to see how this works.”

They wandered the house, which had a layout almost identical to all the others they had seen, and dropped cameras in strategic locations.

“Can we put one on the felucca?”

“Yeah.”

It took almost two hours to get all the cameras in place and test them. By then, it was already clear that all the video feeds would have a dramatic impact on the progress of time in the SU, but that was something they had already accepted.

Chapter 30

Week 8: Monday

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

—Plato

Mike was very pleased. After only two weeks, they were making far greater progress translating than he had expected. Of course, it was consuming huge amounts of computer and human resources, but Thomas seemed fine with that.

The intensive analysis was working. The computer programs developed by Stephen and his team, with the help of real people pointing out matches and watching, had nearly cracked the language. Their huge database of morphemes continually added to a massive list of words that were now cross-linked by use together in phrases and also linked to video clips of them used in context. Small groups were now using those connections to identify additional words, probably less-core ones, since it had ground to such slow going.

However, though they could, in most cases, turn written word into spoken language and vice versa, they could not fully understand either. Translating the symbols—the written language had turned out to be syllabic with a few pictographs—had been dramatically aided with the application of lots of computer power. They now understood the sounds represented by the graphemes and how they assembled and were pronounced as words, though exactly what all the words meant remained to be seen.

Mostly, they had accomplished the connection between sounds and graphemes by watching scribes as they learned and seeing how the words were constructed. Scribes were usually trained in groups of two or three. An instructor would call out a syllable, and the scribes would make the symbol in wet mud with what might be called a writing instrument but was really just a sharp stick. Apparently, they trained this way to save the cost of papyrus and ink. It allowed the IACP team to quickly match the alphabet to spoken sounds and then to watch as words were assembled later in the scribes’ training. Fortunately, there were always groups of scribes at multiple levels of training, so the IACP team was able to do all of this in parallel.

This process had also helped them identify and translate certain words, but not many. Mostly, the team learned numbers since the scribes learned numbers similarly. Eventually, the team had realized that the scribes were counting. It was a little odd, although not entirely surprising, that they did not have a zero. “But,” Mike had added, “neither did the early Egyptians.”

No matter how powerful the computers or how smart the software, it did not seem like it was capable of decoding the language. The real progress in that area had come from studying the girl. Through her, they had figured out several hundred words in only two weeks, but knowing only a few hundred words of an entire language was like having only two or three rungs on a fifty-foot ladder.

The little girl was clearly a visual learner, which was exactly what they needed. They had figured out her name, Nefirti, based on the amount of times her mother used it and the fact that she usually turned and looked when it was called.

It was time to see what Nefirti would teach them today.

SU-N11 Time: 492 PC [+13,508,915,710 Years]

Mike and Stephen watched Nefirti and her mother sitting in the living room, their backs to the river. The girl was eight now and still curious about everything.

The initial rapid gain of word meanings had slowed, because there was less point-and-explain interaction now. They had to watch carefully and try to extrapolate the meanings of words based on context and fill in the blanks afterward.

The computer now attempted to translate everything that anyone said into the Alphan written language and, as much as it was able, translated that into English. An overlay covered the primary visual that made it like watching TV with two sets of subtitles. One set, the Alphan written language, was reasonably complete. The other, English, was a string of blanks pockmarked with a few words. Beneath the English words and blanks were tiny numbers that showed how frequently each word was used, even if—
especially
if, Mike had demanded—it was still merely a blank.

They had figured out the primary syntax patterns, again to Mike’s amazement, largely by using brute-force pattern-matching on the computer. Alphan had little inflection but didn’t depend strictly on word order, either. It was more a language of juxtaposed ideas, with few functional morphemes, like prepositions or articles, though even those did exist in certain situations. Mike guessed that perhaps two similar languages had merged with the birth of this city, one inflective and one not, and that they were still competing for prevalence long after the merger.

Even with their current level of understanding, strange gaps remained in conversations.

Nefirti suddenly jumped to her feet, and Mike perked up.

Nefirti spoke, and the subtitles instantly displayed a string of Alphan graphemes and, beneath that, the English “Let’s go, Mom.”

Mike knew the sentence was more literally “We go, Mother”—he had translated it word for word himself before seeing the subtitles—but he also knew that the computer, for English-speaking viewers’ benefit, changed that to “Let us go, Mother” and that to “Let’s go, Mom,” all instantaneously.

This merged Alphan language had not developed contractions yet, and in some cases, an Alphan word would have to be broken into multiple English words. Even in those cases, the computer failed to normalize many of the sentences and left them more composite than contraction. In short, some of the sentences sounded weird sometimes.

“Where?” Nefirti’s mother answered.

Nefirti spoke quickly, repeating the last syllable.

The English subtitles read, “Take the ____, ____ ___!”

“Pausing,” Stephen said and froze the image. “She said that last word twice.”

“It’s used pretty frequently.”

Stephen nodded. He had noticed it too and pulled up previous examples on the screen. They watched history in picture-in-picture.

Mike looked excited. “I bet it’s ‘please.’”

It’s strange,
Mike considered,
that after so long, there are seemingly simple words we still don’t know. I guess we just have to be lucky and catch them in the right context.

“Yeah. Seems like they use it when they want something.”

“OK. Enter it.”

“Code it ‘tentative’? A three out of five?”

“Four. I’m pretty certain it means ‘please,’ or their closest equivalent.”

Stephen typed away on the keyboard. “Done.”

The mother stood up and spoke, and the English read, “OK. Let’s go,” which Mike knew was actually more like “Yes, we go.”

Mike had decided to split the Alphan affirmative into both “yes” and “OK,” the choice of which was dependent upon the situation—mostly for the comfort of the viewers, even though “yes” and “OK” were the same Alphan word. He hoped to further differentiate it into “yeah” and other casual variations once he had a firmer grip on the language. He had been amazed, though, that like most cultures on Earth, nodding and bowing were linked to “yes.” He had told Stephen, “It adds credibility to the idea that ‘yes’ is linked to nursing: a vertical motion gets more milk; twisting the head side to side discards the teat.” At first, Stephen had squinted at Mike, but then Stephen had pursed his lips and nodded in both agreement and amazement. Mike had added, “It’s not at all universal, but the correlation with Alphans is incredible and could have important implications in linguistics here in our world.”

The mother whistled, and one of the servants entered the room.

He bowed.

“Prepare the _____,” she said, a hint of command clear in her voice.

He bowed again and left, walking toward the river.

The girl turned and watched him go. Stephen froze. It was like she was looking right at Stephen. She smiled with delight.

Stephen had already developed a strong connection to the little girl, watching her grow, her years passing in days. They had spent hundreds of hours with her. It was almost as if they lived with her.

Stephen knew deep down that she didn’t know he existed. But he thought of himself as her guardian angel and regarded her like a daughter. He had never had kids and didn’t really expect to, especially after that mess with Catherine. In fact, as he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. They were a hassle he didn’t need. But this was like all the karmic benefits and the connection without that. Nefirti’s smile melted his heart. He didn’t understand it, but he knew it must be what a parent felt.

The little girl bounded toward him, as if she would jump into his lap. It spooked and delighted him at the same time. The spookiness vanished almost instantly and left him with only delight, and he extended his arms as if to catch her. Mike noticed but said nothing.

She disappeared from the images, and the mother jogged toward them after her.

Stephen and Michael turned around. Nefirti, her mother, and their servant were now out on the dock, joined by the father. He must have circled around the house to meet them there.

The servant was preparing the boat. Apparently, they were going sailing.

“Just in time to go _____,” the father greeted them.

“Oh! That must be ‘sailing,’” Mike said. “Or at least ‘boating.’ We can draw the distinction later.”

“Got it,” Stephen stammered, as he was still recovering from the emotional earthquake.

They watched as the family got on the felucca and the servant raised the sail and gently guided them out on the river.

Across the river, the ever-present pyramids offered a silent vigil. Their early afternoon shadows extended almost completely across the river, like a hand with thick, pointed fingers reaching to grasp the city.

The sixth pyramid now stood as high as the shortest of the completed pyramids, but an army still worked furiously on it.