WEATHER THE STORM
By Neil Douglas Newton
Dr. Messenberg slapped some papers on his desk in front of me. “I suppose you knew you’d get this,” he grumbled.
I just smiled. Being the star of the linguistics department I usually got what I wanted. I had to admit this grant was a bit more spectacular than anything I’d previously proposed. It was, by all standards, the linguistic study to trump all past linguistic studies.
I was at the end of a long line of dialect geographers, all searching for the secret of how a dialect is contained in a geographical area. Like any fringe discipline dialect geography has become an orgy of different core subjects coming together to create…something. Geographers, socio-linguists, linguists, statisticians, economists. The works. I’d been handed a major mystery. Though most laymen were convinced that American English was leading toward total standardization, thanks to the English used by television talking heads, the reality was that there was a previously unexplainable mystery that had all linguists talking. It was a vowel shift, a strange pronunciation of a vowel that had no known origin. It hadn’t come from any source anyone could identify.
While I know that dialect geography isn’t exciting and hearing about this epic mystery would make most people’s eyes glaze over, the truth is that for those that study mankind, it is a fascinating change in the history of how our languages work.
I look at my work this way: In a world of chaos, lack of cohesion, entropy and other forces, what makes people speak with the same dialect in a geographical area? What’s an even better question is, what forms the borders between those areas? Is it a gradual change or are there sharp geographical divisions in dialect?
What makes a phrase spoken by one person become part of slang that is on everyone’s lips within a year? Why is all soda called pop in some places and coke in other places? Why would certain soci-economic classes of people rather die than leave off the final “g” in words ending with “ing”? These mysteries reflect our history and our culture and tell the story of a nation.
And why would a small part of the population suddenly pronounce a vowel differently for no apparent reason? What historical forces made this happen? I was going to find out.
It’s been a question that has plagued all dialect geographers. And I’d developed a mathematical model to explain the way accents morph into a new dialect across a physical geographical plain. Unlike many of my predecessors, I’d injected a strong dose of economics into my model, treating areas like Chicago differently than a small city like Mobile. A large metropolitan area that has people commuting to work from miles away does its magic on a much wider area of people in terms of their dialect.
I’d decided that I’d put my model to a real test. Up till then I had done some dry runs, targeting small areas of perhaps thirty miles. This time I would show my stuff. I knew that I’d be hated, both for my success and my arrogance. I was used to that. Solving the mystery of the odd vowel pronunciation in only a few states would be my ticket to scholarly fame.
My life didn’t start with the success I’d experienced in academe(?). My childhood was what I’d have to call average until I was seven when I started having headaches which recurred several times a week. They only became worse as time went by. When I began having mild hallucinations my mother, a nurse, decided that things were serious. She was proved right; they found a benign tumor that was still small enough to be removed without significantdamage.
The surgery was a success, but I was never to be the same. The headaches continued though I was able to fight them off with migraine medicine. The hallucinations, which had been horrific before the operation, became an occasional problem. But they never completely disappeared. When they would plague me, I’d spend a day or two seeing people that weren’t there. Usually they were people I’d neverseen before, but occasionally I’d see a face I’d see a face repeated. That made me think the people were real. Despite my panic, itwas easy for my parents to pass it off as the after effects of my surgery and they’d ignore my childish expressions of fear in the way adults do. “They’re only dreams,” my mother would say. My father would tell me to stop being silly. “It’s your vivid imagination.” They ignored my complaints of flashing lights, long tunnels, and the peculiar halos that sometimes surrounded the heads of these strangers in my mind. As a child I had no reference to describe the odor of what I later came to identify as sulfur.
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I walked out of the humanities building into a beautiful spring day. I’d been obsessing about the logistics of the study. In my mind was a map of the study area, with the city as a node in the middle and growing areas of suburban settlement moving out from the center. I played out the gradual changes in accent and language elements, seeing the changes in language that I knew would be there.
Like an expectant father I hurried to the computer center to run the model, even though I knew what the results would be. I walked back to the terminal room and brought up the program; for the sake of shaking out any problems it was being run over a small sample of test data taken from a small city sixty miles from the university. The program had been developed to show language change over a geographical area. This rendered the results as shifting colored lines. I could see the geographical area we were targeting as a series of lines moving across from the inner city to the outlying areas. The lines changed colors as the dialect of one area morphed slowly to the next incrementally changed dialect of a new geographical node. The change was gradual, moving through all the gradations, through the primary colors and the non-primary colors. There was an expected series of color change if the model was working correctly, something I knew would happen, this being the tenth time I’d run it this week.
I smiled as I saw everything moving according to plan. I was keeping the model in my head, following it as I’d done many times. Then I heard someone call to me. I turned to see one of my students. We waved and I turned back to the screen.
To my horror something had gone terribly wrong. The one color I didn’t want to see was pink. That meant the model had failed. And all of the lines, the entire study, was a bright pink that screamed failure. I had run this model on computers a hundred times. I had played it out in my head repeatedly. I leaned back and felt a wave of dizziness come over me and I knew in a second that a headache was coming on. While I rarely got headaches, the sad fact was that what constituted a headache for me made the worst migraine seem tame.
I ran to my car, falling into the driver’s seat and immediately reaching for my pills in the glove compartment. I pulled out a bottle of water and downed the pills quickly, hoping I could stave off the worst of the headache.
I sat there, colors washing across my sight. A ghost image of my model floated at the edge of my vision, still an accusatory pink. It was time to go; I started the car and raced out of the parking lot.
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I didn’t go in to the office the next day. I had to start interviewing my linguistic research interns if the study was to start on time. As I lay in bed, I began to see colors in my right eye. It was a migraine plus whatever leftovers remained from my surgery. The pain was tolerable, thanks to some excellent medication. I tried my best not to think of my timetable for the project and all the people I wasn’t interviewing that day.
I could handle pain; I was so used to it. What was really eating at me was my odd experience with my model. It was foolproof; we’d tested it in computer simulations and it gave the same results no matter who ran it. So why did it fail? Or did it fail? Was the complete shutdown of the model due to my surgery years ago? I’d had hundreds of episodes where I stood with people and saw something that no one else saw, usually followed by a headache. Maybe it was just a biological anomaly in my brain. I’d spent my whole life in fear that somehow my surgery would ruin me. No more star of the linguistics department. No more grants. No more lording it over my jealous and belligerent brother at Christmas.
My brother had been a sore subject all my life. He’d laughed when he heard I was going into linguistics, saying, “You’ll be eating beans for the rest of your life. That’s if you get a job teaching in the first place.” It had been sweet going back home in the last few years, wearing a Rolex watch and driving a Mercedes. Being a prodigy, writing books, working for computer companies on their voice recognition software, and guest speaking had changed my life completely. My brother had a used tire store. He had thought it would make him a bundle and that he’d be able to open a hundred stores, becoming the tire king of Philadelphia. Somehow it had never worked out. I knew it ate at him.
When I’d come home from the hospital as a child I’d spent quite a while with bandages on my head, going to physical therapy and being generally creepy. My brother called me Frankenstein for years, even when the surgery was a distant memory. Being a big success gave me a chance to look him in the eye and laugh. I was getting mine back.
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The next day I was almost functional. Even if I hadn’t been pain free, I’d have gone in. There was a brief time window for this study; it had to be up and running within a short time. That meant that I had to start interviewing students for the positions I’d have to fill. Dialect changes had to be tracked over a geographic area. Each of my interns would have to work with other interns to track the various changes in language as the team moved across the geographical area of the study.
I went into the office early and ran my model again. No problems; it was perfect. I ran it again three times before I convinced myself that the failure was due to an anomaly. I lay back in my chair and closed my eyes, drifting off into a state of semi-sleep. Suddenly there was a knock on my door that shattered the uneasy reverie I had fallen into. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew I had to be on my game for these interviews. Even one unperceptive turd could ruin the study with incorrect data and inept conclusions. There would be very little time to remedy any mistakes made. These interns had to hit the ground running.
My first interviewee was a young woman who I’d had in my semantics class. Her movements were quick and jerky, a twitchy type. She looked at me with a face full of earnestness as I sat down behind my desk. I immediately disliked her; I wasn’t a fan of idealism but I needed interviewers so I put my bias aside. I saw that she held the abstract of the study; it was dog-eared and rumpled, giving me the impression that she’d attempted to memorize it. I winced.
I looked down at her references. “Susan Boyd. I see that you’ve read the abstract. What do you think makes you the type of person to be an interviewer in this study? I’ll start by saying that we have a really small window of time. We aren’t in position to perform re-dos on gathering this information. It could kill the entire study. Now what do you see as your role?”
She straightened her back. “I thought about this last night. I would suggest the use of minimal pairs combined with readings of” “Hold it. Did you read the abstract?”
“Several times.”
“Did you read the part about the importance of commuting to work daily to the city from semi-rural areas? Did you read the part about retirees moving to the rural areas from out of state? The socio-economic characteristics of the speaker?”
Her nose twitched. I found that very disturbing. “Yes. I did read that. But the classical field work emphasizes the interviewing process”-
“I’m aware of the importance of the interviewing process. Of course we have to interview people to measure change in dialect over a geographical area. But I know that in the abstract I emphasized a more agile approach, including elements of socio-linguistics and economics. Not just vanilla pronunciation issues and vowel shifts. This is a bit more subtle than the classic interviewing techniques you learned about in Linguistics 101.”
I suddenly had the awful feeling that she was going to cry. Her mouth twitched. “I would really appreciate the opportunity to work with you. You’re considered the most cutting edge scholar in the field. I realize that I have a lot to learn but I will read the abstract again and make sure that I look for the elements that you’re seeking.”
I’m not big on politeness which has been my downfall in the past. In the end the supply of potential interns wasn’t large. While I wanted to tell this oh so sincere soi-disant scholar that she wasn’t intelligent or experienced enough to tell the difference in dialect between a Chinese monk and a southern Baptist, I had to be realistic. She can be taught, I told myself, not quite believing it.
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I interviewed five more. One was perfect; the rest not so wonderful. Susan Boyd was right. My work was cutting edge. But as good as that was, it also guaranteed that the average linguistics student was more than likely to misunderstandwhat I was trying to establish with this study.
What causedmy department chairman to fallin love with me was the basis of the study. Though for most people linguistics is like watching paint dry, for linguists I was chasing after the holy grail. Consider this: most people believe that American English is becoming standardized across geographical boundaries. Put in simpler terms, the idea is that watching the news, movies and television would drum the standard American dialect into everyone’s head until, eventually, all Americans would sound approximately the same.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Sometime in the mid-twentieth century there was significant change in the pronunciation of certain vowels in five Mid-west states. This was not caused by the talking heads on the news; the variation in the way this vowel is pronounced is different than the dialect laymen call “American Standard”, the dialect used by new anchors.
So why was this happening? No one knows. And what I have in mind is to find the geographical boundaries of this linguistic oddity. And once I do, I can use statistical analysis to find the most likely source of the vowel shift, to define what caused it. The implications were enormous: if my model worked well it could be used to analyze other dialect anomalies across the country, or even across the world.
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In the end I did choose Susan Boyd. Enthusiasm was better than an indifferent student simply wanting extra credit and a few bucks. There were two more, one a Masters student named Daniel who seemed to get the idea of the study, the other a linguistics student close to getting his M.S. His name, Spike, worried me until I found that he was more than able to follow the basis of my study, I took them to dinner a few days before we left for our jumping off point in western Wisconsin. That would be the place that we’d staked out as the western edge of the vowel shift.
I watched them closely as we worked at our Thai food. Any kind of conflict could make a study into a nightmare. Data collection takes focus and petty spats can make that into oatmeal. Though the outcome was still murky, I was happy to see that this crew was getting along. Susan Boyd seemed like she was in heaven, trading witty repartee with two male students way above her level. By her second glass of wine she was laughing and, to my great disgust, flirtingwith Daniel, the graduate student.
I was drinking scotch, the drink of writers and intellectuals. As I watched the three of them I got a strange sensation in my head. It wasn’t like a migraine coming on but more like some of the sensations I’d had after my surgery when I was a kid. I saw the far wall recede and then rush forward as though it was going to hit me in the face. The three students became indistinct, going in and out of focus.
What came next scared me. I sawpeople who were not in the restaurant, popping in and out of existence every other second. I took a good gulp from my scotch, hoping it would clear my head, but my phantom guests continued their disappearing and reappearing act. I staredat them though they didn’t seem to notice me. Not a strange thing for non-existent men and woman to do.
“Are you okay?” Daniel asked.
“Uh…yes. Fine”
“You look strange.”
“I always look strange.” I did my best to smile while I watched my phantom friends act like Christmas lights.
“I’m just wondering if you need to go home. There’s no color in your face.”
I had been staring at the phantoms the whole time. I was scared but not half as scared as I was about to be. One of them got an odd look on his face. He popped out and when he returned, he was pointing at me. In seconds all of them were staring back at me. Another pointed in my direction.
I stood up quickly, knocking over my scotch. The three students stared at me. I was breathing hard, looking away from my phantoms in the hope that shaking my head would make them go away.
I looked up slowly. I got a brief glimpse of them. In that second I saw the one that had pointed at me move his hand laterally. And that was the last thing I saw for the next few hours.
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I woke up in the hospital. My first image was of a nurse standing over me. I sat up with a jerk, the fear I’d felt just before I’d passed out still at work in my mind.
“Whoa!” the nurse said. “You need to lie back. We don’t know what’s wrong with you.”
For a second I debated whether I should tell her that I’d seen phantom people while I was eating green curry, just to see the look on her face; in the end I decided that they needed to know what had happened if they were going to help me. I followed her order and lay back down. “I guess I should tell you I had a brain tumor as a child. I’ve had odd…episodes all my life. Nothing much lately. Tonight I saw-not saw- but it seemed like I saw people in the restaurant. They faded in and out from my sight. They weren’t there. I know that.”
She stood stock still for a second. “I’m going to get the doctor”.
Ten minutes later a doctor walked into the room. He pulled up one of the visitor’s chairs and sat near to my bed. “Nurse Cortez told me what you told her. I appreciate the honesty because we could have taken hours to find out your basic problem. This surgery you had as a child; what were the after effects?”
“Headaches. Sight issues. Hallucinations. Balance problems. I still get mega migraines but not that often.”
“What about the hallucinations?”
“Recently? Rarely. Tonight was an unwelcome reminder of my childhood.”
“Did you feel pain when you hadthis hallucination.”
“No. Not pain. But it was like there was some pressure in my head and I felt disoriented.”
“I think that we’ll need to do an MRI. I’m sure there are some physical abnormalities in your brain from the surgery.”
“But why now after all these years?”
He spread his hands. “The brain is still mostly unknown territory. Changes take place in everyone’s brain as they grow. In your case there’s probably some damage that is being exacerbated by any number of factors as you get older.”
“Oh god. I thought I was done with this.”
“I wouldn’t panic if I were you. Remember that you had hallucinations. You didn’t have a hemorrhage or sight loss. Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”
“Frankly…yes.”
“It could be that. Let us do the MRI and we’ll see.”
“Is there a chance the tumor could have regrown?”
“Possible but unlikely. You went through this the first time so you’ll remember. The symptoms of having a large tumor are a little more spectacular than one anomaly involving hallucinations.”
“Okay.”
He put his hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t worry. Let’s see what we find.”
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For those that have never experienced an MRI, it’s like sitting near a bad conga circle that can’t keep time. The sounds that you have to endure are awful, much like someone is outside the machine with a hammer. What’s worse is that you can’t move enough to make yourself more comfortable. FourtyForty-five minutes of this hell before I was able to get up and stretch my legs.
I went back to setting up the study, meeting daily with the three students to go over the plan. For Susan, in her inexperience, I had to emphasize the use of intuition and statistical methods to validate that our results were significant. I was happy to see that she seemed to be becoming more relaxed and even brought some good ideas to the table. Considering my health issues I was going to have to rely heavily on the judgment of my interviewers.
A week later I met with my doctor. I found that I was more nervous that I thought I would be. It had been years since my tumor had been an issue and I supposed that I was living in denial, thinking that I was over the hard part when I had no reason to believe that. Over the previous week I had remembered things that my doctors had said when I was child about possible “complications”. Somewhere along the line I had buried my fears and ignored the possibilities. Undoubtedly this was due to my parents influence and their own fears of admitting their child was less than healthy.
I sat down across the desk from my doctor. He studied me, his face darkening. “Are you okay?”
“This is very undignified. As you may have realized I’m not very tolerant of frustration. People often find me irritating. This problem threatens my work and my reputation.”
I became more annoyed because he laughed. “Excuse me,” he said. “Most of my patients are consumed by fear. That’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. . You just seem pissed off.”
“Let’s just say I’ve had it with the whole brain tumor thing. I was a freak when I was a kid. My own brother picked on me mercilessly. I’ve made a name for myself and want the brain tumor and any residual effects to just go away.”
“I understand. Really. I was a nerd as a child. I know what demons little kids can be. But I think you should feel relieved. I’ve looked over the MRI results and I can’t see that there has been any degradation in your brain’s structure near the site of the surgery; your brain has healed well. I got to look at your imaging from when you were a child. I can’t see any problems. If there was a consistent, growing change in your brain you’d have far more serious episodes than one hallucination. If there was a real problem it would have manifested itself by now.”
“So what was the manifestation I experienced the other night?”
“Stress. Indigestion. Sinus issues. You do have a volatile region in your brain. It will show itself when other factors enter the picture.”
“So what is your prognosis?”
“I would guess that you may have episodes like this again in your life but not often. You should go ahead and continue making your name in your field.”
I snorted. “I guess I have to accept that.”
“Are you unhappy? Would you rather that I told you that your tumor has returned?”
“Onward, ever onward!” I answered. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” I smirked. “Is that positive enough for you?”
“Glass half empty, eh?”
“Being a freak and missing school for two years has a negative effect on the psyche”.
“Understandable. A lot of my patients don’t have a good outlook on life.”
We stared at each other for a moment. “Well, I would like to have you come back in a month to check on you. You never know about these things.”
“I suppose.” I had to love this doctor. He encouraged me on one hand and covered his ass on the other.
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I left feeling angry. I didn’t have any reason to be. It seemed I was okay. Yet I started having feelings I hadn’t had since I was a child; feelings I had suppressed for years and was now being reminded of.
My medical issues had put me back a few days; I flew out to Madison to meet my team. The previous couple of days they had been interviewing people according to my schedule. There were recordings I had to go over. I got there at night and was so bummed out that I just went to sleep, not being my usual bulldog self. Susan Boyd wanted to show me what she had accomplished and was crestfallen when I begged off from drinks in the hotel bar and went to bed.
The next morning my mood wasn’t much better. I had had nightmares the night before, something that had plagued me as a child. I was hoping that as long as I hung on, things would go back to normal. I hadn’t realized how much I’d enjoyed being a star at something. It had eclipsed the sickly freak I’d been as a child.
I did my best to put my mind on auto-pilot. I’d hidden my anger and disgust with humanity all my adult life by playing a part. I could do it again. My team came to my room. I ordered room service that included two bottles of wine. I wanted to maintain the image that we were elite; that this was a party for our success, even though we hadn’t succeeded yet.
I lay on my bed and listened to the interviews. In this phase of the study we were concentrating on what I felt to be the most fascinating part of the vowel shift. Think of the word cat. We learn in school that the vowel sound in that word is a short “a”. It’s the same sound in words like “that” or “bat”. What had happened in several areas from western New York State to western Wisconsin was that many people had started, during the sixties, to pronounce the work “cat” like “Key-et”: two syllables where only one actually exists, with a long “e” sound inserted in the first syllable.
Not quite a phenomenon with the reach of the Russian revolution, but a mystery none the less. Why did this happen? No one was sure. But I would be certain once I gathered all the data. I would trace the change back in time using data collected over decades. And I’d find the “patient zero” that had brought this change to the English Language.
Each recording was preceded by a short verbal introduction by the interviewer, usually highlighted by some condescending remarks about the interviewee. “If he had four teeth I’d be surprised”. “She made dinner table decorations out of light bulbs. She wrote down directions on how to make them, like we cared.”
I smiled. Condescension always brought up my spirits. I followed the geographical trail in my mind as I heard each recording. I knew when and where these recordings were taken; it was part of a line west out of the Madison metropolitan area. The first ten or so recordings had the characteristic vowel shift. The word “That” became “The-yet”, the “y” sounding like a long “e”.
Around the sixth recording I started to get odd sensations in my head. What alarmed me most is that these were the same sensations I’d experienced in the restaurant a little over a week before. I’d been visualizing the pattern of dialect change in my head. As expected the odd vowel shift had begun to weaken slightly as the interviews moved west. Then there was a sharp pain and I heard an accent that, to my trained ear, sounded like an east Tennessee dialect.
I sat up suddenly. “Where did that come from?” I asked my team.
Daniel stared at me. “Where did what come from?”
“That fucking accent. Is this a joke?”
“What are you talking about?”
I got a bad feeling. I was good at reading people and Daniel seemed panicked and angry. With my hand shaking, I pointed at the recorder. “Replay that last interview from the beginning.”
Daniel rushed to comply, stealing glances in my direction. He went back to the beginning of the interview and hit play. I heard the interviewer, Susan in this case, asked the subject to say the word “rat”. What I heard was an East Tennessee accent as I had before. No Midwestern vowel shift. Not even close to the right dialect I was expecting. We were in Wisconsin and the interviewee was speaking with the wrong accent entirely.
“You don’t hear that?” I screamed. All three of them jumped up.
Susan put her hands out. “What is wrong, Jeff? It’s the vowel shift, just like we expected.
I felt my world moving out from under me. “It’s an East Tennessee accent!” I screamed again.
Susan’s eyes widened. “What are you saying? We’re not in Tennessee! All the interviews were done here in Wisconsin. Where do you think we are?”
I tried to speak, but what could I possibly say? Either I was being played by all three of them, an unlikely scenario, or I was going insane. Or perhaps my brain was shutting down, finally being consumed by the hole they’d created when they removed my tumor. I could almost see it happening in my head; the angry maw of the surgery site eating the rest of my brain.
I sat down and poured a large scotch and knocked it back in one gulp. That didn’t seem to do any good so I drank another four fingers or so. And then I looked up. I saw the same people I’d seen in the restaurant, the phantoms. Only this time they weren’t popping in and out of existence. They were solid and they were staring at me with horrified looks on their faces. The man who had pointed at me back in the restaurant said something to a woman in the group, in a language I didn’t recognize. Training took over; I began analyzing the language for its characteristics and probable language group. It sounded somewhat guttural. But in the end I realize that it wasn’t similar enough to any language I’d ever heard for me to even coming close to identifying it.
They all walked toward me. “You see us, don’t you?” one of them said.
I smiled. If I was going to go insane I would do it in style. “Scotch?” I lifted my glass, offering to share my libation with them. “This is excellent. Straight from Islay. I recommend it.”
The man who’d pointed at me at the restaurant smiled. “I’m Seth. I think we need to talk.”
“What about my team here. They are,” I’d turned around as I was speaking. My “team” had lain down on the floor and gone to sleep.
“They won’t remember anything. There will be logical narrative in their minds that explains the time they spent on the project. You don’t need to worry about them.”
“If I’m crazy then what does it matter what you say?”
“I can see why you might think that. The best thing to do now is to take you to our offices and explain things to you. I think there will be some relief from hearing the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked. “The truth of my life?”
“Actually, yes.”
I started to pour another drink when Seth waved his hand to stop me. “Just relax.” He smiled. “We have better stuff where were going”.
Before I could say anything I felt a sense of disorientation, as though I was spinning. The next moment found me on what could only be described as a couch. I sat up and Seth stepped into the room. He pulled up a chair and sat next to me. “We put you to sleep before we brought you here. Our method of transportation takes some getting used to. I felt you had gone through enough at that point.”
“How long have I been sleeping?”
“About six hours. You were exhausted.”
“You realize I’m having a debate in my head as to the reality of this. Maybe this is just another hallucination.”
“I think that you’ll find all of this to be real once you recover your…equilibrium.”
“If I do re-acquire my equilibrium.”
“We want to help you do that.”
“We?”
“Guess it’s time to spill my guts.”
“It could be useful.”
“Imagine this. Throughout the universe there is a…well I’d have to compare it to the weather. Imagine that stable reality and probability are the base state of all the universe. But like a sunny day with a beautiful blue sky there will come a weather front; cloudy days, rain, hail. So like the coming of a period of bad weather we have a period of what can only be called inconsistent probability. Or changing probability.”
“What?”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper and began shredding it. After a couple of minutes he had a wadded ball of paper, totally shredded. He smiled at me. Then he threw the paper up in the air, letting the pieces fly in different directions.
“Weeeee!” I offered.
“Yes. It is a bit child-like. But I’ll ask you if you see a pattern to the distribution of the pieces.”
“No. That type of thing is, while not quite random, it’s not subject to a strong pattern. Like dice, it’s virtually random.”
“Exactly. Imagine if the whole world was like shreds of paper thrown up in the air. Would there be dialects spoken by millions of people in one area. Or would randomness create what you would call an idiolect for each person. I am using the right word.”
“If you mean that every man, woman and child would have their own way of speaking then you’re using the right word.”
“Yes. In fact it’s possible that everyone would have their own language. And even that wouldn’t be stable. And that’s what the earth is going through now. Dialects, movement, houses, mountains, even people. With varying probability things change, sometimes drastically. This hit the earth around twenty years ago. We can control some of the larger things. We can stop houses from moving or cars from turning into mud; this involves the physical safety of everyone on earth. But there are smaller things that are harder to control. Things of the mind, like language. Or memory. For those things we have to convince your minds that certain things are happening. Ironically one of these things is language. There is the story of Babel in your Bible. Without our help no one would be able to understand each other. In reality, everyone has their own dialect, as long as this probability storm persists.”
“So you’re saying that comprehensible language is an illusion? And we’re being convinced that it is real?”
“Yes. I know that is upsetting to you.”
“What about my friends. My colleagues. Is the linguistics department an illusion? Does it exist?”
“You are guided to believe that it exists. The same with your colleagues. And so it does. We strive to create artifacts like a linguistics department because such things existed before this probability storm. The reality is that if we didn’t look after you, the meaning, purpose, even the members of department might change. Or the department would cease to exist. You’d all wander off to do different things that suddenly became reality for that moment. Or some of you might disappear. This is so complex there’s no way I can accurately describe the scope of the problem.”
“And you and your friends. Who are you?”
“There is a race of what you define as Aliens. This problem of shifting reality occurs all over the Galaxy, like dark cloud that moves from one place to another. Or should I say, clouds. There ismore than one of them. Many races have been destroyed by these clouds. Either they are physically harmed by changes in the topography…rocks grow out of the ground or move killing the inhabitants of a planet. Or changes in the mind cause insanity as reality changes. The race I’m talking about has made it their mission to allow races to mature enough to join the league of races. They saw the potential disaster on earth years before it came. They sent their own here and began to train humans to protect humanity.”
“I’m confused. How does this race of Aliens avoid the effects of the changes? Do they create illusions for their own race to keep them from going insane?”
He smiled. “It’s a matter of maturity for the race. Once you reach a certain stage in your evolution these reality shifts don’t affect you. You create your own reality within the pockets of unreality. It’s like having an umbrella in the rain.”
“Are you human?”
He laughed. “Of course. I was raised and trained by…we call them Ascendants. Their name in their own language would be difficult for you to pronounce.”
“So what happens to me?”
“We can work on your brain. You’d forget everything you’ve seen. Though there is the risk that it won’t work. Yoursurgery when you were a child is the reason you’re able to see things that other humans can’t.”
“Great.”
“There’s another option. One I hope you’ll consider seriously. The work we do for the human race is important. You have a unique perspective. You could help us.”
“What could I do?”
“A lot. There are other people like you. Sometimes it isn’t even due to an accident or illness. Some people have brains that are constructed oddly and they see pieces of reality. We need those people to help us do our work. You can introduce them to the new reality.” He smiled.
I hung my head. He looked at me with what was clearly pity. “You have to give me some time.”I croaked. “I can’t give you an answer now.”
“I didn’t expect you would. Why don’t you rest? We have a room set up for you. Take a couple of days. If you have any questions, please ask for me.”
“Okay.”
I was led to a room where I simply lay down. There was a bottle of scotch on a table near the bed but I didn’t feel that even alcohol would help me in the state I was in. I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.
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I woke up and, looking at the clock, I realized I’d slept for seventeen hours. I went out into the hall; a man I hadn’t seen before walked by. “Are you hungry?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Let me take you to the cafeteria.”
I grunted and let him lead me. There were only a few people in the cafeteria; it seemed I had slept passed lunch. I sat down and they brought me some pasta. I was hungrier than I thought, putting away my meal in ten minutes. Another bowl appeared before me and I got through it in five minutes.
I was licking my bowl when Seth showed up. “Good to see you have an appetite. Have you given any thought to what I discussed with you yesterday?
“Well it occurs to me that if I decide to go for the mind meld, I’ll be an expert in dialects that don’t exist. A noble pursuit. One worthy of all my education. Which by the way is an illusion as well. I’m not sure I could go back to being an automaton. Could you give me more of an idea what I would have to do for the Ascendants?”
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Six months passed quickly. I found that in addition to being taught the truth of how the universe worked, there were modifications done on my mind and body. I wasn’t able to create a personal reality but I could affect people’s thoughts if I needed to protect people from reality. Most of the illusion, including the one that created the perception of language groups, was handled by devices provided by the Ascendants. I would only intervene if it was needed. I couldn’t really call the devices the ascendants used “machines” because they were part living tissue. The complexity of what I was learning was daunting and I sometimes wondered if I wanted to go through with it. I had learned that my training would last for at least a decade. Just about everything I had to learn was so far beyond my understanding that I might as well have been back in kindergarten.
My so-called career in the linguistics department was resolved easily; as far as any of my colleagues and students are concerned, they’d never met me. At first I was horrified at the thought of manipulating people’s memories but after six months of training I learned that fooling my old colleagues was child’s play compared to what was done in an hour by people like Seth. And it was all necessary.
On a whim I took a walk through a shopping mall to listen to the dialects being used. I was horrified for the first few minutes. I was able to access their thoughts and could follow their conversations but the reality was a mess; it was like a thousand languages were being spoken in that one area, there was no consistency between the languages, no Germanic or romance group. There was only a mess of random noise thatmeant something to the speaker. I found my former linguistic expertise, or my pretention of expertise, embarrassing.
I tried to console myself with the knowledge that I was really going to accomplish something with my new work and that I was no longer a puppet. Yetsomehow I still found myself harboring a small resentment that I’d been allowed by the universe to fool myself into thinking I was a rising star in myworld and that it was all a lie.
I felt a now familiar sensation. No, not the result of my brain surgery. It was a “come hither” from Seth. He wanted to discuss my progress and where I might be most useful. I wasn’t able to transport myself, yet. I had to live with the indignity of having to ask someone to do it for me. I smiled at the vestiges of my overblown pride and wondered if it would ever go away.
I just smiled. Being the star of the linguistics department I usually got what I wanted. I had to admit this grant was a bit more spectacular than anything I’d previously proposed. It was, by all standards, the linguistic study to trump all past linguistic studies.
I was at the end of a long line of dialect geographers, all searching for the secret of how a dialect is contained in a geographical area. Like any fringe discipline dialect geography has become an orgy of different core subjects coming together to create…something. Geographers, socio-linguists, linguists, statisticians, economists. The works. I’d been handed a major mystery. Though most laymen were convinced that American English was leading toward total standardization, thanks to the English used by television talking heads, the reality was that there was a previously unexplainable mystery that had all linguists talking. It was a vowel shift, a strange pronunciation of a vowel that had no known origin. It hadn’t come from any source anyone could identify.
While I know that dialect geography isn’t exciting and hearing about this epic mystery would make most people’s eyes glaze over, the truth is that for those that study mankind, it is a fascinating change in the history of how our languages work.
I look at my work this way: In a world of chaos, lack of cohesion, entropy and other forces, what makes people speak with the same dialect in a geographical area? What’s an even better question is, what forms the borders between those areas? Is it a gradual change or are there sharp geographical divisions in dialect?
What makes a phrase spoken by one person become part of slang that is on everyone’s lips within a year? Why is all soda called pop in some places and coke in other places? Why would certain soci-economic classes of people rather die than leave off the final “g” in words ending with “ing”? These mysteries reflect our history and our culture and tell the story of a nation.
And why would a small part of the population suddenly pronounce a vowel differently for no apparent reason? What historical forces made this happen? I was going to find out.
It’s been a question that has plagued all dialect geographers. And I’d developed a mathematical model to explain the way accents morph into a new dialect across a physical geographical plain. Unlike many of my predecessors, I’d injected a strong dose of economics into my model, treating areas like Chicago differently than a small city like Mobile. A large metropolitan area that has people commuting to work from miles away does its magic on a much wider area of people in terms of their dialect.
I’d decided that I’d put my model to a real test. Up till then I had done some dry runs, targeting small areas of perhaps thirty miles. This time I would show my stuff. I knew that I’d be hated, both for my success and my arrogance. I was used to that. Solving the mystery of the odd vowel pronunciation in only a few states would be my ticket to scholarly fame.
My life didn’t start with the success I’d experienced in academe(?). My childhood was what I’d have to call average until I was seven when I started having headaches which recurred several times a week. They only became worse as time went by. When I began having mild hallucinations my mother, a nurse, decided that things were serious. She was proved right; they found a benign tumor that was still small enough to be removed without significantdamage.
The surgery was a success, but I was never to be the same. The headaches continued though I was able to fight them off with migraine medicine. The hallucinations, which had been horrific before the operation, became an occasional problem. But they never completely disappeared. When they would plague me, I’d spend a day or two seeing people that weren’t there. Usually they were people I’d neverseen before, but occasionally I’d see a face I’d see a face repeated. That made me think the people were real. Despite my panic, itwas easy for my parents to pass it off as the after effects of my surgery and they’d ignore my childish expressions of fear in the way adults do. “They’re only dreams,” my mother would say. My father would tell me to stop being silly. “It’s your vivid imagination.” They ignored my complaints of flashing lights, long tunnels, and the peculiar halos that sometimes surrounded the heads of these strangers in my mind. As a child I had no reference to describe the odor of what I later came to identify as sulfur.
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I walked out of the humanities building into a beautiful spring day. I’d been obsessing about the logistics of the study. In my mind was a map of the study area, with the city as a node in the middle and growing areas of suburban settlement moving out from the center. I played out the gradual changes in accent and language elements, seeing the changes in language that I knew would be there.
Like an expectant father I hurried to the computer center to run the model, even though I knew what the results would be. I walked back to the terminal room and brought up the program; for the sake of shaking out any problems it was being run over a small sample of test data taken from a small city sixty miles from the university. The program had been developed to show language change over a geographical area. This rendered the results as shifting colored lines. I could see the geographical area we were targeting as a series of lines moving across from the inner city to the outlying areas. The lines changed colors as the dialect of one area morphed slowly to the next incrementally changed dialect of a new geographical node. The change was gradual, moving through all the gradations, through the primary colors and the non-primary colors. There was an expected series of color change if the model was working correctly, something I knew would happen, this being the tenth time I’d run it this week.
I smiled as I saw everything moving according to plan. I was keeping the model in my head, following it as I’d done many times. Then I heard someone call to me. I turned to see one of my students. We waved and I turned back to the screen.
To my horror something had gone terribly wrong. The one color I didn’t want to see was pink. That meant the model had failed. And all of the lines, the entire study, was a bright pink that screamed failure. I had run this model on computers a hundred times. I had played it out in my head repeatedly. I leaned back and felt a wave of dizziness come over me and I knew in a second that a headache was coming on. While I rarely got headaches, the sad fact was that what constituted a headache for me made the worst migraine seem tame.
I ran to my car, falling into the driver’s seat and immediately reaching for my pills in the glove compartment. I pulled out a bottle of water and downed the pills quickly, hoping I could stave off the worst of the headache.
I sat there, colors washing across my sight. A ghost image of my model floated at the edge of my vision, still an accusatory pink. It was time to go; I started the car and raced out of the parking lot.
***************************************************************************
I didn’t go in to the office the next day. I had to start interviewing my linguistic research interns if the study was to start on time. As I lay in bed, I began to see colors in my right eye. It was a migraine plus whatever leftovers remained from my surgery. The pain was tolerable, thanks to some excellent medication. I tried my best not to think of my timetable for the project and all the people I wasn’t interviewing that day.
I could handle pain; I was so used to it. What was really eating at me was my odd experience with my model. It was foolproof; we’d tested it in computer simulations and it gave the same results no matter who ran it. So why did it fail? Or did it fail? Was the complete shutdown of the model due to my surgery years ago? I’d had hundreds of episodes where I stood with people and saw something that no one else saw, usually followed by a headache. Maybe it was just a biological anomaly in my brain. I’d spent my whole life in fear that somehow my surgery would ruin me. No more star of the linguistics department. No more grants. No more lording it over my jealous and belligerent brother at Christmas.
My brother had been a sore subject all my life. He’d laughed when he heard I was going into linguistics, saying, “You’ll be eating beans for the rest of your life. That’s if you get a job teaching in the first place.” It had been sweet going back home in the last few years, wearing a Rolex watch and driving a Mercedes. Being a prodigy, writing books, working for computer companies on their voice recognition software, and guest speaking had changed my life completely. My brother had a used tire store. He had thought it would make him a bundle and that he’d be able to open a hundred stores, becoming the tire king of Philadelphia. Somehow it had never worked out. I knew it ate at him.
When I’d come home from the hospital as a child I’d spent quite a while with bandages on my head, going to physical therapy and being generally creepy. My brother called me Frankenstein for years, even when the surgery was a distant memory. Being a big success gave me a chance to look him in the eye and laugh. I was getting mine back.
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The next day I was almost functional. Even if I hadn’t been pain free, I’d have gone in. There was a brief time window for this study; it had to be up and running within a short time. That meant that I had to start interviewing students for the positions I’d have to fill. Dialect changes had to be tracked over a geographic area. Each of my interns would have to work with other interns to track the various changes in language as the team moved across the geographical area of the study.
I went into the office early and ran my model again. No problems; it was perfect. I ran it again three times before I convinced myself that the failure was due to an anomaly. I lay back in my chair and closed my eyes, drifting off into a state of semi-sleep. Suddenly there was a knock on my door that shattered the uneasy reverie I had fallen into. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. I knew I had to be on my game for these interviews. Even one unperceptive turd could ruin the study with incorrect data and inept conclusions. There would be very little time to remedy any mistakes made. These interns had to hit the ground running.
My first interviewee was a young woman who I’d had in my semantics class. Her movements were quick and jerky, a twitchy type. She looked at me with a face full of earnestness as I sat down behind my desk. I immediately disliked her; I wasn’t a fan of idealism but I needed interviewers so I put my bias aside. I saw that she held the abstract of the study; it was dog-eared and rumpled, giving me the impression that she’d attempted to memorize it. I winced.
I looked down at her references. “Susan Boyd. I see that you’ve read the abstract. What do you think makes you the type of person to be an interviewer in this study? I’ll start by saying that we have a really small window of time. We aren’t in position to perform re-dos on gathering this information. It could kill the entire study. Now what do you see as your role?”
She straightened her back. “I thought about this last night. I would suggest the use of minimal pairs combined with readings of” “Hold it. Did you read the abstract?”
“Several times.”
“Did you read the part about the importance of commuting to work daily to the city from semi-rural areas? Did you read the part about retirees moving to the rural areas from out of state? The socio-economic characteristics of the speaker?”
Her nose twitched. I found that very disturbing. “Yes. I did read that. But the classical field work emphasizes the interviewing process”-
“I’m aware of the importance of the interviewing process. Of course we have to interview people to measure change in dialect over a geographical area. But I know that in the abstract I emphasized a more agile approach, including elements of socio-linguistics and economics. Not just vanilla pronunciation issues and vowel shifts. This is a bit more subtle than the classic interviewing techniques you learned about in Linguistics 101.”
I suddenly had the awful feeling that she was going to cry. Her mouth twitched. “I would really appreciate the opportunity to work with you. You’re considered the most cutting edge scholar in the field. I realize that I have a lot to learn but I will read the abstract again and make sure that I look for the elements that you’re seeking.”
I’m not big on politeness which has been my downfall in the past. In the end the supply of potential interns wasn’t large. While I wanted to tell this oh so sincere soi-disant scholar that she wasn’t intelligent or experienced enough to tell the difference in dialect between a Chinese monk and a southern Baptist, I had to be realistic. She can be taught, I told myself, not quite believing it.
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I interviewed five more. One was perfect; the rest not so wonderful. Susan Boyd was right. My work was cutting edge. But as good as that was, it also guaranteed that the average linguistics student was more than likely to misunderstandwhat I was trying to establish with this study.
What causedmy department chairman to fallin love with me was the basis of the study. Though for most people linguistics is like watching paint dry, for linguists I was chasing after the holy grail. Consider this: most people believe that American English is becoming standardized across geographical boundaries. Put in simpler terms, the idea is that watching the news, movies and television would drum the standard American dialect into everyone’s head until, eventually, all Americans would sound approximately the same.
But nature abhors a vacuum. Sometime in the mid-twentieth century there was significant change in the pronunciation of certain vowels in five Mid-west states. This was not caused by the talking heads on the news; the variation in the way this vowel is pronounced is different than the dialect laymen call “American Standard”, the dialect used by new anchors.
So why was this happening? No one knows. And what I have in mind is to find the geographical boundaries of this linguistic oddity. And once I do, I can use statistical analysis to find the most likely source of the vowel shift, to define what caused it. The implications were enormous: if my model worked well it could be used to analyze other dialect anomalies across the country, or even across the world.
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In the end I did choose Susan Boyd. Enthusiasm was better than an indifferent student simply wanting extra credit and a few bucks. There were two more, one a Masters student named Daniel who seemed to get the idea of the study, the other a linguistics student close to getting his M.S. His name, Spike, worried me until I found that he was more than able to follow the basis of my study, I took them to dinner a few days before we left for our jumping off point in western Wisconsin. That would be the place that we’d staked out as the western edge of the vowel shift.
I watched them closely as we worked at our Thai food. Any kind of conflict could make a study into a nightmare. Data collection takes focus and petty spats can make that into oatmeal. Though the outcome was still murky, I was happy to see that this crew was getting along. Susan Boyd seemed like she was in heaven, trading witty repartee with two male students way above her level. By her second glass of wine she was laughing and, to my great disgust, flirtingwith Daniel, the graduate student.
I was drinking scotch, the drink of writers and intellectuals. As I watched the three of them I got a strange sensation in my head. It wasn’t like a migraine coming on but more like some of the sensations I’d had after my surgery when I was a kid. I saw the far wall recede and then rush forward as though it was going to hit me in the face. The three students became indistinct, going in and out of focus.
What came next scared me. I sawpeople who were not in the restaurant, popping in and out of existence every other second. I took a good gulp from my scotch, hoping it would clear my head, but my phantom guests continued their disappearing and reappearing act. I staredat them though they didn’t seem to notice me. Not a strange thing for non-existent men and woman to do.
“Are you okay?” Daniel asked.
“Uh…yes. Fine”
“You look strange.”
“I always look strange.” I did my best to smile while I watched my phantom friends act like Christmas lights.
“I’m just wondering if you need to go home. There’s no color in your face.”
I had been staring at the phantoms the whole time. I was scared but not half as scared as I was about to be. One of them got an odd look on his face. He popped out and when he returned, he was pointing at me. In seconds all of them were staring back at me. Another pointed in my direction.
I stood up quickly, knocking over my scotch. The three students stared at me. I was breathing hard, looking away from my phantoms in the hope that shaking my head would make them go away.
I looked up slowly. I got a brief glimpse of them. In that second I saw the one that had pointed at me move his hand laterally. And that was the last thing I saw for the next few hours.
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I woke up in the hospital. My first image was of a nurse standing over me. I sat up with a jerk, the fear I’d felt just before I’d passed out still at work in my mind.
“Whoa!” the nurse said. “You need to lie back. We don’t know what’s wrong with you.”
For a second I debated whether I should tell her that I’d seen phantom people while I was eating green curry, just to see the look on her face; in the end I decided that they needed to know what had happened if they were going to help me. I followed her order and lay back down. “I guess I should tell you I had a brain tumor as a child. I’ve had odd…episodes all my life. Nothing much lately. Tonight I saw-not saw- but it seemed like I saw people in the restaurant. They faded in and out from my sight. They weren’t there. I know that.”
She stood stock still for a second. “I’m going to get the doctor”.
Ten minutes later a doctor walked into the room. He pulled up one of the visitor’s chairs and sat near to my bed. “Nurse Cortez told me what you told her. I appreciate the honesty because we could have taken hours to find out your basic problem. This surgery you had as a child; what were the after effects?”
“Headaches. Sight issues. Hallucinations. Balance problems. I still get mega migraines but not that often.”
“What about the hallucinations?”
“Recently? Rarely. Tonight was an unwelcome reminder of my childhood.”
“Did you feel pain when you hadthis hallucination.”
“No. Not pain. But it was like there was some pressure in my head and I felt disoriented.”
“I think that we’ll need to do an MRI. I’m sure there are some physical abnormalities in your brain from the surgery.”
“But why now after all these years?”
He spread his hands. “The brain is still mostly unknown territory. Changes take place in everyone’s brain as they grow. In your case there’s probably some damage that is being exacerbated by any number of factors as you get older.”
“Oh god. I thought I was done with this.”
“I wouldn’t panic if I were you. Remember that you had hallucinations. You didn’t have a hemorrhage or sight loss. Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”
“Frankly…yes.”
“It could be that. Let us do the MRI and we’ll see.”
“Is there a chance the tumor could have regrown?”
“Possible but unlikely. You went through this the first time so you’ll remember. The symptoms of having a large tumor are a little more spectacular than one anomaly involving hallucinations.”
“Okay.”
He put his hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t worry. Let’s see what we find.”
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For those that have never experienced an MRI, it’s like sitting near a bad conga circle that can’t keep time. The sounds that you have to endure are awful, much like someone is outside the machine with a hammer. What’s worse is that you can’t move enough to make yourself more comfortable. FourtyForty-five minutes of this hell before I was able to get up and stretch my legs.
I went back to setting up the study, meeting daily with the three students to go over the plan. For Susan, in her inexperience, I had to emphasize the use of intuition and statistical methods to validate that our results were significant. I was happy to see that she seemed to be becoming more relaxed and even brought some good ideas to the table. Considering my health issues I was going to have to rely heavily on the judgment of my interviewers.
A week later I met with my doctor. I found that I was more nervous that I thought I would be. It had been years since my tumor had been an issue and I supposed that I was living in denial, thinking that I was over the hard part when I had no reason to believe that. Over the previous week I had remembered things that my doctors had said when I was child about possible “complications”. Somewhere along the line I had buried my fears and ignored the possibilities. Undoubtedly this was due to my parents influence and their own fears of admitting their child was less than healthy.
I sat down across the desk from my doctor. He studied me, his face darkening. “Are you okay?”
“This is very undignified. As you may have realized I’m not very tolerant of frustration. People often find me irritating. This problem threatens my work and my reputation.”
I became more annoyed because he laughed. “Excuse me,” he said. “Most of my patients are consumed by fear. That’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. . You just seem pissed off.”
“Let’s just say I’ve had it with the whole brain tumor thing. I was a freak when I was a kid. My own brother picked on me mercilessly. I’ve made a name for myself and want the brain tumor and any residual effects to just go away.”
“I understand. Really. I was a nerd as a child. I know what demons little kids can be. But I think you should feel relieved. I’ve looked over the MRI results and I can’t see that there has been any degradation in your brain’s structure near the site of the surgery; your brain has healed well. I got to look at your imaging from when you were a child. I can’t see any problems. If there was a consistent, growing change in your brain you’d have far more serious episodes than one hallucination. If there was a real problem it would have manifested itself by now.”
“So what was the manifestation I experienced the other night?”
“Stress. Indigestion. Sinus issues. You do have a volatile region in your brain. It will show itself when other factors enter the picture.”
“So what is your prognosis?”
“I would guess that you may have episodes like this again in your life but not often. You should go ahead and continue making your name in your field.”
I snorted. “I guess I have to accept that.”
“Are you unhappy? Would you rather that I told you that your tumor has returned?”
“Onward, ever onward!” I answered. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.” I smirked. “Is that positive enough for you?”
“Glass half empty, eh?”
“Being a freak and missing school for two years has a negative effect on the psyche”.
“Understandable. A lot of my patients don’t have a good outlook on life.”
We stared at each other for a moment. “Well, I would like to have you come back in a month to check on you. You never know about these things.”
“I suppose.” I had to love this doctor. He encouraged me on one hand and covered his ass on the other.
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I left feeling angry. I didn’t have any reason to be. It seemed I was okay. Yet I started having feelings I hadn’t had since I was a child; feelings I had suppressed for years and was now being reminded of.
My medical issues had put me back a few days; I flew out to Madison to meet my team. The previous couple of days they had been interviewing people according to my schedule. There were recordings I had to go over. I got there at night and was so bummed out that I just went to sleep, not being my usual bulldog self. Susan Boyd wanted to show me what she had accomplished and was crestfallen when I begged off from drinks in the hotel bar and went to bed.
The next morning my mood wasn’t much better. I had had nightmares the night before, something that had plagued me as a child. I was hoping that as long as I hung on, things would go back to normal. I hadn’t realized how much I’d enjoyed being a star at something. It had eclipsed the sickly freak I’d been as a child.
I did my best to put my mind on auto-pilot. I’d hidden my anger and disgust with humanity all my adult life by playing a part. I could do it again. My team came to my room. I ordered room service that included two bottles of wine. I wanted to maintain the image that we were elite; that this was a party for our success, even though we hadn’t succeeded yet.
I lay on my bed and listened to the interviews. In this phase of the study we were concentrating on what I felt to be the most fascinating part of the vowel shift. Think of the word cat. We learn in school that the vowel sound in that word is a short “a”. It’s the same sound in words like “that” or “bat”. What had happened in several areas from western New York State to western Wisconsin was that many people had started, during the sixties, to pronounce the work “cat” like “Key-et”: two syllables where only one actually exists, with a long “e” sound inserted in the first syllable.
Not quite a phenomenon with the reach of the Russian revolution, but a mystery none the less. Why did this happen? No one was sure. But I would be certain once I gathered all the data. I would trace the change back in time using data collected over decades. And I’d find the “patient zero” that had brought this change to the English Language.
Each recording was preceded by a short verbal introduction by the interviewer, usually highlighted by some condescending remarks about the interviewee. “If he had four teeth I’d be surprised”. “She made dinner table decorations out of light bulbs. She wrote down directions on how to make them, like we cared.”
I smiled. Condescension always brought up my spirits. I followed the geographical trail in my mind as I heard each recording. I knew when and where these recordings were taken; it was part of a line west out of the Madison metropolitan area. The first ten or so recordings had the characteristic vowel shift. The word “That” became “The-yet”, the “y” sounding like a long “e”.
Around the sixth recording I started to get odd sensations in my head. What alarmed me most is that these were the same sensations I’d experienced in the restaurant a little over a week before. I’d been visualizing the pattern of dialect change in my head. As expected the odd vowel shift had begun to weaken slightly as the interviews moved west. Then there was a sharp pain and I heard an accent that, to my trained ear, sounded like an east Tennessee dialect.
I sat up suddenly. “Where did that come from?” I asked my team.
Daniel stared at me. “Where did what come from?”
“That fucking accent. Is this a joke?”
“What are you talking about?”
I got a bad feeling. I was good at reading people and Daniel seemed panicked and angry. With my hand shaking, I pointed at the recorder. “Replay that last interview from the beginning.”
Daniel rushed to comply, stealing glances in my direction. He went back to the beginning of the interview and hit play. I heard the interviewer, Susan in this case, asked the subject to say the word “rat”. What I heard was an East Tennessee accent as I had before. No Midwestern vowel shift. Not even close to the right dialect I was expecting. We were in Wisconsin and the interviewee was speaking with the wrong accent entirely.
“You don’t hear that?” I screamed. All three of them jumped up.
Susan put her hands out. “What is wrong, Jeff? It’s the vowel shift, just like we expected.
I felt my world moving out from under me. “It’s an East Tennessee accent!” I screamed again.
Susan’s eyes widened. “What are you saying? We’re not in Tennessee! All the interviews were done here in Wisconsin. Where do you think we are?”
I tried to speak, but what could I possibly say? Either I was being played by all three of them, an unlikely scenario, or I was going insane. Or perhaps my brain was shutting down, finally being consumed by the hole they’d created when they removed my tumor. I could almost see it happening in my head; the angry maw of the surgery site eating the rest of my brain.
I sat down and poured a large scotch and knocked it back in one gulp. That didn’t seem to do any good so I drank another four fingers or so. And then I looked up. I saw the same people I’d seen in the restaurant, the phantoms. Only this time they weren’t popping in and out of existence. They were solid and they were staring at me with horrified looks on their faces. The man who had pointed at me back in the restaurant said something to a woman in the group, in a language I didn’t recognize. Training took over; I began analyzing the language for its characteristics and probable language group. It sounded somewhat guttural. But in the end I realize that it wasn’t similar enough to any language I’d ever heard for me to even coming close to identifying it.
They all walked toward me. “You see us, don’t you?” one of them said.
I smiled. If I was going to go insane I would do it in style. “Scotch?” I lifted my glass, offering to share my libation with them. “This is excellent. Straight from Islay. I recommend it.”
The man who’d pointed at me at the restaurant smiled. “I’m Seth. I think we need to talk.”
“What about my team here. They are,” I’d turned around as I was speaking. My “team” had lain down on the floor and gone to sleep.
“They won’t remember anything. There will be logical narrative in their minds that explains the time they spent on the project. You don’t need to worry about them.”
“If I’m crazy then what does it matter what you say?”
“I can see why you might think that. The best thing to do now is to take you to our offices and explain things to you. I think there will be some relief from hearing the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked. “The truth of my life?”
“Actually, yes.”
I started to pour another drink when Seth waved his hand to stop me. “Just relax.” He smiled. “We have better stuff where were going”.
Before I could say anything I felt a sense of disorientation, as though I was spinning. The next moment found me on what could only be described as a couch. I sat up and Seth stepped into the room. He pulled up a chair and sat next to me. “We put you to sleep before we brought you here. Our method of transportation takes some getting used to. I felt you had gone through enough at that point.”
“How long have I been sleeping?”
“About six hours. You were exhausted.”
“You realize I’m having a debate in my head as to the reality of this. Maybe this is just another hallucination.”
“I think that you’ll find all of this to be real once you recover your…equilibrium.”
“If I do re-acquire my equilibrium.”
“We want to help you do that.”
“We?”
“Guess it’s time to spill my guts.”
“It could be useful.”
“Imagine this. Throughout the universe there is a…well I’d have to compare it to the weather. Imagine that stable reality and probability are the base state of all the universe. But like a sunny day with a beautiful blue sky there will come a weather front; cloudy days, rain, hail. So like the coming of a period of bad weather we have a period of what can only be called inconsistent probability. Or changing probability.”
“What?”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece of paper and began shredding it. After a couple of minutes he had a wadded ball of paper, totally shredded. He smiled at me. Then he threw the paper up in the air, letting the pieces fly in different directions.
“Weeeee!” I offered.
“Yes. It is a bit child-like. But I’ll ask you if you see a pattern to the distribution of the pieces.”
“No. That type of thing is, while not quite random, it’s not subject to a strong pattern. Like dice, it’s virtually random.”
“Exactly. Imagine if the whole world was like shreds of paper thrown up in the air. Would there be dialects spoken by millions of people in one area. Or would randomness create what you would call an idiolect for each person. I am using the right word.”
“If you mean that every man, woman and child would have their own way of speaking then you’re using the right word.”
“Yes. In fact it’s possible that everyone would have their own language. And even that wouldn’t be stable. And that’s what the earth is going through now. Dialects, movement, houses, mountains, even people. With varying probability things change, sometimes drastically. This hit the earth around twenty years ago. We can control some of the larger things. We can stop houses from moving or cars from turning into mud; this involves the physical safety of everyone on earth. But there are smaller things that are harder to control. Things of the mind, like language. Or memory. For those things we have to convince your minds that certain things are happening. Ironically one of these things is language. There is the story of Babel in your Bible. Without our help no one would be able to understand each other. In reality, everyone has their own dialect, as long as this probability storm persists.”
“So you’re saying that comprehensible language is an illusion? And we’re being convinced that it is real?”
“Yes. I know that is upsetting to you.”
“What about my friends. My colleagues. Is the linguistics department an illusion? Does it exist?”
“You are guided to believe that it exists. The same with your colleagues. And so it does. We strive to create artifacts like a linguistics department because such things existed before this probability storm. The reality is that if we didn’t look after you, the meaning, purpose, even the members of department might change. Or the department would cease to exist. You’d all wander off to do different things that suddenly became reality for that moment. Or some of you might disappear. This is so complex there’s no way I can accurately describe the scope of the problem.”
“And you and your friends. Who are you?”
“There is a race of what you define as Aliens. This problem of shifting reality occurs all over the Galaxy, like dark cloud that moves from one place to another. Or should I say, clouds. There ismore than one of them. Many races have been destroyed by these clouds. Either they are physically harmed by changes in the topography…rocks grow out of the ground or move killing the inhabitants of a planet. Or changes in the mind cause insanity as reality changes. The race I’m talking about has made it their mission to allow races to mature enough to join the league of races. They saw the potential disaster on earth years before it came. They sent their own here and began to train humans to protect humanity.”
“I’m confused. How does this race of Aliens avoid the effects of the changes? Do they create illusions for their own race to keep them from going insane?”
He smiled. “It’s a matter of maturity for the race. Once you reach a certain stage in your evolution these reality shifts don’t affect you. You create your own reality within the pockets of unreality. It’s like having an umbrella in the rain.”
“Are you human?”
He laughed. “Of course. I was raised and trained by…we call them Ascendants. Their name in their own language would be difficult for you to pronounce.”
“So what happens to me?”
“We can work on your brain. You’d forget everything you’ve seen. Though there is the risk that it won’t work. Yoursurgery when you were a child is the reason you’re able to see things that other humans can’t.”
“Great.”
“There’s another option. One I hope you’ll consider seriously. The work we do for the human race is important. You have a unique perspective. You could help us.”
“What could I do?”
“A lot. There are other people like you. Sometimes it isn’t even due to an accident or illness. Some people have brains that are constructed oddly and they see pieces of reality. We need those people to help us do our work. You can introduce them to the new reality.” He smiled.
I hung my head. He looked at me with what was clearly pity. “You have to give me some time.”I croaked. “I can’t give you an answer now.”
“I didn’t expect you would. Why don’t you rest? We have a room set up for you. Take a couple of days. If you have any questions, please ask for me.”
“Okay.”
I was led to a room where I simply lay down. There was a bottle of scotch on a table near the bed but I didn’t feel that even alcohol would help me in the state I was in. I lay down on the bed and fell asleep.
****************************************************************************
I woke up and, looking at the clock, I realized I’d slept for seventeen hours. I went out into the hall; a man I hadn’t seen before walked by. “Are you hungry?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Let me take you to the cafeteria.”
I grunted and let him lead me. There were only a few people in the cafeteria; it seemed I had slept passed lunch. I sat down and they brought me some pasta. I was hungrier than I thought, putting away my meal in ten minutes. Another bowl appeared before me and I got through it in five minutes.
I was licking my bowl when Seth showed up. “Good to see you have an appetite. Have you given any thought to what I discussed with you yesterday?
“Well it occurs to me that if I decide to go for the mind meld, I’ll be an expert in dialects that don’t exist. A noble pursuit. One worthy of all my education. Which by the way is an illusion as well. I’m not sure I could go back to being an automaton. Could you give me more of an idea what I would have to do for the Ascendants?”
****************************************************************************
Six months passed quickly. I found that in addition to being taught the truth of how the universe worked, there were modifications done on my mind and body. I wasn’t able to create a personal reality but I could affect people’s thoughts if I needed to protect people from reality. Most of the illusion, including the one that created the perception of language groups, was handled by devices provided by the Ascendants. I would only intervene if it was needed. I couldn’t really call the devices the ascendants used “machines” because they were part living tissue. The complexity of what I was learning was daunting and I sometimes wondered if I wanted to go through with it. I had learned that my training would last for at least a decade. Just about everything I had to learn was so far beyond my understanding that I might as well have been back in kindergarten.
My so-called career in the linguistics department was resolved easily; as far as any of my colleagues and students are concerned, they’d never met me. At first I was horrified at the thought of manipulating people’s memories but after six months of training I learned that fooling my old colleagues was child’s play compared to what was done in an hour by people like Seth. And it was all necessary.
On a whim I took a walk through a shopping mall to listen to the dialects being used. I was horrified for the first few minutes. I was able to access their thoughts and could follow their conversations but the reality was a mess; it was like a thousand languages were being spoken in that one area, there was no consistency between the languages, no Germanic or romance group. There was only a mess of random noise thatmeant something to the speaker. I found my former linguistic expertise, or my pretention of expertise, embarrassing.
I tried to console myself with the knowledge that I was really going to accomplish something with my new work and that I was no longer a puppet. Yetsomehow I still found myself harboring a small resentment that I’d been allowed by the universe to fool myself into thinking I was a rising star in myworld and that it was all a lie.
I felt a now familiar sensation. No, not the result of my brain surgery. It was a “come hither” from Seth. He wanted to discuss my progress and where I might be most useful. I wasn’t able to transport myself, yet. I had to live with the indignity of having to ask someone to do it for me. I smiled at the vestiges of my overblown pride and wondered if it would ever go away.