Aleph watched Squidgie sketch while they waited for Elsie to arrive for the latest class. Her thoughts were constantly drifting back to ‘The Window’ that they had been given the previous shift. Honestly the party had been fun, the cake was pretty good in fact.
Although She didn't find it as amazing as what Pylo apparently had gotten out of it.
Watching Squidgie manipulating a pencil and shuffling through actual papers was paradoxically amazing and extremely mundane. They had to curl their body around in strange ways to keep their eye in view of the page. They made minute little adjustments to the wooden drawing instrument with the little hands running down each side of the body without any explicit preference for any.
It was not how she had ever drawn either, or any Terran she had seen or heard of over the choir.
The motions were smooth, sudden sweeps, that seemed to be utterly random across the page, but the subtle way that the pencil would just barely brush along that path and be pulled back in little sinuous waves up and down?
It deposited strokes, lines, dots, smudges and even cross hatching!
It would often take many hundreds or even thousands of such swipes before the image was distinct and clear but it was often incredibly detailed. Honestly more clear and detailed then photographs Aleph had seen outsiders bring to the village.
Some times Squidgie would wait several long seconds scanning the page before picking an angle and direction to make a swipe. Other Times many dozens would be done in rapid succession back and forth.
The results were however not always pleasant.
"So what about this one, is it cute?"
Aleph kept careful control of her face in case this was another horror show. She didn't like hurting Squidgie’s feelings.
At least this one wasn't her own face with her muscle, fat deposits and skull in disorienting translucency that let her count her capillaries.
That first illustration had been disturbing in several ways. It was interesting that drawing had been an assignment Elsie had given Squidgie. None had really been THAT bad since the concept of the uncanny valley was explained.
But she was left to wonder what precisely the point of this randomly scattered curriculum was. It didn't feel like things were all that coherent. That she was building towards a goal like her training with Omega had been. One day they would be talking about ancient history, another Elsie would have them playing with differently colored syrups!
One time she was asked to explain Tunie’s language to Omega, Quarti and Squidgie using the display. The next Omega was tasked with talking about metallurgy and what was known and unknown to Terran sciences about it.
Quarti would be randomly called to interject and provide some ancient anecdote from terran history. And then there were the counting classes!
And that’s all they were! Counting, Repetition and recognition, calling back or writing numerical representations back. Those would show up out of nowhere and the whole class period would be spent be about utilizing numeracy and building intuitions about the ‘actual quantities’ of what was apparently a standard of systems and measures literally older then terra herself!
The classes had been going now for over a year! But compared to the few shining moments that left her utterly awed and humbled by the scope and wonder of the reef, or strange and bewildering alien philosophy? That seemed to flip everything she ever knew around?
It was getting to be something that she was utterly embarrassed and refused to admit to anyone but herself.
Elsie’s classes were mostly dull. Months would go by on weird exercises or going over things that she already knew. Then you'd get two dozen life changing epiphanies in a single one. Sometimes because a previous classes’ topics suddenly shifted around and turned inside out in context! Other times because Elsie would actually find out something that they had assumed the Terrans knew and was blatantly obvious but apparently they didn't?
That usually was an indicator that there would be a long stretch of doldrums.
Aleph wondered which one this class would be. If it was doldrums she would need to brace herself and muscle through. Most of it was weird semi maybe useful things. Elsie’s Numeracy was a good example. It was honestly simply okay, yeah you could say a number and KNOW inherently how big it was just from a syllable or two.
But that didn't really help much?
Okay no it did help in one specific thing in her routine.
Pylo could actually explain directly (instead of talking around it like she had been) things involving time and mass without giving anyone a migraine now. And apparently she was more pleasant to talk to for both Tunie and Squidgieworth if she used that, even though it shouldn't matter what she used in her own head when she converted things for Tunie.
So okay kinda nice. But it was compared to being told and shown the birth of worlds? Or the Window?!
Pylo and Elsie had built a general natural language interface for an entirely alien language from scratch! Not just that according to Squidgieworth it had not even taken them very long beyond the time to actually get around to it!
Never mind the insane optical complexity of what the Window was DOING. It always ‘looked out’ from whatever angle you were looking ‘at’ it.
If she had embedded it in a wall she would have been convinced it was simply what it was called. A Window!
But instead you could look ‘out’ of it from above, below, the side. It always worked!
She blinked a few times realizing that Squidgieworth was waiting for her to answer the question.
“Huh? Oh! Um... Sorry Squidgie I was just thinking about class. Let me take a proper look here”
She took the page and examined it.
It was... interesting, like someone had tried to approach making a person out of a piece of cloth. But was it cute?
She had to be honest, it didn't really do it. Strange yes, Eerie? Definitely! Maybe beautiful in the right setting but not cute.
“No I don’t think so, it’s pretty and not scary at all really or horrible, more pretty or graceful, but I wouldn't call it cute. Don’t worry I’m sure you’ll get it eventually”
She really had no idea what Elsie’s lesson plans with Squidgie were supposed to accomplish. Supposedly it was for some big project that had been her idea initially. Maybe they were going to make a terran style painting?
Was that supposed to help Squidgie with their own place in the Reef? Aleph didn't see how.
Was that even the goal for the Clerk child? Debatable but Elsie had never said it wasin’t and they were very open. If not always clear.
Maybe there was some secret or non-obvious reason to it she didn't see? Whatever! Aleph couldn't even figure out what the lessons for HER were supposed to be teaching really.
“I see, Thank you Miss Aleph! I will try again later so I can think on that”
And then Elsie arrived, walking soft and silently in that strange rolling gait. Limbs unfolding to catch them even as others closed and folded under the weight. The entire assemblage of random flurrying activity seeming to always hold the screen steady and level in spite of all the chaos around it.
“Greetings Class! We are going to be extending the scope of our numeracy into new intuitions today! Given we finally have an instrument for helping to place your position and view the exterior volumes of the reef without direct supervision It will be useful to prepare you for the scopes and scales you will hence forward experience”
Aleph glanced over at Omega and shared a hopeful smile with her.
Quarti of course was as always utterly eager and delighted by whatever the class topic was.
Every single class, no matter how grueling. No matter how simple.
Every.
Single.
Class.
Aleph was pretty sure she was faking it and zoning out half the time but she was never sure which half.
"First, recall the Introduction to Numeracy lesson approximately Seroirɛr ago, and how we applied it to microbiota in this room Soirʌ after?"
Aleph sighed and worked through the problem. It had to do with time, which meant outside of some fundamental physics they were going to be working in the upper milliads. Because apparently there was nothing the reef polity could universally agree on for a consistent clock tick BUT the literal smallest possible slice of time possible.
Why they couldn't just pick a convenient atom or something was beyond her, although Omega and Quarti had joked that it probably had to do with something political and stupid a million years ago.
She had not really gotten why that was so funny honestly.
Anyway, so yeah this absurdly huge immense number that would have boggled her to even write out? First one was... Six months ago? Huh score one for Elsie’s insane curriculum. It made classes in a given block of time distinct enough to tell apart even when you mention them in chunks of time like that.
Omega had started cheating and kept a mathematician skill share ready at the start of every class after the first few numeracy ones had blind sided her. So her sharp nod coming with a short and curt “Yeah” was not surprising.
Aleph nodded herself after making sure she was sure of the class and place.
Quarti grinned and gave a rude gesture with her foot in affirmation. How could a foot perform a rude gesture?
She had apparently figured out (for the first time this life) how to separately flex each of her toes independently.
It was the little hints like that which helped Aleph, knowing that despite her facade some times Quarti was probably going just as insanely bored with the drudgery as her. Or she just did it because.
Because of course she would.
“This lesson will be extending on that while we attempt to also prevent you from falling to your physiological limitations and suffering from scope insensitivity. So Let us begin.”
And with that Elsie walked away from the screen that had been the basis of every lesson over the months and approached the table that they had just set up a few shifts ago for the party.
And its new improbably stationary seeming sphere.
The Window.
Dipped their screen a little and then spoke softly
“Excuse me Window, I need to move you to a new location.”
And then promptly shoved the thing and sent it rolling off the lip of the table where it dropped near perfectly straight down in spite of its seeming momentum and into the cushioning of the clouds with a deep wumph.
Aleph tilted her head.
“How’d you move it?! That thing’s been rooted in place this entire time, I tried shoving it and poking it and prodding it. I figured some kind of crazy alien tech or something prevented it from being moved.”
Elsie turned its screen to ‘face’ her and then looked at Omega and Quarti.
“What was the difference between what I did and what Aleph tried?”
Omega blinked a few times then broke out into a grin. Which Quarti was smugly smirking along with. Her treacherous mentor was first to speak though.
“You asked politely. She didn't say anything too it, she just shoved it!”
Elsie chimed brightly and continued ‘kicking’ the window along over the hillocks of fluffy white.
“Technically inaccurate but effectively correct Omega. An explicit request is not required, simply verbal assurance of intent. Ship Mistress Pylo technically provided such when placing the Window on the table but failed to do so in a manner perceptible to you. She then did not anticipate that you would not fully extrapolate that manipulating it would be primarily lingual”
Watching it roll made Aleph a little uneasy. The black sphere was tumbling up hill in ways that was rather disproportionate to the slight nudges Elsie was giving it. It was suggestive to her that the thing probably was moving under its own power but the lack of any precise external means to do so was disconcerting.
Even if she knew it was not a complex problem her eyes and her gut disagreed. It was a big behemoth of a presence that should be sitting very still or rolling with indomitable and lethal momentum.
It was not however fitting with either of those things.
Finally they reached the class room and Elsie placed a ‘hand’ on it and gently chimed.
“Thank you Window, please remain here”
And the thing stopped on the spot. Not even a wobble.
“Now then class, please gather around and bring your attention to the window.”
Aleph settled down next to squidgie who was eyeing her a bit before turning back to stare at the window. She was not sure what the look was about but she would ask about it later. It seemed kind of confused about something.
“Window, Access Records, Show us agricultural settlement for this stellar volume number sʌn fenæk binoʊnu goinoʊnoʊ linenu thoʊnini dunoʊni”
Aleph winced at the number, that was an absurd designation. After the first Numeracy class she had needed to check in with Omega to find out what the equivalent terran words were.
Discovered that aorian didn't have any proper names for numbers that went that high and thus used loan words from an almost dead language, which Quarti apparently thought was hilarious and proceeded to not speak in anything but that for the whole rest of the shift.
But still she found the numbers for the absurdities that Reef standards apparently habitually dealt with.
And so she had a proper word and context for this one.
A Quintillion.
A Thousand Thousand Thousand Thousand Million!
She was pretty sure that had to be a mistake. There was no way that there should be that many of anything! She was pretty sure there were fewer blades of grass on all of Terra.
Nevermind the vista before her that was incredibly appearing to be a city. She couldn't imagine that many cities. The numeral designation had to be padded out! Perhaps it was some standard system of measures used by everyone ever for all of history?
Either way it looked like a city. There were skyscrapers and streets and signs, green foliage on top. In a gray-black landscape of shrubs and what even she could recognize as a kind of farm land It reminded her a bit of the vineyards in the hillsides that went by as she took the train to the midlands. Little splashes of green or purple of blue amongst the foliage. With dark brooding woods interspersed.
The city had a lot of clouds and fog drifting around it in white cheerful flurries. Everything was frozen in place. Like a sculpture. It looked like a nice day. It reminded her of home.
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Elsie’s voice was soft but it still brought Aleph out of her thoughts with a jolt.
“How big would you say this settlement is? Judging by area? Population of thinking self aware beings? Economic capability?”
Omega broke in with a questioning tone.
“How are we supposed to even begin to judge the economics of this? We don’t have any reference for what is valuable. What do we use to measure it?”
"I have seen you eat. You made that cake. I know for a fact that you have the same instinctive unit of value as almost all reef lifeforms. It's one of the very few concepts judged almost completely universal, even to the most strange or abstracted of entities."
Aleph mulled on that one. Whenever Elsie answered a question like this it was supposed to be a lesson. She looked at Omega who was also puzzling over it. They passed a few notes of possible candidates for just what the unit of value that was universal to all reef life could possibly be.
It wasn't labor.
None of the metals.
Come to think of it just what was it that Pylo had been trading for?
There was mention of a kind of promissory note that sort of sounded like money in regards to the transfer of the clerks. But that seemed like it was a special case situation.
Quarti finally got fed up with the silence/rapid chatter over choir and belted out in a frustrated shout at the both of them.
“It’s FOOD you imlets! Converting it to pizzas is how one always think about money yah?”
Elsie dipped its head.
“One moment I am accessing records. Ah yes pizzas are perfectly acceptable measure of economic productivity. Please judge how many pizzas worth of economic capacity this settlement produces in a given time along with your judgements of population and size”
Aleph hummed and looked at the city.
Omega and Quarti leaned in to peer as well. She leaned to look out over the landscape around it. She saw dots that looked like the lights of windows in the buildings. And they were very small, assuming they were greatly over sized, perhaps even as big as Pylo or Elsie seemed a safe bet.
She tried to think back. This was supposed to be near Redweed if she remembered right. What kind of person did she see a lot of in Redweed?
They were smaller then Pylo. not much bigger than her or Squidgie.
She counted the windows across one building, then made a quick guess of the volume by cubing it together. Assuming they were about the size she guessed and each window was equivalent to a comfortable room in the interior? Okay and then a quick estimate of the number of buildings? Double her highest guess just because aliens were weird and likely they fit a lot more than she thought they could.
“Uh , I'm gonna guess that it’s about... uh... twenty million people living in the city there, and uh let's say uh... ten pizzas of productivity a day per person. So two hundred million pizzas per day economy. Um judging by the area I’m thinking it’s like twelve thousand square kilometers?”
Omega looked at her and then at the city before nodding.
“That fits more or less as a rough guess.”
Quarti just shrugged and waved vaguely “Lots and lots and lots on all three”
Elsie bobbed their screen and then chimed softly.
“You are a few to several orders of magnitude off on all your estimates. However this is partly because you did not utilize the window to gather new information properly.”
Aleph stared blankly, orders of magnitude?!
“Please note you have not been looking at all of it. Window Please show and emphasis the entire agricultural region of the sʌn fenæk binoʊnu goinoʊnoʊ linenu thoʊnini dunoʊni settlement”
The view drew back, or rather the weird distorted perspective warped so that it was like the sphere surrounded the city at a great distance. The buildings shrunk to a light stubble upon the rolling hills of the reef. The black forests were now just a light dark fuzzy growth that was speckled lightly and then became larger and larger mottles until it formed a solid mass around the scintillating hues of the clear areas.
Finally a line shined out from within the thick mat of the ‘forests’ it was irregular and wiggly. It reminded Aleph of mountain ranges on terra, or more relevantly the borders between the older nations. She squinted and saw lights in little roads and speckled paths all over it. But there was only one concentration of light directly in the center.
The city she had seen.
Elsie spoke again.
"Now do a sweep through one of the main streets to allow binocular estimation of true sizes."
The view of the window dropped like she was falling, it made her stomach lurch a little bit as they plummeted down back towards the city. Seeming slowly at first and then suddenly rushing all up at her at once.
Everything was a blur of color and patterns and then suddenly they were swiftly rushing past avenues and a crowded thicket of strange beings. Most of them had only one eye adn great sweeping arcs for arms. Their skins were a vast spread of colors but mostly a pale tone that seemed surprisingly similar to her own. Although lacking her family’s distinct speckles of blue or orange.
She had a better grasp of the city now, but she felt... like maybe her estimates of population were off. At least the skyscrapers were about the same size as the largest on terra. In fact she might have overestimated with the window trick. They seemed more or less proper decent scale windows for the people around her.
Omega and Quarti met her gaze and then turned to Elsie.
“Would you like to make another estimate given this new information?”
Aleph took a breath and tried to grapple with the shift in perspective. She had thought she was dealing with a city but it was more that it was a whole country with all its towns and cities mashed together in the middle and all the farms and wilderness wrapped around the edges. She should be thinking about the populations of some of the largest countries on Terra.
“Yes, I think um, about uh... a Hundred thousand square kilometers for the area, and uh... two hundred million people? So adjusting for production that’s uh”
She felt ridiculous saying this but the measure had been set.
“Two billion pizzas a day? Equivalent economic production?”
Elsie made a humming noise before nodding.
“Much better although the area was lʌthɪnoine square kilometers in the agricultural territory and the population at last full census is closer to loikn servile and assorted other species. And the production is closer to gɛnɛn lininɛ équivalent pizza per sur fɪrki”
Aleph adjusted her perspective. That was the size of one of the largest midland nations! And hte population?! Eight? No Nine Hundred Million people?! This one city would have been a major nation on Terra with those numbers, And Fifty-Five Billion pizzas per day?! She was pretty sure that would put it easily on par with the richest nations as well. She chewed on her lip and tried to meet Quarti and Omega’s gaze.
But both of them were staring into the window and missed her trying to cue to them. Before she could draw their attention on the choir Elsie was talking again.
“Now then, Window please pull back to show the entire Stellar Hollow, keep the territory of this settlement marked for reference.”
The city all turned flat white green around them. And then the view began to pull back and tilt.The ground falling away. At first the flat green color went on forever curling up around them. But as they pulled back she started to see the border. The wriggly shape was there, and then it too fell away as they drifted off from it. Shrinking smaller and smaller until it was nothing but a single point of barely resolvable green light on the walls of the reef that surrounded them on all sides.
She had to squint and even then she really could not readily discern the false green light except as a slight sparkle mote far off in the distance.
“Thank you window. Now please indicate all other agricultural territories of this hollow in contrasting colors to preserve border resolution.”
Aleph had to yelp as she jolted back and covered her eyes. She had been staring hard to try and resolve the view of that one practically invisible dot. And then the entire interior surface of the reef became and blindingly scintillating shimmer of eye searingly bright rainbow light.
Quarti laughed and clapped.
Omega grunted a little then barked at Elsie.
“This Doesn't Help Elsie! We can’t tell the individual regions apart at this scale. They’re all blending together and doing weird interference stuff”
Aleph slowly peeked at the prismatic orb that had become their view on the reef walls. It honestly looked like nothing but a near white shimmering orb. Not actually as painful as she had thought but still she had to agree with Omega. She could not actually resolve anything. It was just white with a faint flickering of random colors if she moved her head.
“Apologies, let us adjust the display until you can resolve individual regions. Window aggregate bordering agricultural centers into super categories by dun steps.”
The terrans looked into the glowing white window, it was. Maybe marginally more sparkly?
Omega shook her head.
Elsie said nothing.
Everyone waited.
Aleph finally spoke up.
“Uh... Window, Please aggregate those aggregates by two more steps?”
There was if she squinted, something like a mosaic of rainbows now. Just barely visible.
“Two more please?”
Finally there was just BARELY discernible patterns of color. Splotches finely speckled together all over the now visible walls and contours of the reef. In every direction they looked they could see them.
Elsie nodded.
“Very good, this will strain the visceral experience of scale so please try and adjust your models that each of these territories marked is approximately an aggregate of thukn regions comparable to that first agricultural region we were evaluating. Please try to estimate how many are present in this stellar hollow upon the reef surface”
Aleph started and started to feel a tremor in her heart as the scope of the expanse of ‘cities’ and their surrounding ‘landscape’ sunk in. Every single tiny splatter of primary color contained more people, area and economic productivity then all of terra she was absolutely sure. A Hundred thousand of what would have been the largest city in Terran history!
She literally could not count all of them. There were so many and so little to tell them apart that she kept losing her place trying.
She fell back on the number she had grasped from before.
“A Quintillion? More?”
Elsie turned their screen to face Aleph.
Quarti spoke softly.
“You nay know that. Only guessing, throwing up the big number from afore ta hide the enormously hugeness of it ya? Don’t really grasp it. But starting to slip and feel the edges of how big it is though”
Aleph shook her head, then nodded her head then huffed and threw up her hands and found she could not stop herself from talking.
“Alright! Yes! I get it! It’s obscenely huge and the stupidly huge number was just for this one set of addresses on this one little neighborhood and Terra and everything I’ve ever seen is a speck I wouldn't even be able to SEE in all of this and it’s HUGE! So MASSIVELY ABSURDLY BIG!”
Elsie nodded their screen at her and began speaking softly. As they spoke the coloring faded away, replaced by lines, something almost like veins or rivers of light. Collecting into greater and greater concentrations, thicker and thicker tributaries until it all converged on a single point.the view shifted along to converge on that point, it was on the lip of a rimwall. Like a mountain or a cliff to Aleph’s eyes.
But it was a bigger cliff than any mountain she had seen. It was a cliff that Terra herself could easily nestle comfortably within.
She noticed absently that Squidgie was staring in what she could only call absolute rapt awe. It was a look she thought she had seen before when Elsie showed them the birth of worlds.
“This is Redweed, it is the local polity for this region and has risen to that point of prominence through the virtue and fortune of its society, its culture and its position along a major transit path through the Reef.”
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The view changed from coursing lines of light to a dark brooding mass of black and deep fiery reds. Structures like loops of tree branches, wire and waves of sculpted obsidian.
There were speckled dots of light that converged from all sides in line with the former converging capillaries she had seen before in false color. There were twinkling lights moving in loops and whorls through the space all around it. There was a motion to those lights like two rivers of sparkling light and dust flowing in opposite directions woven around each other. Through the cleft of open space where this stellar hollow joined another.
“It takes upon it a Tithe of one third of the economic output of all agricultural settlements within this hollow and two other adjacent ones. It takes a lesser tith from the communities of the Chapparal we are now transiting through. Window Please trace our course”
The view suddenly rushed out in a sweeping arc, skimming past the reefwall in a blink that Aleph only realised must have been when Tunie ‘rescued’ the ‘farming settlement’... Wich come to think of it seemed like it was very close to where the original town they zoomed in on was. Did Elsie chose the same one they saved intentionally?
And then through a ‘passage’ into another hollow. And they were ‘slowing’ matching a positioning and perspective she recognized from when the Window was first activated last shift.
“In time I expect that your home of Terra will become a comparable Polity to or even greater than Redweed. If possible I would have it that you are the foundations for your new home to similarly grow and prosper. Our Ship mistress Pylo and our good Vessel Tunie wish equally well for you. It is after all the very foundations of livelihood.”
Aleph gave up, she flopped bonelessly back into the clouds and made some kind of strangled noise that may or may not have been one of Quarti’s more colorful curses.
She was done with this class for now.
Elsie talked a bit longer with Quarti and Omega but she didn't care. Squidgie was being a dear and massaging her temples with those soft little hands.