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The Pursuit of Knowledge
“Thank you for your time, Ms. Bel. It is an honor to speak with you.”
“Honor Shmonor. Happy to talk about those days. You know, all these years you are the first who has come looking for my story? All the other jackals come looking for a narrative, or want something about the shiny new thing. It’s refreshing to get to tell it like it was.”
I am sitting in the parlor of Ms. Karen Bel, linguist and foremost expert on the alien races which occupied the two ships of Contact. It was her effort to find examples of written language from the debris, it was her effort that allowed her to piece together everything we know about the alien races, and it was her effort that allowed us to unlock the secrets the debris from the two ships held. Ultimately, Ms. Karen Bel is the Grandmother of Interstellar Travel—not because she invented it, but because her efforts at translation allowed humanity to reverse engineer the technology. She is in good spirits and good health for her age, and retains her famous no-nonsense talk. While I have lightly edited the transcript of the conversation for clarity, the recording of the full interview—unedited, just as it occurred—can be found on my website.
“Take us back to the events of Contact, and the events immediately following it. When did you know you wanted to be involved?”
“Ha! I never knew I wanted to be involved. Like most things in life, it kind of just happened. I was in Paris, studying linguistics when the ships arrived. I had just started my graduate studies. To be perfectly honest I was not all that interested at first. I saw the headlines in my feed and talked to my girlfriends about it on messaging apps. But beyond that it was over there, elsewhere, out of sight out of mind. It was a distraction. I was studying linguistics, let the alien experts study the aliens.
“The ship itself was never particularly high in the Parisian sky. We saw it at the apex and sometimes caught some stunning views of the things but I wasn’t outside gawking at it. I might’ve had a different opinion if I lived near the equator, but I didn’t so that’s that.
“When the whole thing blew up and the aliens started blasting each other, again—I watched out of the corner of my eye. It was a thing that was happening, but it wasn’t MY thing. Then the second ship blasted away and zapped half the globe—luckily Paris was just beyond the range of the EMP effect but I had some friends in Madrid who had a scary time there.
“I don’t know, I kind of hate to say it but I just wasn’t interested. I was 23 years old, I was young, I was living my best life. I wasn’t thinking about my career, I didn’t have a career, I had spent my whole life in school and trying to earn a quick buck to pay for whatever I could.
“What caught my attention was when they said the alien ship—the first one, the diamond looking one?— When they said it would be falling into the atmosphere. Now I was curious. There was something attainable. Alien artifacts—alien language—would be available to study. How cool is that? As a linguist, it is really hard to look at something with fresh eyes. Words have meaning and the way humans talk is all very similar. We flap our jaw and move the meat around our mouths and push air through it, there’s only so many sounds we can make.
“Crossing language families is the closest we come to truly foreign languages. Some people will try to impress you and say, ‘oh I speak seven different languages’ but then they’ll tell you it’s Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, English, German, and Latin. That’s great, but that’s all Romance Languages or Romance-adjacent—it’s all in the same cluster within the Indo-European language family. They share roots for pete’s sake. If you ever meet someone who can speak French, Urdu, Bisaya, Finnish, Quechua, Mandarin, and Swahili with equal fluency—there’s someone who has mastered language. Their knowledge transcends language families, they have had to relearn language from the ground up multiple times.
“So getting a language that is truly alien—that excited me. We would get to see how biology interfaced with language, how language affected design, how form and function fit together in terms of words spoken by a race that didn’t evolve in the terrestrial soup. THAT excited me.
“My professor at the university was connected somehow to the European Space Agency and when it became apparent that the ship was going to re-enter, they started assembling a team of people to study the artifacts. We didn’t anticipate how hotly contested this would be—it was intended as an academic mission. Again—I was at this point intrigued but not, you know, invested. But my professor approached me and told me he would fast track my thesis and the school would pay for my education sight-unseen, if I would join their multidisciplinary academic team that was being deployed. The way I’ve said it makes it sound like an offer, but it wasn’t—I was being requisitioned by the government, see what I mean? They were telling me I would be compensated for the work I was about to be required to do.
“Perks of being top of my class, you know? Anyway, so what could I say? I let them take me.
“The first meeting was four hours after that—enough time to get the whole team in one room. Some ESA suit came and told us what they knew about the debris field. The ship had split into two chunks, and the debris was going to be spread in a long arc between Africa, the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The second chunk was going to spread mostly in the pacific but some chunks would land near Hawaii, Mexico, and the Southwest US.
“Then another military suit talked expectations. After the laser blast in the Atlantic, the nations of the world were aware that there were incredible and untold alien technologies available, and they anticipated a bit of a race to collect debris. Academic teams were being readied because it would be very important to try to look at the debris in-situ—it would be almost impossible to analyze properly once different governments got their hands on it and started deconstructing and reverse engineering and erasing all traces of things.
“They presumed that it would be a big easter-egg hunt, and everyone would respect finders-keepers. Shows how much faith in humanity they had. Sheesh. Anyway, they told us that the debris would start re-entering the atmosphere within a few hours and give us a spectacular light show. We were going to be taken to a military base to get on helicopters and my team was going to be focusing on debris in Algeria. And that was that—between being approached for this thing and getting on a helicopter to go to Algeria, was about 6 hours. I tried to tell myself I was just going to have fun with it, but I was not prepared for what happened.”
Thank You For Reading!
Part 3 begins! We are rapidly approaching the conclusion of this Sandbox Earth series. What do you think of it so far?
My prequel series continues! I hope you are enjoying. I am very excited to be bringing this series of deep lore from the Adventures of Tylus Worran to you, and I hope you are enjoying it. It tells the story of the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars.
Thank you for reading, and God Bless you!
This was great! Reminded of the move Arrival which is also about a linguist studying an alien language.
Very exciting