As we approached the dates of Violet Parker’s fundraiser and the Sparkle Dungeon 5 release party, stress started catching up to me.
Through some ill-advised set of circumstances, the two events wound up being scheduled back to back—the fundraiser on a Friday night, the release party the very next night. The countdown clock for both events became an everpresent specter in my mind, steadily gaining ground over my daily antianxiety medication. My time in the lab at night was often spent catching up on event planning tasks.
Whenever my mind drifted off a given task, I found myself defaulting to practicing power morphemes in my head, hearing them in Alexander Reece’s voice. Power morphemes became a kind of ambient white noise, always rustling around up there in the old brainpan. I suspected when Olivia finally started teaching me the full sequences that the neural net was generating, I’d realize that I’d already discovered half of them just by letting my brain idle in neutral and observing the results. You could feel how some of them seemed to be magnetically connected to the beginning or the end of others. You could feel rhythms that emerged from given strings, and you knew intuitively that these rhythms signified something.
One night, around midnight, I heard singing coming down the hallway outside the lab; a beautiful, clear tenor voice singing what sounded like an aria from an opera in a romance language that I’d never heard before. I was alarmed to realize I was alone in the building with whoever this was, and they’d be able to block the door if they wanted to. Irritating—I’d left my backpack upstairs in my office, which had the mace I carried. I hoped it was just some late-night janitor wandering through, although I’d been here pretty late many times and never come across anyone else in the building at this hour. I hadn’t been home in a couple of days, hadn’t showered or changed clothes, was mostly subsisting on coffee and protein bars, and power morphemes relentlessly marched through my mind without provocation any time my attention wavered for a second.
That was how I met Bradford Jenning.
Alexander Reece and Bradford Jenning emerged onto the scene fully formed, bursting with youthful vigor and giant trust funds or invisible investors or a dragon’s lair full of gold—no one really knew, because in those days, you couldn’t just buy people’s financial data off a darknet, and anyway no one really cared because they were so charming and so effective.
Reece was the intellectual, a media theory and design theory guru with an undergraduate linguistics degree and a hobbyist’s interest in mathematics. He held some unorthodox ideas. He was an early proponent of memetics—the notion that units of information, or memes, are replicated in culture similar to how genes replicate in living beings—and pursued it as an advertising metaphor even though it never transcended its status as a pseudoscience. And he was absolutely enamored of the idea of the logosphere, an imaginary realm where all the written words, speculative tales, and information transmissions in the world were combined, transformed, and continually propagated—it was vividly real in his mind, almost like a layer in the atmosphere.
Bradford Jenning, meanwhile, played the role of charismatic impresario of the firm, landing elite clients with masterful charm offensives and shepherding a burgeoning staff of associates as they developed one groundbreaking campaign after another. How the two met was the subject of multiple colorful legends painted across dozens of profiles over the years.
Things were different since Alexander’s death. Bradford had become a recluse of sorts, said to lurk in a corner office on the third floor not too far from Olivia’s, rarely seen in the halls, no longer a morale-boosting presence in staff meetings or company outings, but still somehow deeply involved in managing the most elite client relationships of the firm, still signing the checks, still guiding strategy if not advancing the state of the art like Alexander in his prime.
Now Bradford was standing at the other end of the lab, staring at me, looking considerably wilder than his bio photo on the corporate website. Tall, rail thin, white, bushy gray hair, mustache and beard, a button-down shirt that was open at the collar and no tie, and perhaps most distinctively, wide, hyperalert eyes that gave the impression he was extremely surprised to see me. His singing suddenly evaporated.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said.
“That’s true,” I said. I didn’t mean to be cheeky; I was just very tired.
“Sorry to intrude. I prefer the acoustics down here for singing, although I rarely have the luxury of time to spend on such simple pursuits these days.”
“It’s cool.”
“Well, as long as I’m here, I believe you’re due for a performance review. Would you mind joining me in the fishbowl?”
A performance review … in the fishbowl? That meant he wanted a demonstration. Like, an actual performance. In the middle of the night. Fair enough. It was never too late in the evening or early in the morning to show off your skills to the owner of the company.
I followed him into the giant glass chamber, where I’d experienced my first usability test with Olivia, except now Bradford Jenning was sitting opposite me, an unreadable expression on his face, waiting for me to stop fidgeting and show that I was ready.
“How many have you learned?” he asked.
“Eighty-one.”
He nodded and said, “Number twenty-nine, if you please.”
I scoured my memory and summoned up power morpheme number twenty-nine. Olivia discouraged assigning names to the power morphemes, believing that ran the risk of watering down their raw potency. I thought calling something “electricity” didn’t have any impact on electricity’s efficacy; it was just a pointer to a thing. Admittedly the pointer had its meaning, and it was pointing at something with denser meaning, so maybe these meanings blended slightly at the edges, but the meaning of the power morpheme would always win, I thought. Except of course that I had no fucking idea what the power morphemes actually “meant” and generally felt like I was speaking some ancient Martian language that was once fluently spoken by aliens born with five sets of vocal cords.
Anyway, the point was, I’d taken to using poetic metaphors as mnemonic hooks to remember the entire set of power morphemes. They were helpful triggers, a contextual firmament in which to store these entities in my mind for later recollection. I called number twenty-nine “hope springs eternal” because of the genuine warmth that coursed through my body when I delivered it. On my most dispiriting days, I’d sometimes recite it just to give myself a little five-minute burst of unfiltered sunshine. Of course, this was dangerous because the effect wore off quickly, and you could get into an addictive pattern of repeating number twenty-nine until suddenly your afternoon had turned into evening.
That was the thing: Olivia was training me to use power morphemes as a persuasive tool to affect others, but the effects were often reflected back on me as well. Sure, I built up resistance to my own delivery, but I got the feeling there were hidden costs to acquiring these skills.
Bradford displayed no reaction whatsoever when I delivered number twenty-nine.
“Number seventeen, please,” he said.
For almost an hour, we proceeded through the library of power morphemes. Usually Bradford was impassive; occasionally he’d betray a small reaction, and infrequently he’d correct some perceived flaw in my delivery and work with me to pick up the nuance. I was sweating profusely by the end of the hour, and I was jacked up like I’d injected adrenochrome straight into my brain stem.
“Good, I think that will suffice,” he finally said. After an awkward pause in which he seemed to be briefly lost in a reverie, he suddenly said, “I’ll have Olivia accelerate your training.”
“Uh,” I said.
“I’ve taken enough of your time,” he said as he stood up to leave.
“Wait.”
He raised an eyebrow, paused in the doorway to the glass chamber.
“Why aren’t you training anyone else?” I asked.
He returned to the chair opposite me and sat down.
“Who among the top Sparkle Dungeon players would you recruit to join you here in the lab? Cameron designed the spellcasting system to contextually prime players to learn power morphemes … who would you say is ready?”
I pulled up the recent leaderboard in my mind. Sir Trancelot—excellent fighter, mediocre diva-caster. Countess Disco le Funk—excellent dancer and DJ, but not much of a diva-caster. Marquess d’Ambient was the first person to master the Curse of the Mismatched Beat spell, but often went missing for weeks at a time due to day job stuff and never actually cracked the top twenty. The Keeper of the Moonlight Prism—Jordon Connelly, that is—was a very skilled diva-caster, but you’d have a hard time talking her out of her popstar duties to sit in a basement laboratory for months of training. Didn’t seem like the game was actually working to “contextually prime” people. Other than me, of course. I was fucking primed as all fuck. Anyway, I saw his point.
Primed for what, though? In that moment, staring down the infamous co-founder of the firm that was paying my rent, my suspicions about this whole process finally crystalized. There was zero chance they could use power morphemes in proper advertising, since they couldn’t be transmitted digitally. They could definitely use them for person-to-person persuasion, which would be ethically dubious at best (although arguably the entire industry could be described as ethically dubious), but it wasn’t super scalable.
That left what Olivia referred to as “combat linguistics.”
“Are you training me to fight?” I blurted out.
“You’ve learned eighty-one out of a hundred and eight power morphemes,” he said. “The neural net has so far produced three hundred and five sequences of power morphemes that are predicted to have compounding effects. We’re training you to learn all hundred and eight power morphemes so that you can then learn all three hundred and five sequences, to verify which ones are useful.”
“Useful for what?”
He remained calm as my voice trended toward insolence, and changed the subject.
“Do you know how they work, Isobel? Has Olivia told you?”
“They’re unusually dense units of meaning,” I said. “They mean more than they should.”
“That’s what they are, not how they work.”
“They work by stacking phonetic overtones—”
“No,” he insisted. We were quiet for a long moment, letting the silence cleanse our conversational palette, and then he said, “Alexander once proposed a thought experiment to me. Consider the imaginary numbers in mathematics, which exist outside the natural number system, off in some complex realm with its own rules for describing aspects of reality. What would a metaphorical equivalent be in linguistics?”
“Imaginary morphemes,” I guessed.
“Yes. In principle, if you extended this thought experiment to its furthest reaches, you could imagine a technique for mapping an entire imaginary linguistic topography onto actual real-world syntax that could somehow be spoken. I didn’t realize it at the time, but for Alexander, this was more than a thought experiment. It was an avenue of research.
“One day he came to me and announced a discovery: one hundred and eight power morphemes, fully formed. You hear one, and your mind unpacks it into a complete, multidimensional, ideational array of concepts. And when it does, it delusionally thinks it originated these concepts. And as a result, it believes these concepts outright. Now put a sequence of power morphemes together, and you can insert a staggering matrix of thoughts into a person’s mind. You can mask these sequences within actual legitimate syntax, distracting a person with the overt meaning of a phrase while subliminally delivering extra meaning they don’t realize is present. They’re very diabolical that way.
“And I asked him—how, Alexander? How did you discover these? How do they work so effectively on the human mind?
“Somehow his experiments in expressing an imaginary syntax, with nothing more than his own haggard voice … somehow, he produced a signal, a resonance on a precise frequency, that enabled—communication.”
“Communication with who?” I dared to ask.
“There is life—actual, sentient life—embedded into our language structures. A specific group of linguistic symbols actually works in a conscious, symbiotic fashion to shape human thought. They don’t control our thoughts—but as our brains evolved, they were key to unlocking our language centers, accelerating the rise of civilization. The punctuation marks introduced Alexander to the power morphemes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Punctuation marks,” he said, “are an alien species. Thousands of years ago, they arrived on Earth as refugees, and made our minds their new home.”