taste me, as the food and drink Alice found almost said. she was cast unto a stormshorn sunderedsea. you too will fall beneath my waves in time.


profile pic by moiwool (nonbinary color edit by me)


tomotter
@tomotter

Species in this setting:
The People, from planet Dirt orbiting Star
The Us, from planet Rock orbiting Star
The People, from planet Planet orbiting Star
The Not-Animals, from planet Dirt orbiting Light
The People, from planet Dirt orbiting Star
The People, from planet Here orbiting Star
The We, from planet Ground orbiting Brightness
The Us, from planet Dirt orbiting Star


shel
@shel

It was shocking. Even people who spoke the same language were understanding each other in a deeper way. Deceit became impossible. No matter what you said, the other party understood—really understood. Your true intentions were always conveyed. The emotions you felt were deeply grokked. The Sausserian Gap was no more. Intended meaning and received meaning unified. Everyone understood each other.

Now, some people might not have cared about others—or agreed. But they understood. They'd say "I understand where you're coming from but" and really truly meant it. Everyone knew that everyone else understood. It went both ways. Yes, the rich now understood the poor, but the poor also understood the rich.

"I get it. You want to earn a bigger profit because you fear inadequacy. You were raised in a long line of successful people that you can't be the one to end. But I also see through your trickery here. My labor is worth a hell of a lot more than you're offering and you know it because that's why I know it."

The applications on Earth came to be greater than the applications in space.


bruno
@bruno

The trouble wasn't understanding what other people were saying. It was understanding what you were saying. Suddenly you couldn't say something without intimately knowing where it was coming from, what it signified, how others would receive it. Opening your mouth meant being simultaneously plunged into the yawning abyss of self-knowledge and burned alive by the light of being perceived.

Some turned violent against the machines, smashing the translators in fits of rage. Others shut down entirely, choosing to close themselves off from communication rather than be seen. A handful opted to simply say everything that came to mind until they achieved ego death; until there was truly nothing behind their words, until no ulterior motive (or any motive) remained.

In truth, those were all the same reaction; having made communication impossible, the Universal Translator could rest.


thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. It is for their own good.


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in reply to @tomotter's post:

for sure the hardest part of engineering the Universal Translator must have been getting it to figure out when people were deliberately using a couple words in their own language for flavour.

There are other languages on earth and lots of them name earth after the local variant of God/Goddess, such as Gaea, so plenty of planets would probably be named "The children from Nature's domain orbiting nature". Additionally if a planet isn't their first world they might name it like a colony: new York, New England.

>go to planet dirt
>meet the dirt people
>houses made out of baked dirt
>their food comes from dirt
>they get water from holes in the dirt
>electricity comes from burning really old compressed dirt
>multiple professions dedicated to understanding the dirt
>ask me what my home dirt is like
>fucking hate the dirt planet

in reply to @shel's post:

in reply to @bruno's post: