always something better

Friday, 24 March

Language takes work.

The appearance of language is easy enough. You spent graduate school making the circulatory systems of separate phyla play nice in the same body, and earned tenure on the strength of your work on convincing animal cells to take their nutrients from hyphae; reshaping larynxes and giving merpeople articulated hands, even toying with neurons and FOXP2 variants, are child's play. And, after all, what jabberjays or even Owls of Athena do is only so removed from the abilities of certain unmodified animals: mimicry and pattern recognition. The creatures are impressive enough in their way, to be sure, and downright stunning to an audience already eager to believe—but they lack recursion, productivity, sophistication.

Those are the challenges. Sign and speech are only tools; language is an intricate system, arbitrary and ordered, finicky and expansive, pulling countless bits of brain and body together for one purpose. Overdo it and you get a human with interestingly shaped limbs—difficult to distinguish from, if infinitely more elegant than, results any plastic surgeon worth their license could recreate. Underdo it and you get an expensive parrot. You're sure there must be a balance between the two, but it's eluded you for six years now. It's onerous. It's infuriating. It keeps you up metaphorically banging your head on papers from fields you never expected to need to care about.

It's one of the most exciting projects you've ever put your mind to, and you're about to miss a crucial stage.

"The things I do for my country," you sigh to Titanium—to yourself, really; they won't hear you, let alone understand you, through the glass. Then you shake off the moment of moroseness, return their wave, and sign, "How is Titanium?"

"Happy," Titanium answers—moving from the elbow, faintly clumsy with her words in the way the young always are, but clear enough. It's their standard answer, and one of the reasons they're your favorite right now; they're a cheerful little creature, forever eager to play, and that makes them easy to work with. "How is Verena?"

You think briefly through her vocabulary, then try, "Verena is happy because Titanium is happy."

Whether they'll ever learn to parse more than one clause at once remains to be seen but doesn't, in this instance, particularly matter. They pick up the bit that's important to them—happy—and wriggle in place. "Verena play?"

"I only have a few minutes." They tilt their head uncomprehendingly, so you amend, "No play."

Their fins droop against their hips. You smile softly and press a hand to the glass; reassured at least enough for the fins to perk back up, they touch the other side of the glass, then pull their hand back to ask, "Fish?" You laugh out loud to that; they can't hear it, but at the sight of you tossing your head back they wave their tail, encouraged. "Verena fish? Titanium fish?"

"Fish later."

"Fish now?"

"Impertinent thing," you murmur to yourself out loud, still laughing. To Titanium, exaggerating the size of each sign for emphasis, you repeat, "Fish later."

"Fish now please?"

"If you're asking that nicely," you tell them, "I suppose we can manage something." Which you're well aware is beyond them, but they certainly understand when you step to the side and crack open the cooler for a sprat. Your underhand toss overshoots, but Titanium seems if anything even more delighted by the chase, rising to meet their prize with a series of casually joyful flips.

Distracted by the promise of a snack, Titanium doesn't notice the door opening behind you, but you hear it and lift your un-fish-oiled hand for a backwards wave. Aemiliana announces herself with, "You know you're spoiling their dinner and leaving the rest of us to deal with it."

"They did say please."

It's mostly facetious—similar as they look from the outside, it's less likely that any of your creatures understands an abstract concept about social graces than that they've memorized a handshape that gets them extra snacks—but your assistant manager chuckles as she steps up next to you and waves to an ecstatic Titanium. ("Aemiliana!" they say one-handed. "Aemiliana hello! See!" And they wave the fish gleefully.) "You softy. One last visit, then?"

("Say thank you," she adds to Titanium as she speaks. They let go of the sprat long enough to parrot, "thank you," then catch it again and tear in with their sharp teeth, sending a cloud of red across their face.)

"Something like that." You shake your head. "I knew when I'd need to leave, but it's still disappointing. I wanted to see more from them, first."

At twenty-three months, Titanium's generation of Ichthyos sapiens candidates are a touch smaller than, but otherwise roughly in line with the development of, a human the same age. You'd hoped to see their capabilities blossom before you had to leave, the simple sentences they've been learning to string together expanding in complexity and variety; now, if that happens at all in the coming months, you'll have to find out secondhand. Your staff are intelligent and capable people who will hold the lab together just fine in your absence, and you'll be in daily contact with Aemiliana, who manages the language trials anyway—but this project is yours. Fueled by your thought experiments, founded on your early trials, years now of work that wouldn't exist without you. Success or setback, you should be here.

"So did I," Aemiliana admits. You both watch Titanium gnaw on the unfinished half of the sprat for a moment. "Have you thought about whether to keep this bunch if they don't come through?"

You wave a hand. "Oh, we'll cull and autopsy the yearly set, but they're doing so much better than the last ones that I expect the rest will be more useful alive. I'm curious whether they'll pass what they've learned to the next generation, for one thing." Not their offspring—even hybridized primate work is too slow; you'd die before you got results if you waited for every generation to sexually mature before you got a new one started—but the next genetic drafts in your files waiting to be refined based on this group's results and implanted into frozen eggs. "And they'll be necessary as controls when we start teaching the no-input group." Having human subjects as well would be even better, but keeping them under the radar would heap extra work onto your loaded enough plate. Fortunately, you're not the first person to ever think of studying children raised in isolation; you can manage nearly as well with historical literature, and that's frankly less exhausting than keeping another ethics review board out of your hair.

Thinking of future stages brightens your mood considerably. In a year your sabbatical will be up and you'll be back in your own office, hashing out a syllabus for the summer term; in two, no matter what happens with Titanium's group, you'll be hatching a new generation and preparing to test what four years without input does to the twin specimens' ability to learn to sign. The project won't finish without you, and the contributions only you can make—you will never be more than a dabbler in linguistics, but nevertheless are and in her own estimation always will be rather stronger in that field than Aemiliana is in yours—will wait for your return.

"That's true," Aemiliana says. "And it's not like we don't have the resources to keep them."

As if to prove her point, Cobalt appears at the junction between indoor tank and outdoor pool. Titanium, having finished their fish and grown increasingly bored watching you and Aemiliana talk, darts to this new source of entertainment, and the two squabble good-naturedly over possession of the chunk of coral Cobalt hauled in for some reason. It was expensive to set up, and it's as artificial as an Arena, but the outdoor pool is a better setup than even the muttation zoo can boast: large enough to keep the specimens comfortable, climate-controlled, stocked with environmental enrichment, and nestled safely three stories below the less ambitious projects you maintain half for fun and half to give everyone on the outside something to see. You're the childless inheritor of a wealthy line, with forty years of investment behind you. You have the resources for near about anything you like.

The coral was a frivolous touch; there's so little of it out in the actual oceans, anymore, even after rewilding efforts. But you're fond of the stuff.

"We'll miss you here, you know," Aemiliana adds at length. "It's been bizarre enough having you in and out."

"So I've been told," you say, laughing but genuinely gratified. "You all know how to make a lady feel needed."

"You are! I'm excited for you, don't get me wrong. Thrilled to see what you and Ms. Rao do. But don't be surprised if you come back to a welcome party."

"Thank you, Aemiliana. I'm sure I'll be itching to get my hands dirty again by then." You give the fish oil on your fingertips an overstated glance. "Maybe."

She laughs. "Please. They'll keep you so busy, you'll get back here and put your old bones down for a month-long nap."

"Oh, just for that, no hints," you say to another laugh—she knows you too well to think you would ever feed anyone classified information. "Really, Aemiliana, thank you. I would have had to turn this down if I didn't trust you running the lab, and that would have been a shame."

You might be needed here, but Panem needs you elsewhere—needs you and Nilima both, now more than it did when you were first summoned back to the offices you last left twenty years ago. Barely older than your students, with the energy to match and then some, Nilima has drive and vision; you've seen enough of her art to recognize both new ideas and, far rarer, the requisite boldness to bring them to life. She was a step forward for shaping the Games; now, through them, she's shaping the image of a Panem no longer under Snow. And you, old guard Gamemaker with two respectable Victors to your name, are the anchor to legitimacy—a reassuring track record to return to after these past months' chaos, a reminder that while this may never again be Snow's Panem, it will always be Panem.

The whole thing—the two of you, the transfer of authority over the last month, all of it—has been so clean it almost makes you wonder what the High Council isn't telling the rest of you about the circumstances leading up to Snow's death. But you're not in this to be party to political squabbling; you're in it to do your part to show the Districts that the Capitol, despite everything, holds them as firmly in control as you'll hold the handful of children representing them.

And, if you can be selfish for a moment, you're in it for the science. For all your sincere grumbling—about timing, and interruptions, and what a pain it's been to set up a secure line with Aemiliana—you have to say you're looking forward to a new chance to look at the impossible and say, yes, I can make that happen.



title is from Dead Astronauts by Jeff VanderMeer. ([T]he good of the whole must outweigh the individual, as the Company voice decreed[...] Why fix the thing in place, in its former place, like a butterfly on a killing board? Pretty, but there was always something better it could be.)

I dug through my cognitive linguistics notes for this because I'm a nerd, but what I am not is an acquisitionist or an animal communication researcher! or a geneticist, or even someone who spends much time around two-year-olds. the science here is mostly bullshitting.