Notes

Notes

I posted this on Reddit HFY but I wanted to share this story here too. I thought people might enjoy it.

We don’t know what happened to them, for several hundred orbits of the local star system we’ve been looking at their ruins trying to decipher their history, culture, science and much more. Much has been discovered but we’ve still only scratched the surface of mountain of knowledge. For example: what we once thought were several separate alien societies turned out to be all one alien culture. How such a wide spread and advanced species vanished without a trace is a mystery.

One of many things that troubled us is that their written language seems to have hundreds of variations, many don’t even seem to relate to each other. In fact, this was the primary reason why their society had been so difficult to comprehend.

One such written language I’ve taken up to decoding looks deceptively simple, and is found across all their territories but for the longest time, I had found no key to decode it. On the surface, it looks incomplex, just circles, dots and lines placed upon a bar of lines going across the width of paper, but I suspected it was vastly elaborate as I have come across various texts that go from a few simple dots across a few bars to hundreds of various dots and lines all stuffed onto several connecting sheets filled with bars; these dots are not even bound to the bars as they can sometimes jump high above it or far below it.

Further, I had found other glyphs and symbols I had no way of discerning why they are placed where they are. The only thing I knew about this script is that it has been paired with other scripts of their written language. I’d even found identical sheets of these scripts paired with different scripts. I was almost sure this was a universal script for them, and if I could decode it; perhaps we’d have a key to decode all the other scripts.

One thing that had given me aid was a discovery a colleague of mine found, an ancient recording he was able to recover. This in its self was a breakthrough since most of their technology holding their nonphysical records is still inert and this small recovery was a miracle. Our fields of study don’t cross but what he discovered, in fact, did.

This colleague decided to wait until more people had the time before it would be viewed. I was among that group with others from various fields. Once we viewed it, what we found on it was the recording was a ritual of some sort. There was a large gathering of the aliens depicted in a room facing a podium, and on the podium, were a few aliens facing the crowd, one held a tool of some sort and the other was dressed in red with floral decorations. Then, all of a sudden, it started. The one in red spoke in soft and somber voice and I was in awe that same moment. The one holding the tool used it to make sounds that complimented the other’s spoken words in a harmony I never before experienced. It was, for lack of a better word, spell binding.

The moment they had started they had me trapped in trance. What I heard was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and it invoked powerful emotions in me. I felt as somber as the alien’s voice and I dearly wished I could hold my life companion in that moment, as if I didn’t do so soon, I never would again. Against all reason that said otherwise I pulled a holo-tab from my pocket and sent him a message telling him I needed to see him that night and that I loved him. There was an aching in my chest that didn’t leave until he finally replied a tic later assuring me he would come and asking if anything was wrong. I didn’t respond because, at that moment, I wasn’t sure. When the ritual finally ended, the emotions it conjured lingered in me. I looked upon the group to find everyone else was similarly affected, one of us even openly wept.

We watched it several more times, out of diligence and study, though we took several tics to recover ourselves and prepare our emotions better for it. One thing I hadn’t noticed before, flowing across the bottom of the recording, was a script being highlighted as the one in red spoke. A script I knew another colleague of mine was translating. Since this was his script, I forwarded the recording to him; with apt warning of its contents of course.

After the discovery of the recording, more attempts were made to recover the nonphysical information with some success but nothing new for my field came up after a cycle and my translation attempts still turned up nothing. Until my colleague whom I sent the first recording to had sent me back a few scripts with some additional notes he made. He had found a script sheet containing the words the alien in red had spoken; that was not all however. This script he sent had also contained the language I was trying to decipher, and another he was sure it was paired with. He couldn’t understand how they were related at all, so he jotted down his hypothesizes and sent it back to me. One script of mine was paired with his, yet the other wasn’t paired with any other type of written script. This wasn’t all that unusual, since half the time, my script came unpaired with others, but his notes insisted they went together. What puzzled me was that we only heard the one alien speak. If he was correct then I was missing something.

Cautiously and after long emotional preparation, I had returned to that recording of the alien ritual to review it with the scripts I received, hoping to glean any sort of incite. When it began again, I still felt a twinge in my chest, but I was able to focus. I had followed along as it spoke, both upon the recording and the sheet I pressed my primary digit to. Following my colleagues notes I could vaguely see relations from his script to its spoken words, I also saw a connection between his script and mine as it spoke but I could still not see how they translated. In the end, all I ended up with was frustration, I was still no closer to figuring out my script or how it was used.

I knew in the back of my mind there was a connection. Something in me saw it, but I just wasn’t sure what it was. My eyes drifted over my script once more, I had noticed that the dots and lines corresponded to timing along the bar, I didn’t know why. I saw each word the alien had spoken had also ran along with that timing but it didn’t make sense. I was at my wits end and about to throw everything off the table until my eyes landed upon the second unpaired yet related script.

My colleague was sure they were all together for a reason, and I had no other lead to go upon, so once more did I watch the recording, following the untranslated script. There were more dots and circles to follow but somehow, they fell in with the timing of the spoken words. Not wholly, but I could agree with my colleague now that they all did belong together, though I was still unsure why. When the spoken words had paused, this script had continued and at first, I couldn’t understand. Nothing was being spoken but as my digit steadily continued along the script something else was still keeping pace with each dot.

The realization hit me like a wave. The sounds coming from the tool the other alien was using, corresponded with each circle, dot and line on the page. As the tone of the tool grew and fell, so did the dots and circles rise and fall across the bar. This script didn’t translate words, it translated sound, and from this sound was the emotion imbedded in the ritual.

I jumped to my other untranslated scripts sitting upon shelves and shelves dedicated to holding them and took the nearest one to me. It was a short script and simple compared to the one I was currently reading. It took several re-watches of the video to gauge what the script said, but with a little focus, I could hear it in my imagination. It was humble in comparison, yet a happy sound, childlike. The next wasn’t as easy to imagine, but it was exciting and vibrant, and yet another was entrancing, and another soothing, and another fear inducing. I felt so many things just reading these scripts.

Then I stumbled upon two copies of the same sheet, but each was paired with different spoken scripts, one belonging to the same colleague as before, the other belonging to someone working upon the other side of the planet, and I was struck by another realization. It was a universal language. It conveyed emotions, emotions that we could relate to. They had paired these emotions with the words to speak them and they shared these emotions across their languages.

This…

This is how we came to understand a bit more of what they left behind. This script for sound, for raw emotion, changed everything. It’s imprecise but if we can translate something from one spoken script and find it pared with mine and another untranslated spoken script we can learn more of what we don’t understand.

I don’t only mean it’s changed our understanding of them, it’s also changed us. Thanks to my discovery, my people have eagerly embraced a part of an alien culture long since lost. We have adopted this script they created and have begun writing our own sounds. We have embraced the tools they used to make resonate. We have poured our voices into their echoes and made our own. We’ve become a little bit like them. This sound, this…music, we can’t escape it now, it’s a part of us.

Now, like a line in that first song.

Maopopo kuʻu ʻike i ka nani

[I realize your beauty]

Excuse my poorly written idea, it was just stuck in my head all morning and I had to get it out. It should be simple to figure out what the first song is, but if anyone is wondering what I had in mind for the second song discovered, I was thinking Twinkle, twinkle little star. The rest I didn’t give much thought to.