It was around 3 a.m. when Jaeyun fell asleep at the translation console. He'd been slumped with his face buried in the screen when the console's warning tone woke him. There was a keyboard imprint on his cheek. Red letters on the display: TRANSLATION FAILED, NO SEMANTIC EQUIVALENT. The signal had come in through the Lucid interface. Jaeyun rubbed his eyes and replayed the source signal. Lucid's language wasn't sound but a curve of frequency. It began at 2.7 hertz and surged up to 340 before descending — a shape like a mountain range. The bends and folds of that curve carried meaning. Jaeyun spread the curve across the screen. There was an extra valley in the middle of the range. A single curve that split into two and then merged back together. It was a pattern found nowhere in 23 years of translation databases.
Relay Station Sejong. 14.2 light-years from Earth. 0.3 light-years from the boundary of Lucid territory. Here, 7 translators worked in shifts, rendering Lucid's frequency patterns into human language and converting human language into frequency patterns. Jaeyun was in his 8th year on Sejong. The translation room sat at the station's core, walled on all sides by consoles and screens. There were no windows. What a translator needed was not starlight but frequency.
At the shift change, Minseo came in. Coffee in one hand, a notebook in the other. She set the coffee down beside the console and glanced at the screen.
"Broke again?"
Jaeyun pointed at the display.
"Looks like a self-referent, but it splits partway through. You ever seen anything like this?"
Minseo laid her notebook aside and brought her face close to the screen. She traced a finger along the curve.
"The branch point's here. I've heard this shape shows up when they're pointing at their past self and their present self at the same time. It was in Kang Woojin's notes."
Jaeyun looked up.
"Kang Woojin?"
Minseo nodded.
"The first translator here. He went home 10 years ago. His notes should still be in the archive."
Jaeyun went down to the translation records archive. A small room on the station's lower level, next to the server room. The blue indicator lights on the server racks blinked in the dark. The draft from the cooling fans brushed the back of his neck. Dry, cold air. Out of 28 years of records, Jaeyun found the file for the very first resource accord. Kang Woojin's translation notes were attached. He read them under the light of the blue indicators.
The handwriting in the notes was short and broken. The writing of a tired man. 'Three months to convey the word agreement to the Lucid. The problem is the subject. To the Lucid, the me of now and the me of tomorrow are different beings. So a Lucid agreement is a consent given by an identity at one specific moment. Not permanent consent. Failed to reflect this difference in the translation. Translated agreement as permanent consent. It was a choice. I regret it.' The last two words were underlined. I regret it. Jaeyun ran his finger over the underline. It was only lettering on a screen, yet he felt as if he could sense the fingertip of someone from 28 years ago.
Jaeyun closed the file and left the archive. The blue light of the server racks vanished behind him, and the white glare of the corridor stung his eyes. He walked the corridor squinting. Sejong's corridors were straight lines. You could see both ends. At one end was an observation window. Beyond the glass, the pale violet nebula of Lucid space was glowing. Jaeyun stood before the window and pressed his forehead to the glass. It was cold. The temperature of space carried through the glass. What had Kang Woojin thought, standing before this window? On the day he decided to translate agreement as permanent consent, had he stood here? Jaeyun closed his eyes. The cold of the glass spread from his forehead to his temples.
In the afternoon a transmission arrived from Earth. It had departed 14.2 years ago. An official letter from the UN Interstellar Relations Committee: a request to renew the permit for resource extraction along the Lucid boundary. As he read the letter, Jaeyun felt his hands trembling. Renewal. Meaning an extension of the existing contract. And the existing contract was founded on the agreement Kang Woojin had translated 28 years ago. An agreement translated as permanent consent. Jaeyun knew now. That the translation had been a mistranslation. That the Lucid had never permanently consented to anything.
Jaeyun carried the renewal request back to the translation room. He tried to convert the word renewal into a Lucid pattern. Renewal is the extension of an existing contract. Extension means that the same thing persists even as time passes. But Lucid's language had no pattern corresponding to persists. For the Lucid, everything grew denser or fainter according to the concentration of experience. Nothing persisted. Jaeyun assembled patterns at the console for an hour, then stopped. Translating renewal was itself impossible. Faced with a word he could not translate, Jaeyun chose another path.
Jaeyun did not translate the renewal request. Instead he sent the Lucid a question. It took two hours to convert the question into a frequency pattern. The concept of remaining valid did not exist in Lucid's language. After many revisions, Jaeyun arrived at this: Is the consent from 28 rotations ago still dense at the present concentration of experience? A rotation, Lucid's unit of time, was the rotational period of Lucid's star — about 1.2 Earth years. 28 rotations. Roughly 33.6 Earth years. Jaeyun held his finger over the transmit button and stopped for 3 seconds. His fingertips were cold. The moment he sent this question, a relationship of 28 years could waver. Jaeyun let out a breath and pressed the button.
The 3 days of waiting were long. 0.3 light-years to Lucid's territory. Even with the quantum relay, a signal took time to cross and come back. While he waited, Jaeyun worked through other translation jobs. Routine communications with Lucid. Weather-data exchanges, nebula-activity reports, transit-route adjustments. These were easy to translate. Numbers and coordinates left little room for misunderstanding. But the moment a word like agreement or consent or promise appeared, the translation stalled. To a being with a different concept of time, what is a promise? Jaeyun carried that question through the 3 days.
While he waited, Jaeyun read Kang Woojin's other notebooks. The early contact records. When Lucid first sent its frequency patterns, Kang Woojin was the only translator on Sejong. For 6 months he decoded the patterns alone. The tone of the notes shifted from day to day. At first there was excitement. 'Confirmed 3 new patterns today. Presumed to be an emotional category.' A month later, fatigue had seeped in. 'Slept 4 hours. Can't crack the pattern. Confirmed today that Lucid uses no tenses. Because of this, all previous translations have to be re-examined.' Three months later, it was resignation. The handwriting had grown smaller, the sentences shorter. '2 weeks to understand the concept of density of experience. Not sure I fully understand it. But I can't put off the translation any longer. Earth is waiting for the agreement.'
Reading the notebooks, Jaeyun traced the outline of the man called Kang Woojin. The pattern of the handwriting shrinking, the records clustered in the night hours, the personal notes mixed in now and then. 'Mother's birthday. Sent a message of congratulations, but it arrives 14.2 years from now. Will she still be alive when it does?' Jaeyun stopped at that sentence. The blue indicator light in the storage room blinked. In the narrow aisle between the server racks, Jaeyun found himself pulling from his pocket the last photograph of his father. A paper photograph. He had brought it when he came to Sejong. In the photo his father was 53. He would be 61 now. No — by the last status signal, 14.2 years old, he had been alive. Now, there was no knowing. He put the photo back in his pocket. Was the identity of the father in the photo the same as the identity of the father now? A human being would answer yes. But the certainty that the 53-year-old father and the 61-year-old father were the same man was, for Jaeyun, growing steadily fainter. Jaeyun had had the same thought himself. A message he had sent his father 2 years ago. It would arrive 12 years from now. His father's reply would come 24 years from now. When Jaeyun was past 60. Time enough for the identity of the sender and the identity of the receiver to have become wholly different.
On the morning of the 3rd day, Lucid's reply came. Jaeyun opened it alone in the translation room. He spread the frequency curve across the screen. The descending segment of the curve was unusually gentle. Lucid was hesitating. Jaeyun read the curve. Translation: 'The consent of 28 rotations ago belongs to the identity of 28 rotations ago. The present identity remembers that consent, but is not the subject of it. Memory and consent are not the same.' Jaeyun leaned back in his chair. Cold air was coming down from the ventilation duct in the ceiling. 28 years of resource extraction. Extraction to which Lucid had not consented. Jaeyun's hand was trembling over the console. For a long while he only looked at the screen. The ceiling of the translation room was low. Through the metal panels, the wind from the ventilation duct grazed his forehead. Cold wind. Jaeyun closed his eyes, then opened them. The words on the screen were still there. Memory and consent are not the same. He couldn't tell whether those words were his own or Lucid's.
Jaeyun called for Minseo. The two of them sat in the translation room and looked over the reply again. Minseo studied the curve and said,
“The descending segment is slow. This kind of pattern shows up when Lucid is worried about how the other side will react.”
Jaeyun looked at her.
“Worried?”
Minseo nodded.
“Lucid knows what this reply means too. That a relationship of 28 years is being shaken.”
Jaeyun held his mouth shut a moment, then said,
“We have to send it to Earth.”
Minseo looked at him.
“Send it and it arrives 14.2 years from now, and it's another 14.2 years before any response comes. And the extraction, in the meantime?”
Jaeyun answered.
“I don't know. But if I hide it, it's the same thing Kang Woojin did.”
Minseo drank her coffee. Setting the cup down, she said,
“Kang Woojin didn't hide it either. He chose. And you're choosing too.”
Jaeyun didn't answer that. Minseo spoke again.
“Have you thought about what would have happened if Kang Woojin had translated honestly?”
Jaeyun looked at her.
“There'd have been no agreement. The relationship with Lucid would never have started.”
Minseo nodded.
“And we wouldn't be here either. This conversation wouldn't exist either.”
Jaeyun looked at the console screen. Lucid's reply hung there as a curve.
“Even so, we have to send it.”
Minseo lifted her cup and tilted it toward Jaeyun. It was something close to a toast.
“I know. That's why I'm not stopping you.”
Jaeyun went to report to the administrator. An office on the station's upper level. Beyond the observation window, the nebula's pale violet light spilled all the way across the office floor. The administrator sat in his chair and read the translation of Lucid's reply. As he read, his face hardened. When he finished, he spoke without lifting his eyes from the screen. "If we send this to Earth, Sejong is finished." Jaeyun looked at him. "If we hide Lucid's answer, Sejong will be standing on a lie." The administrator turned his head and looked at Jaeyun. "Kang Woojin, the translator, made that choice in order to build this place. You're standing here because of that choice too." Jaeyun knew he was right. His very existence rested on a mistranslation from 28 years ago. The administrator looked out the window. The nebula's violet stained half his face. "Send it," the administrator said. "But at the same time, ask Lucid for a new consent. If the old agreement is void, then let's begin a new one."
Jaeyun's steps were heavy as he left the administrator's office. The corridor's night lighting washed the floor in blue. Of the 32 people stationed on Sejong, the only one awake at this hour was the translator. Lucid did not sleep. The frequency patterns arrived 24 hours a day, without pause. Jaeyun laid a hand against the corridor wall. He could feel the faint vibration of the comms equipment receiving Lucid's signal. The wall seemed alive. The conversation of two species was flowing through it.
Jaeyun returned to the translation room and prepared two transmissions. One bound for Earth. It carried Lucid's answer together with Kang Woojin's notes. A transmission that laid bare the mistranslation of 28 years ago. It would arrive in 14.2 years. The other bound for Lucid. Can your present identity give a new consent? This question was easy to render into Lucid's language. To Lucid, every consent was created anew in each moment. Jaeyun sent both transmissions at once. The instant he pressed the send button, the console indicator in the translation room turned green. The signal spread out in two directions. Toward Earth it would fly 14.2 years; toward Lucid, a few days. Jaeyun lifted his hands from the console and leaned back in his chair. The translation room was quiet. Only the sound of the console's cooling fan and the wind in the ventilation duct remained. Jaeyun tried to gauge what it was he had done. He had shaken a relationship 28 years old. He had thrown Sejong Station's very reason for being into doubt. And at the same time, he had opened the possibility of a new agreement. All of it was contained in a single translation. Jaeyun looked at his palms. The fingers that had struck the console were trembling slightly. One transmission flying 14.2 light-years to Earth, the other 0.3 light-years to Lucid's domain.
Lucid's answer came five days later. This answer once again contained the pattern that had defied translation that morning. A branching self-referent. Jaeyun spread out the curve together with Minseo. Minseo pressed a finger to the fork in the curve and said, "This isn't a self-referent. It's us." Jaeyun looked. "Us?" Minseo pointed to each of the two branching lines. "One is Lucid, one is human. But they merge. Lucid is binding humans and itself into one. An identity that exists only within the relationship." Jaeyun looked at the curve again. Lines that split and then joined. At the point where the two species met, something new was coming into being. Jaeyun magnified the confluence. At the meeting point the frequency was trembling, ever so slightly. A tremor you never saw in Lucid's standard patterns. Minseo looked. "What's this tremor?" Jaeyun answered. "I don't know. Whether it's unstable, or whether it's new." Minseo said, "It could be both. New things are usually unstable."
The full translation of the answer: 'The present identity can give a new consent. But the consent must be given by our identity. Not mine alone, not yours alone—the identity we made. This did not exist 28 rotations ago. It exists now for the first time.' Jaeyun read this translation three times. Lucid was saying it had made something new out of its contact with humans. What 28 years of contact, piled atop a mistranslation, had given birth to. Something that began in error, yet was not error alone. Jaeyun added this translation to the Earth-bound transmission. The send indicator turned green. Jaeyun leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling of the translation room. Metal panels. A ventilation duct. Every surface of Sejong Station was metal. A cold, hard world. And yet within those metal walls, the languages of two species were flowing. Frequency patterns and letters were flying toward each other. And at the point where they met, Jaeyun sat.
Jaeyun wrote in his translation notes. Just as Kang Woojin had left notes for someone 28 years later, Jaeyun wrote to a translator of the future. 'Observed the first confirmed instance of the branching self-referent. It appears to be a new category of identity that Lucid has created out of its relationship with humans. I cannot be certain this translation is correct. Kang Woojin, my predecessor, dressed an uncertain translation as settled fact, and we are paying the price for it. I have decided not to hide my uncertainty. I hope you, reading this note, will do the same.'
Jaeyun saved the note and looked at Minseo, who was handling another transmission at the next console. Jaeyun said, 'Somebody's going to read this note 14 years from now.' Minseo looked over. 'Could be you.' Jaeyun shook his head. 'The me of 14 years from now isn't the me of right now.' Minseo laughed. 'Lucid's rubbing off on you.' Jaeyun didn't laugh. 'When I read Kang Woojin's note, he didn't feel far away, even though he was a man from 28 years ago. It was as if he'd written it yesterday. A man who was tired, alone, unsure.' Turning her coffee cup in her hands, Minseo said, 'Which is why you made a different choice.' Jaeyun paused and looked at her. 'I almost made the same one. I almost just translated the renewal without sending anything to Earth.' Minseo looked at him. 'So why didn't you?' Jaeyun answered, 'Because of that word underlined — regret.'
Leaving the translation room, Jaeyun stood before the observation window. The nebula's pale violet bled through the glass and out into the corridor. Jaeyun pressed a hand to the window. Cold glass. The warmth of his palm fogged a patch of it. The fog spread, then vanished. As the warmth cooled, the fog went with it. Jaeyun laid his hand there again. The fog returned. Beyond the glass, the nebula's violet light passed through the fog and settled onto his palm. The light of the gas cloud where the Lucid dwelt lingered a moment on his skin, then was gone. Jaeyun looked at his own face reflected in the glass. A face laid over the nebula. The Jaeyun of now and the reflected Jaeyun were minutely out of alignment. Folded into that misalignment were 14.2 light-years of distance and 28 years of time. Jaeyun took his hand away. The fog vanished. The glass turned transparent again, and the nebula's violet poured through unobstructed. Thousands of Lucid individuals were conversing in frequencies inside that gas cloud. They might be debating the question Jaeyun had sent. Or they might already have sent an answer that had not yet arrived. In this gap of time, question and answer were flying across the universe at once.
Jaeyun went back to the translation room. He sat down at the console. A new signal had arrived from the Lucid region. A curve unfolded across the screen. Another branching pattern. This time there were three branch points. Three separate lines stretched out in three different directions, then merged into one. Jaeyun set the cursor at the curve's starting point. 2.7 hertz. That same frequency from the dawn a few days ago, when he'd woken. Jaeyun put on the headset and followed the curve. He stopped where the first branch rose, checked where the second branch fell, and found where the third branch met the first two. Three branches. The Lucid, and humans, and something born between them. Jaeyun did not yet have a word to translate this third branch. But the curve was there. Waiting to be translated. A curve that had been two branches 28 years ago had become three. Next time it might become four. The deeper the relationship grew, the more complex the curve would become. Translating a complex curve would be harder. But that complexity was proof that two species were changing each other. Jaeyun laid a hand on the console. His fingertips met the cold surface of the keyboard. He had struck this keyboard for 8 years. Was the Jaeyun of 8 years ago the same person as the Jaeyun of now? Jaeyun set that question aside and focused on the screen. Just as Kang Woojin's note had crossed 28 years to reach Jaeyun, Jaeyun's translation would cross 14 years to reach someone. Jaeyun began to read, starting from the first branch. Where the curve rose, his heart quickened too. Where the curve fell, his breath drew long. Over 8 years of translating, Jaeyun's body had come to respond to the Lucid's frequencies. Whether the Lucid had changed Jaeyun, or Jaeyun had changed himself. The console screen was lighting his face. The light of the frequency curve surged up and sank down like a mountain range over his eyes. Somewhere in that range was the answer.
