[Chapter VI, continued]
Samuel Johnson Hall
This is the main building for Language Studies. This is not to be confused with Language Engineering, which is the department that handles devices for the manipulation of language-objects; it is also not to be confused with Linguistics, English Literature, or Comparative Literature, all of which have their own buildings and faculties. Language Studies applies itself to questions of linguistic efficacy chiefly at a social and anthropological level.
That’s to say that we study how the ability to change things based on their names affects daily life and society.
The department office, with several professorial offices leading off of it, is to the southeast. To the southwest is the seminar room, where many of the upper-level courses occur, and which also contains the department library; downstairs is the basement, where the graduate students and junior instructors are kept.
On the wall hangs a framed photograph of Professor Waterstone, with the words SHAPLY CHAIR in big letters underneath.
(Oh, my kingdom for an e-inserter!)
>x photo
The Shaply Chair is not named after the famous suffragette Phyllida Shaply, but after her considerably less famous or interesting descendant Lawrence Shaply, who was well-placed within Dental Consonants Ltd. when it started up and subsequently had buckets of money with which to endow university chairs.
Nonetheless, this position is a point of considerable pride for Professor Waterstone, and gets him many invitations to speak both here and abroad, which he takes terribly seriously. (More to the point, the government permits him to attend.)
This may explain the particularly expansive grin on Waterstone’s face in this image. Usually his pleasure is expressed more moderately.
This looks like it’s going to be a whole sub-area, with multiple different locations, which makes sense given that it’s the last major portion of the map (presumably there’s a lot more of the Bureau we haven’t seen yet, though). I guess we could start by returning the book we borrowed?
>sw
We lack a key that fits the seminar door.
Guess not.
Maybe before jumping straight to the Professor, we should venture to the dungeons where grad students and adjuncts are kept?
>d
Samuel Johnson Basement
Dank and malodorous: there are no windows down here, and the drainage is terrible.
The stairs up are here; the lecture room at the east. Immediately south is the Graduate Student Office, and southwest is Professor Brown’s office. The most interesting of all is the small door west, trying to look inconspicuous, but locked with a keycard lock: it’s where the department stores its most dangerous licensed equipment.
A large open carton stands against the wall right between Brown’s lab door and the interesting door. “Recycling,” reads the sign over the carton. “Place your lab-created items here for processing.” There is a banana in the large carton.
Ooh, that looked door is enticing – let’s keep our eyes out for a keycard!
Wonder what’s in the bin?
>x carton
In the large carton is a banana.
>x banana
Just beginning to get brown and spotty.
I think there’s only one reason this would be here, and sure enough, when we put on the monocle:
There is a dismissive blatt from the monocle, and transposed over the banana is a faint, unappetizing image of a bandana.
There’s not much we can do with this – I try making the banana a “baaa”, reasoning that at least in the language of sheep, that could be just about anything, but unsurprisingly that goes nowhere.
>sw
Brown’s Lab
Professor Brown, the Reification of Abstracts researcher, is hunched over his work table. Brown is only barely a professor at all – actually, his working title is Senior Lecturer, and he holds a yearly contract which the University has the option to renew at whim. This prevents him going elsewhere while ensuring that he never has a fully-funded lab of his own. All the electrical equipment down here is tinker-toys compared to the stuff he really wants; in fact, half of it he built himself with components he bought with his own money.I know all this because Brown cornered me in the hallway one afternoon and talked to me for twenty minutes straight about the pressures of academic job-hunting in the current political climate. I tried to get him to stop, but he’s like a wind-up toy.
“Don’t touch anything, please,” he says, without looking up.
I’d like to ask what he is doing.
Some elements of Counterfeit Monkey might be fantasy, but its depiction of the academic job market seems spot-on. But ooh, the inability of our X-remover to perform abstract reification is something we’ve been bumping up against seemingly forever – does this stuff help Brown accomplish it?
>x equipment
A series of metal boxes with digital readouts and wires that lead in and out.
Brown uses this stuff to measure the amount of energy it requires to reify abstract concepts such as “talk”. He has a theory, apparently, that by measuring the minute variations of input energy required to create these items, he can establish baseline indications about how much certain words are used by English-speakers worldwide; ten, fifty, or a hundred years from now, this data will allow researchers to determine whether these same words have become more or less popular relative to other words.
It’s a little weird. Abstract reifications are one of the absolute coolest things in language studies, but Brown has managed to pick the very most boring research project to perform on them, and one which moreover is guaranteed to prevent him having any results worth publishing any time in the next two decades.
This pretty much sums up everything you need to know about the guy.
…yeah, I’m with Alex; in theory this is kinda interesting, but the amount of power you’d need too plug into this project seems way out of whack with the modest results.
>x brown
He’s going bald on top – prematurely, because I think he’s only 28 or so – so, to compensate, he’s grown a goofy little goatee.
Oof, that is not a dignified way to come to terms with male androgenetic alopecia.
>ask what he is doing
“What are you up to there?” we ask. Asking Brown questions when he’s working is a bit of a crap-shoot, I tell you now.
He wiggles his nose back and forth. I knew him for three months before I figured out what the wiggle is: it is his hands-free way of working his spectacles back up his nose when they start to slide down.
Without looking at us, he says, “I’m getting ready to do a new calibration run on ‘love’.”
This is a favorite of his, because you can get it so easily from a glove, so the materials are inexpensive.
I’d like to ask what love looks like or ask how Professor Brown makes abstracts.
I know we’re meant to find Brown off-putting and pathetic, but I am actually impressed by that nose-wiggling trick and wish I knew how to pull it off. Is that a thing people can just do?
>ask how he makes abstracts
“What equipment do you use to make your abstracts?” we ask.
“It’s an ordinary letter-remover with a few adjustments,” Brown says. “The department’s computer can lift some of the legal overrides on standard letter tools. The job would be easier if I had access to higher-powered machinery, but…”
I’d like to ask what love looks like or ask whether he can fix the letter-remover.
I am now doing the kind of dance that my five-year-old nephew does when he needs to go pee but is so excited playing that he doesn’t want to stop.
>ask whether he can fix the letter-remover
“Could you fix my letter-remover to make abstract objects as well?”
“It’s not difficult, you just – oh, stay here, I’m not supposed to bring students into the rectification room.”
He takes the letter-remover and steps out into the hallway. I can hear him using his keycard on the door, going into the little room west of the hallway, doing something there. (Don’t bother thinking we’re going to cosh him and take the keycard. I’m sure there’s a better way, and I don’t cosh people.)
He comes back in a minute.
“There,” he says. “Should be abstract-enabled now.”
We could ask what he thinks of the letter-remover or thank Professor Brown.
[Your score has gone up by three points and is now forty-eight.]
>thank him
“That’s wonderful ? thank you!”
“Yes well,” he says. “Don’t show it to anyone. Technically you shouldn’t have that.”
We could ask what he thinks of the letter-remover.
Don’t listen to the haters – Professor Brown is officially the coolest NPC in the game.
>ask what he thinks
“Is there anything else that could be done to upgrade my letter-remover?” we ask naively.
“Nothing I can help you with, I’m afraid,” he says. “There are some safety overrides that could be programmed out, allowing you to make living creatures, but that’s…” He does his spasmodic shrug. “One of those things where I think the laws have a point. It’s dangerous and possibly even cruel.”
We could ask why reifying living creatures is cruel.
>ask why
“Why would it be cruel to make a living creature?” you ask.
“We don’t know whether such creations have awareness and sensation like other creatures,” he says. “If they do, it is horrible to bring them into existence only to send them out again.”
Yeah, what kind of monster would you have to be to, say, create a whole human being just to change your car’s oil and then leave them hanging about on a street corner, with no home and no place to go, burbling out their limited inventory of stock-phrases to anyone who will listen, bereft of real cognition or individuality and doomed to return to a pile of stinking garbage when someone finally gets around to slapping some restoration gel on them?
[crickets]
When we look around again, we’re told “Professor Brown, the Reification of Abstracts researcher, is hunched over his work table. He is wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a worn leather jacket.” Let’s check out his kit:
>x spectacles
They have tiny oval lenses, tinted green.
Brown seems to be simultaneously cultivating the image of rebel (age 17) and absent-minded professor (age 65).
>x jacket
A moderately cool sort of bomber-jacket look, except that the elbows have given out and the cuffs are unraveling.
Alex is just jealous.
Anyway, we have an exciting new toy! It’s hard to decide where to start since there are so many abstracts we’ve been blocked from creating, but I’ll go with one of @Draconis’s ideas:
>remove b from ball
We reset the device to b. We pick up the ball.
There is a hum of ferocious effort from the letter-remover as it strains to create “all”. At first it seems likely that it will just break down, but it gets through the aa (a spontaneous flow of lava); skips all creatures of the aard- variety thanks to its restraints on living animal-creation; and goes on to the abaca (a large hemp-yielding plant).
Unfortunately, it’s done a bit too zealous a job with the aa, and before it gets to whatever comes after abaca, the lava is flowing in our direction.
That is, that’s what would have happened if we had done something so foolish. Shall we suppose we didn’t?
Ha! This reminds me of the time I thought I’d broken my first game because, while I was testing it, I typed TREE into a disambiguation prompt and the IDE promptly barfed out a complete list of every object in the game world (this was the first time I posted on the forum about a bug, so I just about died when Zarf himself explained what was going on).
I can’t resist wasting time with a few more transformations:
>remove c from pic
We reset the device to c. There is a mad-scientist cackle, and the pic turns into pi. For something so simple, it is astonishingly beautiful: a perfect circle in translucent silver, absolute and unflawed.
>remove i from pastis
We reset the device to i. There is a flash of psychedelic colors, and the pastis turns into some pasts. It looks from the side like a shard of glass, but seen straight on, it captures previous events. At the moment it is replaying us discussing why reifying living creatures is cruel.
We could ask what he thinks about the pasts.
Oh, interesting, that triggers a new discussion topic!
We demonstrate the pasts.
“Yes,” says Brown, interested. “This is good, very nice example of how an object can be affected by the creator and local environment. It appears to be a record of your own behavior alone, but with the right laboratory conditions it ought to be possible to produce a past abstract referring to someone else, or to a place.”
Okay, Atlantean field archeology sounds super fun.
We still can’t get the as, though – would need a razor – but this opens up one more transformation:
>remove s from pasts
We reset the device to s. With a distinct whiff of cool butter, the pasts turn into a pat. Considering everything it could have been, we are lucky with this pat: it is only a pat of butter.
I now check my score to see which letters I’ve yet to successfully remove, the list currently being g, j, k, q, v, or z. Z and J will have to wait on being able to create animals, I think (despite Brown’s protestations, I am 100% making that upgrade now that I know the equipment to do so is right next door), but I can still make some progress:
>remove g from sign
We reset the device to g. With a distinct whiff of sulfur, the sign turns into a sin. An abstract representation of willfully clueless meddling. Not a sin known to Dante, perhaps; but modern democracies have their own forms of wrong-doing.
That’s not as much fun as I was expecting, but we can cross off the g regardless.
We’re done in Brown’s lab, and the restricted-equipment door is of course locked, but there’s still that lecture room east of the stairwell:
Lecture Hall (at the podium)
The main lecture hall used for large survey courses in language studies offered to undergraduates. I sat through courses here when I was an undergraduate myself, and have now delivered a few lectures as a teaching assistant.
The room extends south, full of hard wooden seats. Abandoned on one near the back is a coat.
A poster at the front of the room announces a conference on cultural reactions to linguistic change. It is being held in Nice the day after tomorrow, with Professor Waterstone as keynote speaker, on the topic of “homonym shame”. Somehow I had forgotten about the date of this: I’ve been too much worried about our escape.
…speaking of homonyms, we’d better hope nobody ever attempts to thwack that city with a paddle.
>x coat
It’s been abandoned here for a while, since this isn’t the time of year when people wear coats. It’s brown cloth, only thick enough to keep out rain or a mild chill, and it’s rubbed shiny at the elbows. No wonder the owner didn’t miss it much.
We take it, which moves us into the seating area (I guess it’s implemented as an enterable container?)
Lecture Hall (among the seats)
Many are the fine hours I have spent here dozing; and many are the students of mine who have done the same. The circle of life becomes complete.The room extends north, full of hard wooden seats. Abandoned on one near the back is a coat.
Someone has taped to the wall a course advertisement for next quarter, inviting interested undergraduates to enroll in Interlingua 101. Probably Professor Higgate’s work.
We take the coat.
>x ad
In large type:
Interlingua 101: Learn a Language You Already Know.
In smaller type beneath: Interlingua se basa a parolas international, preponderentemente de origine latin, que ha supervivite a nostre dies, e que existe in italiano, espaniol/portugese, francese e anglese (linguas de referentia) plus germano e russo como reserva. Le grammatica del interlingua es un rationalisate synthese del grammaticas de referentia.
And then as a final tagline: INTERLINGUA IS THE MODERN LATIN.
…I’m not sure if that’s actually Esperanto, or a made-up polyglot tongue, but it’s impressively readable! It sure seems like the authorities would frown on the creation and promulgation of a universal tongue other than English, but I suppose scholars can get away with things others can’t.
When I mess around with the ad (I thought it’d be funny to create an “a”), I found it’s tied to its modifiers, making it a “course advertisement”, but this creates new frontiers for comedy:
>remove o from ad
We reset the device to o. There is a flash of yellow light, and the course advertisement turns into a curse advertisement. It’s an ad of the kind you sometimes find in the back of underground newspapers, offering to take off the rude-object restrictions off a letter-remover, “for private home use only.”
For no real reason, I also turn the coat into an oat:
>remove c from coat
We reset the device to c. There is a distinct spearmint flavor, and the coat turns into an oat. A single dry cut oat.
With a last look at the seats (“Ingeniously uncomfortable”) I head back to the front of the room to check out the conference poster:
>x poster
t’s the usual sort of thing: the conference title set in Papyrus font; a stock daguerreotype of a portly woman holding a letter-remover the size of a policeman’s cosh; inset pictures of the major speakers, with pride of place for Waterstone himself.
…is that how academic conferences are usually advertised? Huh.
One last door down here in the basement:
>s
Graduate Student Office
A small windowless room divided into cubicles for individual graduate students.
A tiny refrigerator stores lunches (sometimes) and looted leftovers from department receptions (when available). On top of the fridge there is a coffee-maker.
My cubicle is the one with the swivel-chair, towards the back of the room by the water cooler. I cleared everything subversive out of there ages ago, and now I do most of my work at home in the apartment. It’s safer that way.
We can see a sticky on the swivel-chair. I half recognize the handwriting, but I’m having trouble placing it. One of the other grad students, but I’m not sure which.
>x sticky
Please be careful. The blue hats are watching you.
Groan – Alex was definitely not being as smooth as he thought he was. Having this lying around is itself kind of incriminating, so let’s dispose of the evidence:
>remove y from sticky
We reset the device to y. With a distinct whiff of sap, the sticky turns into a stick. It is about two feet long. It’s stripped of its leaves and fairly sturdy.
(I try to see if I can do a further transformation to a tick, but it interprets that as a prohibited insect, rather than a licitly-abstract unit of time – I was hoping to get my k-removal badge by winding up with a tic).
The fridge is unexceptional, but when we open it:
We open the tiny refrigerator, revealing some cream and a silver platter.
Oooh, fancy.
>x cream
Kept around to go with the coffee. It doesn’t seem to have gone off yet, which is a wonder.
This was fun to make the first time, might as well do it again:
>remove c from cream
We reset the device to c. There is a pink cloud, and the cream turns into a ream. One ream, which is to say 500 sheets, of generic printer or copier paper. The sheets are an attractive milky color.
>x platter
Evidently the platter is left over from a department function, and no one has bothered with doing the dishes.
On the silver platter are a crumpled cocktail napkin and a shrimp tail.
Someone left it in the fridge with that stuff on it? Gross!
>x napkin
It’s trash. Why it wound up being archived in the refrigerator is anyone’s guess.
Yes, it is.
>x tail
There’s no meat left; just the remains of one shrimp tail with the flesh bitten off.
Ugh. Grad students really are feral.
(We’re not too proud to grab this all, though – just in case!)
>x maker
It’s the cheapest possible variety, donated by one of the older students, and it is constantly overflowing and needing to be taken away to be cleaned of loose grounds. But it does work, more or less, most of the time.
The coffee-maker is currently switched off.
>turn it on
We don’t have time to go brewing ourselves a pot, but I can set your mind at rest on one point anyway: it generally comes out horrible.
We can stop by the Babel if we need a caffeine recharge before hitting the Bureau, I suppose.
>x chair
It is grey with small white dots on the fabric.
I bought the swivel-chair with my own money, because sitting on the plastic bucket seat supplied by the department made my legs sticky in the summer.
I try to sit on it and swivel around yelling “wheee!”, but alas, can’t figure out the syntax.
…I think that’s about what we can do down here, at least for now, so it’s time to head upstairs and visit Professor Waterstone to see about that invitation.
[continued later tonight]