I arranged the fifteen pebbles on the cave floor with my claws, doing my best to try and assemble some kind of shape or pattern.

Back during my days as a physics grad student, I had participated in more than one partially-inebriated discussion about the question of alien life, and how we would communicate with aliens, if humans ever encountered them. In a world without Star Trek-style universal translators (and where the aliens might not resemble human actors with prosthetics and make-up), how would one go about communicating with an alien species that might not even communicate using aural or written language? What if the aliens' communication was entirely through something like pheromones?

The answer everyone always came around to was 'math.' Math was the universal language. Two plus two always equaled four, even if the sounds or symbols (or smells) you used to communicate those numbers might differ across languages and species. However, I had an advantage here: the giant spider and I did speak the same language. Or…well, we both understood the same language. I still hadn't mastered the power of speech, but it was convenient that we shared the same language — it would have added an additional layer of difficulty if the spider had greeted me with a "bonjour" or "guten tag."

However, I wasn't in a position to speak — or write, given the limited material I had to work with. If my only goal was to communicate "please recognize me as an intelligent being," then simple math might do the trick.

I started by arranging the pebbles into piles of ascending size: first a single pebble, then a second pile with two pebbles, then a pile of three, and so on. Fifteen pebbles let me count to five in this manner, with no pebbles left over. That at least demonstrated a basic capability for counting. Maybe that would be enough to catch the spider's attention, assuming I could draw its attention to the piles upon its arrival.

But maybe a more sophisticated message was possible. I noticed a bit of the spider's thread on the ground next to me, and dabbed at it with my claw, drawing it into a long strand. I spent a minute trying to use the strands of webbing to draw lines or shapes, but the sticky stuff was hard to work with. It stuck to my claw as easily as it stuck to the floor of the pit, so any time I finished what I thought was a bit of handiwork, lifting my claw away took a good chunk of the thread with it. If I'd had hands to work with, I might have had better luck, but my claws weren't dexterous enough to "pinch it off" at the end or "rub it onto the floor." Thick strands suffered more from this problem, and thinner strands might not be visible to the spider. By now, I had covered a good chunk of the relatively small pit floor with random strands of webbing, and the mess only grew worse as I worked. I didn't want the signal to get lost in the noise. If I was going to do anything with the webbing, it had to be simple and foolproof.

I balled up a bit of the webbing (as best I could with my inflexible claws; it was more of a random clump than a ball), and set it in the approximate center of the floor. The big clump had enough contact with the ground that it stuck to the floor more than it stuck to my claw. Then, I placed two pebbles on it — dropping them from a few inches above so as to not get my claws tangled up in the mess — and delicately placed a claw on each of the pebbles, drawing them apart. I had hoped to draw a line, but it came out looking like less of a line than an elongated blob. I considered the shape, then added a third pebble to the middle, and dragged it away at an angle. Now, the oblong blob looked like something that sort of resembled a triangle, with the third pebble forming what was approximately a 90 degree corner.

In the process of playing with these three pebbles, I had disassembled the two smallest piles, leaving the piles of 3, 4, and 5 pebbles. Something about those piles struck me, and then I had an idea. I already had a triangle. I pushed the piles of 3, 4, and 5 pebbles so that there was one pile along each side of the "triangle."

I smiled at my little creation. Worst case scenario, the spider would notice the pattern of 3, 4, and 5 pebbles, which still indicated counting on my part. (Actually, the true worst case scenario was that the spider wouldn't notice or simply wouldn't care, and would eat me, but I was betting everything that the spider would at least give me enough opportunity to impress it with my rudimentary understanding of math and shapes.) And if the spider looked closer, it would see that the piles were effectively labeling the sides of a triangle, and more specifically, a right triangle: it was a universal truth that in a right triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse equaled the sum of the squares of the two other sides. The Pythagorean theorem: 3 squared plus 4 squared (9 + 16) was equal to 5 squared (25), making this the smallest right triangle where the length of each side was an integer. If the spider could pick up on that, then it would recognize that I was not only capable of counting, but also had an understanding of mathematical principles that had taken humans millennia to discover. (That didn't indicate any special talent on my part; I was just standing on the shoulders of metaphorical giants, but at least it would show that we were intellectual peers. At this particular moment, I kind of wished I could stand on the shoulders of literal giants; having a giant to lift me out of this pit would save me the trouble of having to prove my worth to a spider that had taken me for nothing but a morsel to save for mealtime.)

Besides demonstrating the Pythagorean theorem, there was another layer of meaning embedded in this arrangement of pebbles: back in the 19th century, a German physicist by the name of Gauss had suggested this particular shape — this universal fact about triangles — as a means of communicating with extraterrestrial life, as any species advanced enough to develop interplanetary communication would surely recognize it. (Given that his writing on the subject predated human space travel by over a century, he was certainly a forward-thinking man.) The reference would probably be lost on anyone who didn't have the same physics background that I did, but if they did notice it, it would be something to bond over. It was, perhaps, an overly-optimistic sentiment, but at this particular moment, optimism was all I had.

With the pebbles laid out on the ground in the center of the pit, I waited. As a human, a situation like this would have had me pacing around nervously, but as a dragon, I had no problem staying rigidly still. It struck me that this seemed to be a reptilian tendency: it was a simple biological fact that cold-blooded creatures tended to be less active than warm-blooded creatures. Was I cold blooded? Perhaps not: yesterday, when I had briefly cried tears of joy (moments before the spider arrived and ended my moment of celebration), I had felt the warm wetness of my tears on my own scales. That seemed to indicate that I was somehow generating internal body heat.

I spent the next hour with nothing but my thoughts for company, with one of those thoughts being that I had no idea how long it would take the spider to return. The spider's parting words had suggested it was waiting for "meal time" to make its return, and the fact that it was saving me for later might indicate that it hadn't been ready to eat me at the time it encountered me. How long did it take for a spider to get hungry? Maybe the fact that it had kept me alive was reason to believe it intended to keep me around for days. If my [starvation] status indicator was to be believed, I would reach the point of death by starvation on day 10 (when the status penalty from starvation lowered my max HP to 0). Surely a spider couldn't wait that long, could it?

I tried to gauge the time of day from the scant bit of sunlight that was reflected off the wall of the cave. I was fortunate to have the ability to see in extremely low light, and I only hoped that at the time the spider arrived, the level of illumination would be enough for it to see the shape I had laid out on the floor.

After what must have been several hours, the silence was finally interrupted by the sound of skittering above me. I sat patiently on the floor of the pit, doing my best to arrange my body so that my foreclaws were pointing toward the shape I had made on the floor. I watched as the spider lowered itself, and I squawked, attempting to get its attention. As I squawked, I saw that it had a bundle of web with it, approximately the size of the armored ants I was familiar with — apparently another meal to join me down here in the pit where it kept its food.

Fortunately, just as I had hoped, the spider's many rows of searching unblinking eyes seemed to notice the pebbles I had laid out. It opened its mouth to speak in a raspy voice. "What have we here?"

I had no ability to respond with words, but it seemed best to let the spider know that I was aware that it was speaking to me, so I let out a squawk in response. The spider responded by lowering itself on its long strand of web until it was barely higher than I was. For a brief moment, it occurred to me that if I was ever going to try to attack the spider, this would be the time to do it: I had full freedom of movement, and it was distracted by the shape I had drawn on the floor. However, to get myself out of this pit, I was entirely reliant on the spider's help: a dead spider wouldn't be able to pull me out of here. A surprise attack was not the way to win friends and influence people — or spiders — so I sat quietly as the spider appraised my creation.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

The spider dropped the silk bundle it was carrying to more closely study the pebbles, then looked at me before speaking in its raspy voice. "Piles of stones! You're a creative lizard, aren't you?"

I sat, dumbfounded. Setting aside for a moment the fact that it recognized me as a lizard (and not a dragon), it hadn't noticed my Gaussian reference — not a big surprise there. But apparently, it hadn't picked up on the mathematical aspect of the pebbles, or even the shape of the triangle. Tentatively, I stepped forward. The spider raised itself a few feet, but watched in fascination as I rearranged the pebbles to the original basic formation: piles of stones ascending in size, starting with a pile of one, up to a pile of five.

The spider lowered itself and spoke in a tone that implied fascination. "You can count! Hey lizard, how many legs am I holding up?" It raised three of its claws.

I let out a short squawk, followed by two more squawks of equal duration. One, two, three. Three legs.

"You can count!" The spider let out a chittering noise, which in a different context might have sounded menacing, but given the spider's reactions to this point, I was optimistically assuming that it was expressing delight or surprise. Confusion about my species aside, this seemed like a positive development. The spider seemed to grow more animated, bouncing up and down on its thread. "Hey lizard. Can you talk?"

I considered the question. If I could talk, don't you think I would have done it by now? A verbal response of some kind seemed like the best way to acknowledge the question, so I squawked. As I did so, I tried shaking my head. My dragon head didn't exactly swivel in a way that indicated a negative response -- I had hoped it was close enough to a "no."

"Huh?" The spider looked at me, its legs wiggling in a way that seemed to suggest confusion. "Was that a yes, or a no?"

Apparently, the gesture was more ambiguous than I had hoped. I squawked again. Uh, no? I shook my head. I was glad that the spider had decided I was worth conversing with, but I wished it picked a better way to ask its question.

"You moved your head just now. Was that a no?"

This time, I nodded.

"Wait, was it a yes the first time, and now you're saying no about it being a no? Or…"

I let out an involuntary yelp, a reflex that felt like laughter. This could have been an Abbott and Costello comedy routine for all the progress we were making. The spider seemed to mistake my laugh for frustration, as it began in a tone that sounded apologetic. "Sorry. Hmm. How about this: can you tap the floor?"

The most literal way to answer the question would have been by nodding my head to indicate yes, but I figured a demonstration would be more useful, so I tapped the smooth rock ground with my claw, making a tapping sound.

"Ah, that's much easier to sense," said the spider. Hmm, did that mean its eyesight wasn't the best? No, probably as a cave-dwelling creature, it was more used to relying on sound than sight. Plus, an audible "tap" would allow for communication even after sunset robbed us of what little dim illumination we had.

"How about this: tap once to say yes, and tap twice for no. Okay?"

I tapped once. Yes.

"Okay, great," said the spider, its raspy voice growing more excited. "What's your name? No, sorry. Hmm…how about this. Do you live down here, or do you live above?"

Please ask a yes or no question, I wish I could have said out loud. I tapped twice.

"Wait, you don't live down below or above? …oh." The spider seemed to realize the problem with its question. "Let me try again. Do you live down here?"

I tapped twice. No.

"So you live up on the surface."

I tapped once. Yes.

"You're pretty far from home. Why did you come down here?"

I tapped once. Not really a question I could answer yes or no, but a yes seemed like the closest thing to agreeing with the first statement: Yes, I am pretty far from home.

"Hmm?" the spider said. "Sorry, I guess I was just thinking out loud. Sorry, I'm not very good at asking questions. What do you think I should ask you? I know, you can't answer. I wish you could talk, it would be so much easier that way.

I tapped once in agreement. Yes. It definitely would be easier if I could talk.

"I'll try to ask better questions," said the spider. "But…is it really not possible for you to talk?"

I hesitated, not sure how to respond to a question with a negative. Tentatively, I tapped twice. No?

"I mean, you can't talk now. But can you learn how to talk? Can your friends talk? Are you from a race of talking lizards?

I considered the question. It was a good question: if I'd had the good fortune to be born with a dragon parent around, would they have been able to talk in the same way this spider could? Would I eventually learn to talk — was my lack of verbal capability just part of being a baby dragon, just like baby humans couldn't talk? Unsure of the answer, I tapped three times.

"Does that mean you don't know?"

One tap. Yes.

“How could you not know if your kind can talk? Are you the only one?”

One tap. Yes.

“Did they…abandon you?”

Three taps. I don’t know.

"Hmm. Maybe this will work better. Do you have…this? Accept it if you do."

Quest: 'Say Hello.' Description: Offer a friendly greeting by saying 'hello.' Reward: 1 exp Accept/Reject?

I paused, blinking at the notification. A creative way to check to see whether someone had a system. I chose 'accept.'

New active personal quest: Say Hello

The spider looked at me excitedly. "You see the world just like I do! I bet that means you're a talking lizard. Or...you can be one, some day."

I tapped twice. No.

"Do you mean…you're something that's not a lizard, even though you look just like one?

Yes. Quite astute.

"What are you? A salamander?"

No. I was encouraged by the question, though. The fact that the spider understood that salamanders were distinct from 'lizards' meant it had at least a rudimentary understanding of biology, and it was asking in the right direction.

"Are you a gecko?"

No.

"Are you a reptile?"

I hesitated, and tapped three times.

The spider looked at me for a moment. "Wait. Three taps means you don't know, right? You don't know if you're a reptile?"

One tap. Yes.

"How can you not know if you're a reptile? Hey, you know what I mean when I say reptile, right? You know what a reptile is?"

Yes.

"Okay, so how can you not know if you are one? You do know what kind of creature you are, right?"

Yes.

"But you don't know whether you're a reptile."

Yes.

Hey, are you…in the dragon family? Like a wyvern or a drake or something like that?"

Yes. I began bouncing on my forelegs in excitement.

"Very cool!" The spider seemed to mirror my excitement, and began bouncing up and down on its web. "You're very small for a dragon, though. Uh…hold on. You're not…going to breathe fire and kill me, are you?"

Two taps. No. An odd question to bring up this late in our conversation, but the spider seemed chatty at this particular moment, and in the absence of any tonal or other verbal cues from me, I couldn't begrudge it for wanting to do a simple vibe check.

"Hey, can we be friends?" asked the spider. "If you're a dragon, I'm thinking I want you as a friend. Definitely not as an enemy. Plus, we're both…well, we have the thing that lets you see things!"

Yes. Agreed on all counts.

"Oh!" the spider said in a moment of apparent recognition. "That's why you said you don't know if you're a reptile, right? Because you've got scales like a lizard, but a dragon might be warm blooded. Because, you know, they breathe fire."

Yes. Fire-breathing technically not confirmed yet, but that seemed to be the right idea.

"And that's why you don't know if you can talk! Because you're a dragon, but you're small. You're a baby dragon!"

Yes.

"I'm sure you'll be able talk eventually. I mean, you've got, the thing!" Apparently, 'system' wasn't a universally understood label, but I understood the spider's meaning. The spider seemed to bounce in excitement. "You're a baby dragon!" Then its expression seemed to turn melancholy. "A baby dragon without any friends."

I tapped once in agreement. Yes, I'm a baby dragon with no friends. Apart from the spider who had just agreed to be my friend, anyway.

"You don't have any parents."

Yes.

"That's so sad."

I considered the thought for a moment, then tapped once. Yes.

"Hey," said the spider. "Are you…not from this world? Does that question even make sense to you?"

Yes! I tapped once in agreement and started bouncing in excitement.

"Oh!" said the spider. "You're just like me!"

The spider lowered itself, and it reached toward me with one of its legs. Even though each leg was tipped with a sharp claw, I didn't flinch away. Somehow, I understood the gesture. I reached out with my right foreclaw, and the spider reached toward me until our claws touched for a brief moment. An interspecies handshake.