The vibration that traveled up along the outer hull had stopped 3 days earlier. It was the moment the navigation engine finished its final deceleration and the probe Sejong settled into orbit around 2087 Ari, a body of the Kuiper Belt. After that, the only sounds left inside the ship were the whir of the air-conditioning fans and the faint suck of coolant passing through the pipes. Once the engine's vibration—the backdrop of 7 years—was gone, the hull fell as silent as a tomb. It took Sora's ears a full day to adjust. Sora sat before the monitor in the analysis room and watched the external camera feed. The surface of the body was black and flat. It wasn't ice. The albedo was far too low. The entire body was swallowing the light.
From the seat beside Sora, Jinhyeok pulled up the scan data. He was the probe's physicist, a man who for 5 years had kept pace with Sora in this same ship. The spectral analysis appeared on the screen.
"This isn't natural," Jinhyeok said. Sora looked at the screen. There was a periodic pattern in the spectrum. A regularity that no random mineral composition could ever produce. Sora's fingertips went cold. She gripped the armrest of the chair. The metal was cold. Her fingers tightened on it.
The surface sample collected right after the landing revealed a microstructure. When the electron-microscope image was magnified, a lattice on the nanometer scale emerged. The lattice's arrangement repeated. It repeated, yet was never identical. In every layer there was a minute variation. Sora laid out that pattern of variation across the screen. The intervals between the variations were not uniform. But neither were they random. The back of Sora's neck went cold. She drew in a breath. The air in the analysis room was dry. This was structure. A precision no random crystal could form. Beneath the surface of a Kuiper Belt body, someone had inscribed information on the nanometer scale.
Sora opened the language analysis tool. Across 7 years of voyage, the one thing Sora had done was model hypothetical nonhuman language systems. No institution back on Earth had pinned much hope on this mission. The exploration of Kuiper Belt bodies was chiefly a survey of mineral resources, and Sora's role was incidental. 7 years since leaving Earth. Sora had spent most of that time alone in the analysis room. Simulations that decoded imaginary nonhuman communications from imaginary data. Since the data wasn't real, the results weren't real either. Her colleagues didn't understand Sora's work, and Sora never tried to explain it. And yet, when the variation pattern of the nano-lattice was laid out on the screen, there was something in it that resembled the frameworks of the models Sora had handled for 7 years. No—resembled wasn't the word. Sora's model had once predicted this pattern. A combination of variables she had discarded in a simulation 2 years ago matched the structure of this lattice by 96 percent.
"Jinhyeok," Sora called. It took effort to keep her voice from shaking.
"Look at this."
Jinhyeok looked at the screen. The comparison between Sora's model and the lattice pattern. Jinhyeok's shoulders rose. His mouth opened, then closed. He pushed his chair back. The wheels scraped against the floor.
"It could be coincidence," Jinhyeok said. Sora didn't answer. They both knew it was no coincidence. The lighting in the analysis room flickered faintly. From behind the wall came the sound of water running through the coolant pipe.
Sora began to classify the lattice pattern's variations systematically. First-order variations, second-order variations, third-order variations. She extracted the transition rules between each order. The work took 16 hours. In all that time Sora never left the analysis room. Jinhyeok set down a ration bar and left. Sora chewed the bar while watching the screen. She couldn't taste it. She only repeated the motion of chewing. Only after swallowing did she think about what she had eaten. Once the transition rules were extracted, the pattern began to open. The combinations of first-order variations seemed to form units of meaning. If they could be called meaning. She could see structural units that functioned much like the morphemes of human language.
On the 3rd day, Sora had classified 247 basic units of the lattice pattern. She tried to attach an arbitrary Korean label to each unit. Up to the first 50 it was possible. But from the 51st on, the Korean labels began to feel inaccurate. The units themselves held a meaning more precise than any label. Sora abandoned the labels and started using the units' own symbols. She extracted the combination rules between the units and analyzed the higher structures the combinations produced. A diagram spread across the screen. Sora was looking at the diagram when she stopped. Something strange was happening. The structure of the diagram ought to have been complex, yet it didn't feel complex. Sora read the diagram again from the beginning. The speed at which she read it had quickened. Pattern analysis that had taken 30 minutes up until yesterday now finished in 5. Sora looked at the clock. The digital clock in the analysis room read '14:23.' Reading the numbers took her 0.2 seconds. Slower than usual. But her speed at reading the lattice diagram was 6 times her normal pace.
Sora rose from her chair and went to the bathroom. She looked in the mirror. Fatigue had settled into her face, but the focus of her eyes was different from usual. She couldn't say what was different. Her pupils were a normal size. No redness. And yet recognizing her own face in the mirror took longer than it should have. Her face looked like data. The position of the eyes, the angle of the nose, the curvature of the lips. Not a face but an array. Sora looked at the toothpaste tube on the shelf above the mirror. She could see the letters printed on it. Korean. But recognizing the letters took longer than usual. About 0.5 seconds. Barely perceptible. But Sora felt it. It wasn't that the letters were unfamiliar. It was her own process of reading them that felt unfamiliar. Sora set the tube down and looked at her hands. She saw ten fingers. Before the number ten registered, the array count in the lattice's basic-unit classification surfaced first. Sora turned on the faucet. Cold water struck the backs of her hands. Sensation returned. Temporarily.
Back in the analysis room, Sora reopened the lattice diagram. It read instantly. Faster than reading a Korean sentence. A cold sweat ran down Sora's back. She took the keyboard and began composing a report in Korean. Her fingers stumbled. Partway through the sentence "The recurrent pattern of structural variation is—," her fingers halted at the word "recurrent." It wasn't that the word wouldn't come to her. It was that the word felt imprecise. The structure corresponding to the level-3 variation of the lattice pattern was a more accurate description than "recurrent." Korean vocabulary was crude next to the lattice pattern. Sora deleted the word "recurrent" and moved to type the lattice pattern's symbol. There was no key for it. It was a Korean keyboard. Sora stared blankly at the screen. The Korean layout of the keys looked inefficient. No interface existed that could input the structure of the lattice.
Sora lifted her hands off the keyboard. Her palms were damp. Her heart had quickened.
"Jinhyeok."
Sora pressed the intercom. A reply came.
"Something's wrong with my Korean right now."
Silence drifted back across the intercom.
"Wrong how?"
"It's not that the words won't come. The words don't fit. Thinking in the lattice pattern is more accurate."
Jinhyeok came to the analysis room. He looked at Sora's face. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor. The lattice diagram was up on the screen.
"Read this diagram."
Sora said. Jinhyeok looked at the screen. 30 seconds. A minute. Jinhyeok shook his head.
"I can't read it. I don't know the system you classified it by."
"I can read it. Faster than Korean."
Jinhyeok fetched Sora's EEG monitor. It was one of the survey ship's medical devices. He fixed the sensors to Sora's temples and measured her brainwaves under two conditions. Reading Korean text, and reading the lattice diagram. The results came up side by side on the monitor. Jinhyeok looked at them and eased back against his chair. He covered his mouth with his hand. He stared at the monitor for 20 seconds. Her brainwaves while reading Korean were normal. But the processing speed had dropped. An 18 percent decline from the earlier record. Her brainwaves while reading the lattice diagram fell outside the normal range. The pattern matched no known cognitive activity. Not language processing, not mathematical reasoning, not spatial cognition. It was a neural activation pattern that wasn't in the database.
"What is this."
Jinhyeok said. His voice was low. His usual ease was gone. Jinhyeok peeled the sensors from Sora's temples. Red marks remained where they had been.
Sora stopped working on the lattice diagram. For 24 hours she didn't look at it. She read only Korean text. Novels, reports, mission manuals. Korean came back. But the Korean that came back was not what it had been. When she read a sentence, she became aware of its grammatical structure. The subject-object-predicate arrangement made itself felt, deliberately. She was reading her mother tongue like a foreign language. The meaning of a sentence came through, but why the sentence was ordered that way pressed itself on her attention. Korean grammar began to look like one option among several. There was another option. The grammar of the lattice. Sora lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling's lighting panel was a rectangle. Before the word rectangle came to her, one of the level-2 variations of the lattice pattern came first. The lattice came first, and Korean trailed behind. Sora sat up in bed. In the dark she could make out the wall of her quarters. The texture of the wall read as the lattice's surface-variation pattern. Sora closed her eyes. Even closed, she saw the lattice. The darkness behind her eyelids was the lattice's background color.
Sora went back to the analysis room. She reopened the diagram. The instant it opened, her senses widened. The lattice pattern felt not like a flat diagram but a multidimensional structure. Sora began to trace the diagram's higher structure. The higher structure was not a simple combination of lower units. The manner of combination itself carried information. The order, the direction, the density of combination each formed an independent axis of meaning. Sora analyzed the higher structure for 4 hours. When the analysis was finished, her mouth was dry. She reached for a cup to drink some water. The cup's cylindrical form broke apart into the lattice's variation pattern. The water's surface tension read as the lattice's dynamic transition rule. Sora couldn't drink, and set the cup down. Her hands were shaking.
The lattice was not a message. The lattice was a tool. The act of reading was the condition that set the tool working. While Sora analyzed the lattice, the lattice was rearranging the architecture of Sora's cognition. It was not that Sora was coming to understand the pattern; the pattern was changing the way Sora understood. Sora rose from the chair. Her legs shook. Her heart raced. Sweat had gathered on her forehead. She braced herself against the wall. The walls of the analysis room were made of metal panels. The bolts of the panels were driven in at regular intervals. Sora's eyes read the arrangement of the bolts. The arrangement of the bolts looked like a first-order variation of the lattice pattern. No — it was not that it looked that way. Sora's cognition had begun to interpret everything through the grammar of the lattice. The spacing between the bolts converted itself into the lattice's transition rules. The seams of the wall panels appeared as nodes of a higher structure. The entire analysis room read as a subset of the lattice.
Sora went to find Jinhyeok. Jinhyeok was in the control room, checking the comms logs.
"If I keep doing this work, my Korean disappears."
Jinhyeok turned around.
"What?"
"The more I read the lattice, the further away Korean gets. Even now it takes me time to build this sentence."
Jinhyeok's mouth went stiff.
"Then just stop."
"If I stop, the lattice-side cognition unravels too. But."
Sora stopped. She was searching for the word.
"But I think as it unravels the Korean side gets damaged along with it. The interface has already changed. It doesn't go back to how it was. I lose both."
Jinhyeok stood up from his chair. The distance between him and Sora shrank. His hand came to rest on Sora's shoulder. Sora felt the weight of that hand. At the same time she felt the pressure his hand applied converting itself into the lattice's physical variation pattern. Two cognitions were overlaid. Human sensation and lattice interpretation were operating at once.
"Let's report to Earth. The comms lag is 7 hours one way, but we need an expert opinion."
Sora shook her head.
"In 7 hours it'll have progressed further. Even now, while we're having this conversation, your words are being translated into lattice patterns. Automatically."
The color drained from Jinhyeok's face.
"My words are being translated into what?"
"When you said 'let's report,' those words were first converted into one of the lattice's transition rules. The Korean meaning came afterward. The order was reversed."
Jinhyeok took a step back. Sora saw it. Jinhyeok's motion read as the lattice's dynamic variation pattern. A person's movement was being decomposed into an information structure. Sora closed her eyes. Even with her eyes closed she could feel the spatial structure of the analysis room. The cognition the lattice had opened for her. The position of the walls, Jinhyeok's body heat, the flow of air from the environmental unit. Everything was ordered by the grammar of the lattice. Sora opened her eyes.
"I'm going to keep doing this."
Jinhyeok looked at her for a long time.
"Why?"
"Because I can't go back."
Sora leaned against the wall. The metal wall behind her back was cold.
"If you reverse what's already changed, both sides break."
Jinhyeok said nothing. Sora went on.
"I can't go back to the me from before I read the lattice. The me who thought only in Korean is already gone. All that's left is going forward."
Sora returned to the analysis room. She opened the door. The air in the analysis room was dry. The standby screens of the three monitors gave off a blue glow in the dark. Sora sat down in the chair and began to access the topmost structure of the lattice diagram. From the control room, Jinhyeok monitored Sora's brainwaves remotely. Sora's brainwaves were moving into a region that matched no known human pattern. Watching the screen, Jinhyeok felt his hands shaking. Sora's brainwaves were oscillating. High-frequency activity that matched no type in the existing database. Jinhyeok pressed the record button on the comms module. Whatever happened, a record had to remain. Seven hours for a transmission to reach Earth. Seven hours for a reply to come back. For 14 hours, whatever happened inside this ship, Jinhyeok would have to bear it alone.
The topmost structure unfolded on Sora's screen. The full design of the lattice was visible. Thousands of strata of nanostructure. Each stratum formed an independent system of meaning while at the same time being a part of a higher system. Sora read that structure. It was not reading. She was inside the structure. Sora's cognition had entered into the structure. There was something the lattice was showing Sora. Other bodies at the outer edge of the solar system. There were 17 more bodies with the same lattice structure. The position and distance of each body and the differences in the lattice's variation were all within a single diagram. The 17 bodies were one connected system. The design of the system unfolded all at once inside Sora's cognition. The being that made the lattice had designed the entire outer solar system as a single information substrate. Beneath the surfaces of the asteroids and ice bodies, the same nano-lattice was embedded. Each lattice was an independent tool and, at the same time, a node of the whole system. The moment Sora sensed the scale of that system, her vision went dark. She gripped the armrest of the chair. Her fingers tightened.
Sora rose from the chair. There was no strength in her legs. Holding the wall, she made her way to the control room. Jinhyeok pulled his eyes from the monitor and looked at her. Her face was pale. Her lips were dry.
“Jinhyeok.”
Sora said. The Korean came out slowly. There were gaps between the words.
“Here. Is not. One.”
Sora’s lips trembled. Finding the Korean particles took time. Choosing between one subject marker and another was now a conscious act. What had once been automatic had turned manual. Jinhyeok stood.
“What isn’t one?”
Sora lifted her hand and pointed at the navigation monitor in the control room. An orbital map of the solar system’s outer edge hung there.
“17. More. There are. The same.”
The focus wavered in Sora’s eyes. Her pupils were dilated. Jinhyeok took hold of her arm. Her skin was cold. Her pulse was fast. He sat her down in the control room chair. Her weight felt light. For 3 days she had barely eaten.
Sora sank down onto the control room floor. Jinhyeok sat beside her. Her breathing was irregular. She opened her mouth. A sound that was not Korean came out. It seemed an attempt to give voice to the mutation structure of the lattice pattern—a combination of low tones from the throat and sibilants. It was a sound human vocal cords could make, yet it belonged to no human language. Sora stopped. Her own ears heard the sound that had come from her own throat. That sound matched the lattice’s audio conversion exactly. She closed her mouth. Her jaw trembled. She shut her eyes.
“Sora.”
Jinhyeok called. Sora opened her eyes. She looked at him. She saw his face. At the same time his heat distribution, the tension in his muscles, his respiratory cycle—all of it read out in the grammar of the lattice.
“I. Am still. Here.”
Sora said. It was Korean. Slow, staggering Korean.
Still seated on the floor, Sora looked up at the control room ceiling. She saw the ceiling’s lighting panel. A rectangle. This time the Korean word—rectangle—would not surface. Only the lattice’s stage-2 mutation surfaced. Sora rolled that mutation pattern around inside her mouth. It did not come out as sound. She took a pen from her pocket and began to draw the lattice pattern on the control room floor. Jinhyeok watched. Her hand was moving fast. An enlarged rendering of the nano-structure was taking shape on the floor. It was accurate. She was drawing it without looking at any microscope image. It was not Sora’s memory. Sora had never consciously memorized this pattern. The lattice was copying itself through Sora’s motor nerves. Sora’s hand was a tool. An output device for the lattice’s self-replication. An output device that operated independently of Sora’s will.
Jinhyeok took Sora’s hand. The pen stopped. Sora looked at him. Her eyes were wavering. Their focus shifted back and forth between Jinhyeok and the lattice pattern.
“I’ll send a transmission to Earth.”
Jinhyeok said.
“You must not. Send more people. To this body.”
Sora said. Jinhyeok looked at her for a long time.
“Why?”
Sora pointed at the pattern on the floor.
“Everyone. Who sees this. Changes. All of them.”
Jinhyeok looked at the pattern on the floor. An enlarged copy of the nano-lattice. An arrangement of lines and dots. His eyes were tracing along the pattern. The arrangement of lines pulled at his gaze. His eyes moved to the next line on their own. The beginning of what Sora had gone through was happening to him too. Sora grabbed his hand. Hard.
“Don’t look.”
Jinhyeok raised his head. Sora’s hand was trembling. It took him 2 seconds to pull his eyes from the floor. Even after he looked away, an afterimage of the pattern lingered in his vision. Jinhyeok rubbed his eyes. He rubbed them with the back of his hand. The afterimage did not fade. The sound of the control room’s fan filled the space between the two of them. The lattice pattern drawn on the floor was vivid under the fluorescent light. Jinhyeok’s eyes were sinking back toward the floor.
