In my first week, I managed to learn six power morphemes.
The process was extremely challenging. Olivia compared the initial experience to learning a guitar: you need to build up calluses on your fingers and they will bleed until you do, and you need to learn how to stretch your fingers in unpleasant ways until they’re used to their positioning on the strings. To learn how to pronounce power morphemes, you put your vocal cords through similar rigor. Of course, calluses on your vocal cords were the opposite of healthy, so the metaphor only worked to a certain extent.
Olivia had a hypothesis that, over time, using power morphemes might actually introduce mutations to the vocal cords. She speculated that perhaps vocalizing certain frequencies at certain volumes over certain periods of time could trigger an unexpected response from the body: perhaps introducing plasticity that wasn’t there to begin with, stretching vocal folds to allow access to pitches that were previously out of reach; perhaps flooding muscle tissue with unexpected growth-stimulating hormones to allow more fine-grained breath control; perhaps even inserting actual slivers of cognition into the otherwise autonomous functioning of the vagus nerve that controls the vocal cords, in order to allow sophisticated micro-adjustments to the vibrations responsible for phonation. Olivia, of course, was not an otolaryngologist or a geneticist or a biologist or an incredibly long list of relevant medical and scientific disciplines, so I felt very whatever about that whole rap.
My voice was always raw, to the point where I questioned if I was doing actual damage via this process. But Olivia knew ninety-seven of these damn things and had no problems speaking normally. Every night I tried things like gargling apple cider vinegar, or sticking my head under a blanket with a hot water vaporizer, to keep my vocal cords healthy and lubricated.
For our last lesson of the week, Olivia skipped forward to give me a glimpse of what we were building toward. She asked me to combine number one, number three, and number four into a sequence—maybe that wasn’t enough power morphemes to constitute a word or even a sentence, but the point was, connect them as naturally as possible. To my surprise, it was quite a struggle. The inflections I’d learned for each power morpheme, by studying the recordings of Alexander Reece, were wildly divergent across the three. I wasn’t stumbling over pronunciation, per se—rather I could tell that my intonation needed to adapt to bring the three into alignment. I had choices, then, because I could use intonation to make the sequence sound aggressive, or make it sound pleasant and peaceful. Both of these felt legit.
“Good, yes,” Olivia said. “Your intonation can make the difference between a sentence being a statement or a question. In Chinese a speaker can take a single syllable and apply different vocal tones to affect its meaning in five different ways sometimes. Babies use this layer of intonation when they don’t have words yet, but they desperately want you to take care of them, and they make these sounds, these emotional appeals, and you go ‘awww’—so, intonation alone can be persuasive even if you don’t have a proper word or morpheme to attach it to. That’s sympathetic intonation.”
“So this is all still technically within the realm of how any ordinary language could work?” I asked.
“Yes, so far this is how language works. The only thing alien right now is the morphemes themselves, which have no direct translation. But these morphemes are made of phonemes, which are the smallest discrete units of sound that can contribute to meaning. You combine phonemes to make morphemes, which are the smallest actual units of meaning; and then you combine morphemes to make words and word groups, or lexemes—for instance, ‘run’ and ‘ran’ and ‘runs’ are all part of the same lexeme we might simply call RUN. Intonation affects meaning at each level, even at the phonetic level.”
“Sounds like you’re saying intonation is kind of the final authority on what a given word or sentence even means,” I said. “Like, I’ll pick up the tone of your voice at the same time I pick up the actual words that you say, and if the tone of your voice is sufficiently convincing, I’ll believe your subtext more than what you’re actually saying.”
“For the purpose of this thought experiment, yes, exactly,” Olivia replied. “In reality, it’s much more complex, because meaning is heavily dependent on overall context, and we’re not extrapolating that far today. The takeaway I want you to leave with today is that each power morpheme’s effect can be significantly modified by sympathetic intonation beyond what you’re hearing Alexander attempt on the recordings. That sympathetic intonation layer will be key when we start teaching you how to disguise the delivery of power morphemes within regular spoken language.”
Oh. Sure thing.
“Was that sequence supposed to have any effect?” I asked.
“No, so far our experiments produce no major psychoactive effect from that combination,” she replied. “But this trio is a common combination in larger sequences that do have observable effects. As you learn the hundred and eight, we may stop and teach you some safe sequences, but I do not recommend experimenting on your own until you’ve closely studied our notes on the entire lexicon. Can we agree on that?”
“Where are these notes?” I asked.
“I’ve been holding off on giving them to you because they’re very raw and unprocessed. Give me some time to organize them and clean them up a little better.”
“Or,” I said, “you could let me do that for you.”
“I think you have enough on your plate.”
“I’m a go-getter.”
“Most of the notes are Maddy’s,” she said. “Before you deep dive into her psyche that way, you should probably know what happened to her.”
“What ‘happened’ to her?”
“What she did, I should say. And I’m not up for that story today. In time, Isobel. All roads point to you learning everything we know about all of this technology and its implications.”
“Was she a senior marketing specialist like me?”
“No. She was a computational linguist. She wrote software to help us catalog and analyze power morphemes.”
“I see. And how exactly am I a good replacement for a computational linguist?”
“You’re the Queen of Sparkle Dungeon.”
Oh. I couldn’t tell if she was joking or serious, and decided not to press it just now.