His voice was slurred from the effort of concentrating over Scrupilo's thoughts. "When you touch the four/three square and say --" he made the alien sounds; they were all very easy to do "-- the screen shows a collection of pictures. They seem to match the squares. I think we ... we are being given choices." Hm. "The box could end up training us." If this is a machine, we need some new definitions. "... Very well, let's play with it." Three hours passed. Toward the end,
clearence on mbt shoes, even Vendacious had moved a member nearer the screen; the noise in the room verged on mindless chaos. And everybody had suggestions; "say that", "press this",
mbt clearance sale, "last time it said that, we did thus and so". There were intricate colored designs, sprinkled with things that must have been written language. Tiny, two-legged figures scampered across the screen, shifting the symbols, opening little windows.... Scriber Jaqueramaphan's idea was quite right. The first pictures were choices. But some of those led to further pictures of choices. The options spread out -- tree-like, Scriber said. He wasn't quite right; sometimes they came back to an earlier point; it was a metaphorical network of streets. Four times they ended in cul de sacs, and had to shut the box and begin again. Vendacious was madly drawing maps of the paths. That would help; there were places they would want to see again. But even he realized there were unnumbered other paths, places that blind exploration would never find. And Woodcarver would have given a good part of her soul for the pictures she had already seen. There were starscapes. There were moons that shone blue and green, or banded orange. There were moving pictures of alien cities, of thousands of aliens so close that they were actually touching. If they ran in packs,
kisumu sandals, those packs were bigger than anything in the world, even in the tropics.... And maybe the question was irrelevant; the cities were beyond anything she ever imagined. Finally Jaqueramaphan backed off. He huddled together. There was a shiver in his voice. "T-there's a whole universe in there. We could follow it forever, and never know...." She looked at the other two. For once, Vendacious had lost his smugness. There were ink stains on all his lips. The writing benches around him were littered with dozens of sketches, some clearer than others. He dropped the pen, and gasped. "I say we take what we have and study it." He began gathering the sketches,
DRE BEATS SOLO, piling them into a neat stack. "Tomorrow, after a good sleep,
MBT Tariki Shoes, our heads will be clear and --" Scrupilo dropped back and stretched. His eyes had excited red rims. "Fine. But leave the sketches, friend Vendacious." He jabbed at the drawings. "See that one and that? It's clear that our blundering gets us plenty of empty results. Sometimes the picture box just locks us out, but much more often we get that picture: No options, just a couple of aliens dancing in a forest and making rhythm sounds. Then if we say --" and he repeated part of the sequence, "-- we get that picture of piles of sticks. The first with one, the second with two,
GHD Limited Edition, and so on." Woodcarver saw it too. "Yes. And a figure comes out and points to each of the piles and says a short noise by each." She and Scrupilo stared at each other, seeing the same gleam in each others' eyes. The excitement of learning, of finding order where there had seemed only chaos. It had been a hundred years since she last felt this way. "Whatever this thing is ... it's trying to teach us the Two-Legs' language." In the days that followed, Johanna Olsndot had lots of time to think.
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