Bradford kept talking for a bit, but I realized I was doing that thing I used to do with my grandmother, where she’d babble about the neighbors or her garden and I’d nod and go “mm-hmm” every so often while secretly hate-singing ballads from Rent in my mind to pass the time.
“You seem nonplussed,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “you know, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that word spoken out loud.” My non sequitur game is massive.
He smiled and said, “How about a change of scenery?”
We took the elevator up to the third floor, silent the whole time. I’d landed on a comfortable threat assessment of the guy: that he’d snap like a twig if I punched him, plus there were zero uncomfortable stories circulating about him anywhere in the building as far as I’d heard.
His office was down the hall from Olivia’s, bigger than hers, with a massive mahogany desk as the centerpiece, a gigantic brown leather chair behind it, and an innocuous, comfortable-looking chair in front of it for visitors. A brown leather couch was nestled under the windows against one wall, with pillows and a blanket scattered about indicating frequent double duty as a bed for Bradford. A glass coffee table next to the couch featured an array of old magazines with himself and Alexander on the cover. Those two were really rock stars of the PR world for a while there, with Alexander playing the flamboyant front man and Bradford playing the smooth sidekick.
Music was playing from what first appeared to be a Victrola in a corner behind his desk. I looked a little closer, though, and saw it was just a fancy dock for his phone. The music sounded like one of those internet radio stations that programmed nonstop downtempo grooves—pleasant, unobtrusive, not particularly distinctive stuff. Hipper than I might have expected, although if I were trapped in a room with it for too long, I would be forced to start a punk band in retaliation.
We sat down on either side of his desk, and I imagined he was about to pull a crystal decanter of bourbon out of his desk drawer, but Bradford was shaping up to be someone immune to certain cliches. I realized the fake Victrola was sitting on top of a dorm room refrigerator, from which he retrieved a pair of coffees and handed me one. I wondered if he wanted to caffeinate me so that I’d snap out of my exhausted, lab-induced stupor and pay closer attention to him.
Fair enough. If the man wanted to fully invest his reputation with me on a first contact with aliens story, he could be my guest.
“Alexander didn’t believe he was communicating with an alien species at first,” Bradford said. “Or rather—he didn’t understand that he was. He described that initial encounter to me once, said it was like sticking his finger in the light socket of the logosphere. Are you familiar with that concept? The invisible realm where all human ideas eternally persist, or some such?”
I nodded—Alexander was still talking about the logosphere in interviews until nearly the end of his life. When the radio was invented, intellectuals were inspired to imagine the logosphere as the distillation of all the information contained within radio waves. By extension, all the information contained in books or even simply generated by human minds must circulate in the logosphere. Kind of like a collective unconscious, except instead of a shared symbolic memory, the logosphere was a shared pool of pure information and intent. You could imagine the internet to be a sort of pseudo-reification of the concept of the logosphere. Of course, that would make the logosphere a blazing, unmitigated trash fire, and I believe Alexander held his vision of the logosphere in higher esteem than that.
“I worried he’d had a stroke,” he said bluntly. “He tried to explain over the phone, but he wasn’t making sense to me, and of course, power morphemes don’t work over the phone. But he managed to convince me to go out to his house, where it became very clear that he’d stumbled onto something unusual. He’d somehow ‘downloaded,’ for lack of a non-tiresome digital metaphor, the original one hundred and eight, and he was struggling to comprehend their implications. He and I sat together for two solid days as he worked his way through pronouncing about a third of them out loud for the first time. Some of the notes attributed to Alexander in the lexicon are actually mine, my impressions as the first person to hear power morphemes spoken by another human being.”
“But why ‘downloaded’?” I asked. “Why not just ‘invented’? Or say he was struck by inspiration. Isn’t that a simpler explanation?”
“Simpler, but incomplete,” he replied. “A power morpheme on its face ought to sound like nothing more than gibberish to you when you hear it. No different from hearing any other fragment of a language you haven’t learned. But something in your mind does understand power morphemes, or they’d have no effect.”
“And that something … is aliens?”
“Punctuation marks, to be exact,” he said.
Written languages don’t require punctuation marks to be effective. Modern Thai, ancient Greek, classical Chinese … there’s a list of successful languages that don’t use punctuation but still communicate meaning. Spoken languages, on the other hand, are chock full of punctuation marks, always have been. You insert punctuation almost by instinct as you learn to speak, so that your speech isn’t an undifferentiated run-on sentence that never ends. In that way, punctuation is fully integrated into human thought, without originating it per se. That’s how it’s been since nearly the dawn of human history, right up until Alexander Reece stuck his finger in the light socket of the logosphere.
That’s how long punctuation marks had been here, trying to get our conscious attention. When we invented symbols to demarcate their effects, that was a big step toward recognizing their presence, but that’s where we stopped. After all, there was no reason whatsoever to imagine that punctuation marks as a symbol set were themselves a decentralized, sentient cloud of independent intent, smeared across the minds of billions of humans.
Power morphemes changed the game. Each one included a core signaling frequency that ambient punctuation in the local environment could detect. The metaphor Bradford used was that of a phone ringing, followed by the message; in this case, when the phone rang, punctuation marks in the vicinity responded.
“You can use sequences of power morphemes to change people’s behavior, convince them to do things that otherwise might not seem natural,” Bradford said. “We think what’s happening is that the punctuation marks in the subject’s brain respond to power morphemes by reorganizing the subject’s thoughts to match the intent of the speaker. Crafting convincing new ideas out of existing ones, by redistributing punctuation’s effects in ways we don’t understand yet. There’s no written equivalent of this mechanism, but it’s certainly effective when spoken.”
“How did you work all that out?” I asked. “I mean, do they communicate with you directly?”
“They communicated with Alexander directly. On occasions when he chose to pronounce all hundred and eight in sequence, they would respond to him directly and he could actually have conversations with them. Or rather—he’d give and take control of his own thoughts, and then frantically try to transcribe his encounters. They were notoriously hard to remember, like dreams that evaporate as soon as you wake up.”
The implication was clear—maybe if I learned all hundred and eight, I could have conversations with them, too. The question was: did I want to?
“How many power morphemes do you know?” I asked.
“One hundred and seven,” he replied.
“Are you just stuck on that last one?”
“Alexander was a fundamentally different person after the hundred and eighth,” Bradford replied. “I’m not quite ready to undergo that transformation.”