Chapter Five:Invaders
Subject: Invaders
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 02/11/15 08:38
To: Randall Clay
Well, this was a very exciting say, to say a little about it. Before I forget, though: yes, the Shouters would make sure that their batteries made noise. Silence is the same thing as death to them, and something moving around or doing things without making noise would generally freak them out. When one of them, or for that matter anything in their entire ecosystem, wants to hide, they do it by camoflauge, sounding like something else.
It was the night of the lottery adn draft assigning the major Shouter Ur-Texts, and, for some reason, thewhole thing was being done on East Coast Time, so we were all of us in school way after hours, watching the action online, when the power went out.
This didn't keep us disconnected for any appreciable amount of time- most of us had laptops or other wireless device, and that connection was fine. It did, however, keep us mostly in the dark, but for the illuminated screens of those computers.
The lottery potion hapened soon enough. I got the number five pick, Travis the number 12, and Jack Snowden managed something in the middle of the 'second round' in picks fifty through one hundred. There was, according to the schedules, a thirty-minute break at that point before the draft commenced, during which some pre-draft dealing could theoretically have happened. I don't think we would have been interested in any such thing, but quickly enough the issue became moot.
Mrs. Lincoln had left to find a battery-powered light. We hadn't particularly noticed that she hadn't returned until, shortly after the lottery finished, we heard the loud sound of breaking glass, once, twice, three times, from somewhere down the hall.
I left John in charge of the class, and Travis, Frank Langer, Jess Leary, and I went out to see what was happening. Someone had akeychain with an LED flashlight in it, which we shone down the corridor.
"Mrs. Lincoln?" I called, to no response.
"The soundwas from down toward the auditorium, right?" asked Travis.
"Probably the fishbowl window" said Frank. The Fishbowl is the new computer lab, build just after you graduated. It's characterized by giant windows looking out on the hallway, which has another pair opposite, looking out on the campus ground. Or, more importantly, looking in- visitors to the school, students on a free period, and random passers-by seem to always be staring in, observing anyone unlucky enough to have to work there. Hence the name. Jess was already ahead of us, so the rest of us followed her dowqn to that lab. Our sweeping flashlight spotted the safety-glass pebbles on the ground, confirming our suspicions, and we quickend our pace, stil seeing no sign of Mrs. Lincoln.
We did see the source of the glass, three large bricks. The outer glass was shattered, the inner one had taken a hit and broken up between the films, but the films had held. It was at that time we heard signs of a scuffle, outside, on the grounds. Frank took out his phone and punched 911; a second later, Jess had looked up and dialed the campus security station, all while all four of us were in motion, twoard whatever was happening. I turned off the flashlight- the moon and lights on the emergency circuits were enough to see by and didn't advertize our position.
A few minutes later we could see them; about eight to ten men, dressed in red robes and hoods, covering their faces, dragging a bound and gagged Mrs. Lincoln along the ground, toward the tall tree, where they had already rigged up...something. Not a makeshift gallows, this was more complesx, with pulleys and a harness. They didn't get to do whatever they were planning on; it was about that time that the sirens became audible, signalling the imminent arrival of the police. The men scattered, dropping the ropes that entangled Mrs. Lincoln. Travis and I untied her while Frank adn Jess took as many pictures of the attackers as they could.
We spent the next two hours making statements for the police- Mrs. Lincoln was took shaken up to contribute anything, so we were all they had. We learned that these were, at least by uniform, members of God's Red Sword, a fairly new organization dedicated primarily to hatred of Arabs and Muslims (and not making any pariticular distinction between the two groups), and secondarily to a blief that the Message derived either directly from the mouth of Satan himself, or at least was an alien memetic virus that was turning the brains of our youth into alien pod people of some sort. They liked to cite the Whorfian Hypothesis that language shaspes the kind of thoughts a person can or will think.
Laughable, of course. Nobody's ever going to speak Shouter natively. No human, at least. We're not going to ever get to where we even have to worry about side effects of thinking in it; it's made for different sorts of brains. A different underlying Chomskian universal grammer, most likely. Translation will always be a high-level, front of the brain kind of process. To natively understand Shouter would involve simultaneously processing three different threads of conversation, taking place mostly in frequencies inaudible to human ears, and that's just the simpler parts.
Anyhow, John ran Travis' and my picks by proxy. We'd talked about what our preferences were enough beforehand that he could accurately make the picks. I got a really old one, one of the early- we're guessing, here, from the sonar/video portion of some presentations, but it's probably some kind of heroic god-king epic, along the lines of King ARthus or Gilgamesh. Travis got something more recent, an extremely influential story based on a large-scale war. And John got, well, we're a lot less sure what that one is about, but he thinkgs it's a murder mystery. We'll all be busy with them for a good long time, even without people with nothing better to do but try and dangle our teachers upside down from trees.
Your Brother
Douglas
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 02/11/15 08:38
To: Randall Clay
Well, this was a very exciting say, to say a little about it. Before I forget, though: yes, the Shouters would make sure that their batteries made noise. Silence is the same thing as death to them, and something moving around or doing things without making noise would generally freak them out. When one of them, or for that matter anything in their entire ecosystem, wants to hide, they do it by camoflauge, sounding like something else.
It was the night of the lottery adn draft assigning the major Shouter Ur-Texts, and, for some reason, thewhole thing was being done on East Coast Time, so we were all of us in school way after hours, watching the action online, when the power went out.
This didn't keep us disconnected for any appreciable amount of time- most of us had laptops or other wireless device, and that connection was fine. It did, however, keep us mostly in the dark, but for the illuminated screens of those computers.
The lottery potion hapened soon enough. I got the number five pick, Travis the number 12, and Jack Snowden managed something in the middle of the 'second round' in picks fifty through one hundred. There was, according to the schedules, a thirty-minute break at that point before the draft commenced, during which some pre-draft dealing could theoretically have happened. I don't think we would have been interested in any such thing, but quickly enough the issue became moot.
Mrs. Lincoln had left to find a battery-powered light. We hadn't particularly noticed that she hadn't returned until, shortly after the lottery finished, we heard the loud sound of breaking glass, once, twice, three times, from somewhere down the hall.
I left John in charge of the class, and Travis, Frank Langer, Jess Leary, and I went out to see what was happening. Someone had akeychain with an LED flashlight in it, which we shone down the corridor.
"Mrs. Lincoln?" I called, to no response.
"The soundwas from down toward the auditorium, right?" asked Travis.
"Probably the fishbowl window" said Frank. The Fishbowl is the new computer lab, build just after you graduated. It's characterized by giant windows looking out on the hallway, which has another pair opposite, looking out on the campus ground. Or, more importantly, looking in- visitors to the school, students on a free period, and random passers-by seem to always be staring in, observing anyone unlucky enough to have to work there. Hence the name. Jess was already ahead of us, so the rest of us followed her dowqn to that lab. Our sweeping flashlight spotted the safety-glass pebbles on the ground, confirming our suspicions, and we quickend our pace, stil seeing no sign of Mrs. Lincoln.
We did see the source of the glass, three large bricks. The outer glass was shattered, the inner one had taken a hit and broken up between the films, but the films had held. It was at that time we heard signs of a scuffle, outside, on the grounds. Frank took out his phone and punched 911; a second later, Jess had looked up and dialed the campus security station, all while all four of us were in motion, twoard whatever was happening. I turned off the flashlight- the moon and lights on the emergency circuits were enough to see by and didn't advertize our position.
A few minutes later we could see them; about eight to ten men, dressed in red robes and hoods, covering their faces, dragging a bound and gagged Mrs. Lincoln along the ground, toward the tall tree, where they had already rigged up...something. Not a makeshift gallows, this was more complesx, with pulleys and a harness. They didn't get to do whatever they were planning on; it was about that time that the sirens became audible, signalling the imminent arrival of the police. The men scattered, dropping the ropes that entangled Mrs. Lincoln. Travis and I untied her while Frank adn Jess took as many pictures of the attackers as they could.
We spent the next two hours making statements for the police- Mrs. Lincoln was took shaken up to contribute anything, so we were all they had. We learned that these were, at least by uniform, members of God's Red Sword, a fairly new organization dedicated primarily to hatred of Arabs and Muslims (and not making any pariticular distinction between the two groups), and secondarily to a blief that the Message derived either directly from the mouth of Satan himself, or at least was an alien memetic virus that was turning the brains of our youth into alien pod people of some sort. They liked to cite the Whorfian Hypothesis that language shaspes the kind of thoughts a person can or will think.
Laughable, of course. Nobody's ever going to speak Shouter natively. No human, at least. We're not going to ever get to where we even have to worry about side effects of thinking in it; it's made for different sorts of brains. A different underlying Chomskian universal grammer, most likely. Translation will always be a high-level, front of the brain kind of process. To natively understand Shouter would involve simultaneously processing three different threads of conversation, taking place mostly in frequencies inaudible to human ears, and that's just the simpler parts.
Anyhow, John ran Travis' and my picks by proxy. We'd talked about what our preferences were enough beforehand that he could accurately make the picks. I got a really old one, one of the early- we're guessing, here, from the sonar/video portion of some presentations, but it's probably some kind of heroic god-king epic, along the lines of King ARthus or Gilgamesh. Travis got something more recent, an extremely influential story based on a large-scale war. And John got, well, we're a lot less sure what that one is about, but he thinkgs it's a murder mystery. We'll all be busy with them for a good long time, even without people with nothing better to do but try and dangle our teachers upside down from trees.
Your Brother
Douglas
posted by Jeff R. at 9:49 AM
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