Chapter 3
Spaceports were the same across the civilised galaxy. Shiny surfaces, a tendency to suspend art from the ceilings and extremely low expectations about productivity. Arianne was sitting at a cold table, surrounded by uncomfortable seats full of half-asleep people waiting for their flight. Some were obviously seasoned veterans of spaceports and had were encased in self-sealing suit tents like softly glowing cocoons. She was preparing herself for travel, stilling her mind, trying to enter a state of meditation that she had been taught to cope with inter-stellar travel as part of her Masters course. However, a large screen was blaring with news and interviews. The usual stuff: changes in the REF market; funding feuds; some researchers were trying to drum up support for a war against the Bloggeration, because a Bloggeration group had answered all the research questions of a very expensive, decade-long grant in two days, and released it all to the public.
Arianne looked up through the gorilla glass ceiling high above. Dozens of spaceships were weaving past each other, all at odd angles. Strange, thought Arianne, how one could get used to marvels of space travel. However, she suddenly recognised one of the ships. There was no mistaking the private space yacht of probably the most famous linguist in the galaxy, Vastion La Quana. Arianne had always thought it looked like an open-toed sandal. What was he doing here?
As if the news screen could read her mind (Arianne was pretty sure it couldn’t), the scene cut to a live interview with La Quana on one of the system networks. Despite all the times she had heard his voice talk about her own subject, and read his papers on a dozen topics in linguistics, and despite his slightly creepy drawling voice, she couldn’t help listening.
“The study of language” La Quana extolled to the interviewer “is really the study of what makes us human. Language is how we organise society, drive our galactic economy and it’s the thing that defines us as a species. But explaining how we got language may also be the hardest problem in science. Any child can learn to use any one of tens of thousands of languages, practically without any guidance –“
“Except Space Finnish” cut in the interviewer.
“Yes, except Space Finnish - and yet language scientists have struggled for centuries to understand even how simple sentences are understood. How did we end up with this system that has almost infinite expressive power, yet can fit inside something slightly smaller than a basketball? We can’t go back in time to see how it all started, and we can’t compare ourselves to other species, because none of them have anything like what we have.”
Holt stepped between her and the screen.
“Sorry for interrupting,” he said, “but it’s time to go”.
“Don’t be sorry - ” said Arianne, “La Quana was about to do a rhetorical backflip and explain all the amazing progress he’s made on an impossible problem.”
“La Quana? The Marmite sandwich guy?” Holt turned to look at the screen “I’ve heard he’s quite good at getting funding.”
“He’s the best -” said Arianne, standing up and instinctively looking for a bag that wasn’t there “a major Gravitation grant in every funding round since SPIN 1.”
“The grants where they use Gravity Manipulators to create your own planet for research?”
“Yep, he’s got his own solar system by now.”
Arianne decided not to bore or amuse Holt with the dream of her own research planet.
She and Holt walked towards the terminal gates. They passed a line of young adults coming the other way. They were staring at everything except each other, so Arianne pegged them for new students. Had she really looked that undirected and clueless just eight years ago? Wait, not eight years ago, but eight-plus-153-years ago - fashion could not have diverged so much within a decade. Some were wearing pale tight-fitting trousers and white or checked shirts with collars that had been stiffened to first rise to the chin, then dive out to the shoulders. Most were wearing an outer layer of fabric that wrapped around their back and sides, but left a centre strip of shirt exposed. “Jackets”, Arianne thought they were called. Others were wearing neon colours covered by layers of gauze with some kind of knotted plant fibre wrapped around their necks or loosely draped over shoulders. All around her, people were speaking to each other through fabric and folds, and she was unable to understand any of it.
Arianne was reminded of the styles from the early 21st Century that you could see in films. ‘Films’! The word itself was borrowed from that era. When Arianne was young she would have said ‘licks’ or ‘buzz-throughs’. Strange how things come back around. The whole scene would have been very convenient for a lazy 21st Century Science Fiction writer, thought Arianne - full of mutated familiarities disguised with made-up words. Then she and Holt traxelled into the cobodrefib via a tessblanacular.
“So, Holt - what have I missed since I was out? Do we have usable net-connected e-brains yet?”
“Nope, advertising is still too strong. There are always whispers that the Bloggeration have some resistant tech, but we’ve never seen any evidence.”
“Ah, pity. At least we still have something to lure in first year students.”
It was one of the first examples of a complex cultural system that students were given. The technology to interface thoughts and computers was well established, and the utility of being able to communicate with the net directly through your brain was enormous. The problem was that every e-brain application ever launched eventually succame to advertising. It would start with small displays superimposed over shops in your visual field - initially mostly useful stuff like prices and special deals. But this was soon followed by attention-grabbing images, sounds and smells, which were pretty annoying but ignorable. Even the first few subliminal messages might be tolerated. However, eventually the really heavy stuff would start - endorphin reinforcement for purchases, artificial anxiety that you didn’t have new shoes, altered perception, manipulated memories, choreographed dreams. Eventually, you would not be able to tell your own beliefs and desires from those implanted by force or suggestion through advertising. In the end the tech would become so overrun by marketing, the ability to access information at will at lightning speed became irrelevant. You’d have to dump the tech.
Most people had a basic perceptual link between their brain and a basic hand-held terminal, but most things still had to be input into your brain manually. There was always some e-brain technology on the rise, promising that, this time, there’d be no ad-crash. There were fringe groups. But the story was eventually always the same. It wasn’t as if there were evil people out there aiming for this, it just happened gradually as if the advertising industry was a living organism with its own evolution. In fact, it was almost never possible to take a technology or a new fashion or musical style and predict what would happen to it once you threw it into a living, evolving culture. Bad news for civilisation, but a nice classroom example for people studying cultural evolution.
In the departure hall, Holt swivelled so hard Arianne almost bumped into him.
“Doctor, here is your ticket. When you get to the hub, go through immigration control and I’ll meet you on the other side.”
He transferred a travel doc to her terminal.
“You’re not coming with me?” she said.
“Wish I could, but I’ve got a mill jumper taking me out. I’ve got a few things to sort out first - I’ll catch up with you”
“Oh. How long is the trip?”
“A few decades.”
“Hmm. Well, what’s a few decades when I’ve got three digits on the clock?”
Holt smiled and nodded at the ticket.
“It’ll fly by.”
Arianne’s ticket was business class.
She. Could. Not. Believe. This.
A mix of joy and embarrassment washed over her. Under Holt’s watchful eye, Arianne approached the service desk and was ushered to the priority lane. A young couple were too excited to notice her (newl
yweds?) but an elderly man in a bowler hat scowled as she passed. Holding up the front of the queue, a dejected looking lady was trying to restrain a young puppy from running off.
“Where are you flying?”
Asked a real-life service clerk. Arianne glanced over to the opposite lane where a robotic arm was trying to wrench a man’s carry-on bag into the checked-luggage bin.
“Er, CAFCA central hub”
Arianne brandished her terminal showing the ticket.
“Thank you, straight through the door, please”.
Arianne stepped towards the door which slid open. Through the doorway she could see a large reception area. She stepped across the threshold …
… and was on the central hub.
Even expecting the seamless transition, it was still a shock. She glanced behind her, half expecting to see the Io space port, but of course it was light years away. The view through the first door had been just a projection. As soon as she had crossed the threshold, her implant had recorded her pose and rendered her unconscious for the chryo-droids to scoop up. She had then been whisked unawares through space and re-animated in the same pose at a replica door on the hub.
All she saw behind her was the disembarking tunnel with figures shuffling towards her. A middle-aged couple were nagging each other with bitter faces. And old lady was dragging a battered old hound. Behind them, a group of crew were clumsily unloading a coffin with a bowler hat balanced on top.
Damn, thought Arianne. Business class was GOOD.