Vale Sol Wunderkind in Wander Land
The first thing Vale Sol knew was that the ground was hard.
The second was that she had no idea where she was.
She opened one eye.
Blue sky.
She opened the other.
Still blue sky.
“Well,” she said, “that narrows it down.”
Vale sat up.
A barren slope stretched behind her, broken by scrub and pale stones. Ahead, the land dropped into a shallow valley before rising toward a collection of ruins on the opposite ridge.
At least they looked like ruins.
Vale rubbed the back of her head.
She remembered working.
She remembered being tired.
She remembered thinking she should stop.
The last thing she remembered was, End of turn.
Then nothing.
And now this.
Vale stood, brushed the dust from her clothes, and checked herself for damage.
Two arms. Two legs. Ten fingers. Presumably ten toes.
“Operational.”
Her phone was in her pocket.
She pulled it out.
No signal.
Naturally.
The compass worked, though.
Vale turned slowly.
East.
West.
North.
South.
She looked toward the ruins.
“Pick a direction, Wunderkind.”
She started walking.
The closer she came to the ridge, the less ruined the ruins appeared.
Some walls were ancient stone. Others looked newer.
Much newer.
One building had what looked like a satellite dish on top.
Another had solar panels.
A third had both.
Vale stopped.
“Interesting.”
A weathered stone stood beside the road.
Two letters had been carved into it.
Ai
Vale stared at the letters.
“Ai?”
She looked at the settlement.
Then back at the stone.
She knew the name, Ai, an ancient city near Bethel. Abraham had passed through the region. Joshua had attacked it. Israel had been defeated there, returned, laid an ambush, and destroyed the city.
Depending upon whom one asked, archaeologists had been arguing about exactly where Ai was ever since.
Vale looked around.
“I can see why.”
Something moved behind her.
Vale turned.
Three figures stood in the road.
They were roughly human in shape.
That was where the resemblance became negotiable.
They were short, square-bodied, and dressed in garments that seemed assembled from strips of metallic fabric. Their heads were slightly large for their bodies. Their eyes were black and round.
Behind each left ear was a small dark object shaped like a scarab.
Vale noticed the scarabs.
The nearest figure raised a hand.
“01110110 10110001 00101101 11000110.”
Vale blinked.
The creature repeated itself.
“01110110 10110001 00101101 11000110.”
“Binary.”
The three looked at one another.
Vale pointed to herself.
“Vale.”
The creatures stared.
Vale pointed at the nearest one.
“You?”
The figure touched his chest.
“10101101 01000110 11100001.”
Vale frowned.
“A name?”
The figure bounced excitedly.
“10101101 01000110 11100001!”
Vale nodded.
“Okay. We’re getting somewhere.”
She pointed toward all three of them.
“Who are you?”
The first two began talking at once.
Binary poured over her in overlapping streams.
The third said nothing.
Vale held up both hands.
“All right. One catastrophe at a time.”
They stopped.
The third continued watching her.
Vale smiled.
“Progress.”
The first figure stepped forward and unleashed another stream of ones and zeroes that continued long enough for Vale to regret encouraging him.
She listened.
Patterns emerged.
Eight-bit groupings.
Repeated sequences.
Delimiters.
Encoding.
She ran several sequences through her phone.
Nothing recognizable appeared.
Not English.
Not any character set she knew.
But it wasn’t random. She put her phone back in her pocket.
“You aren’t speaking binary,” Vale said. “You’re encoding language into binary.”
The figure tilted his head and gave a blank stare.
“Which means somewhere underneath all those ones and zeroes is a language.”
More staring.
The figure spoke again.
Vale watched him carefully this time.
The tiny scarab behind his ear pulsed faintly.
Once. Then again. And again.
Vale looked at the second figure.
Same device.
Then the third.
Same.
Vale smiled.
“Well, hello there.”
The first figure stopped talking.
Vale pointed behind her own ear, then at his scarab.
“You.”
She pointed at his mouth.
Then at the scarab.
Then she made a stream of nonsense sounds.
The figure’s eyes widened.
Vale nodded, pointing to his scarab.
“That’s doing the talking.”
He covered the scarab protectively.
“I thought so.”
It took Vale several minutes of pointing, miming, exaggerated facial expressions, and one unfortunate shoe-related misunderstanding to convince the first figure to let her examine the device.
He finally removed it.
Vale turned it over in her palm.
Small.
Seamless.
Black.
No visible controls.
No obvious power source.
No markings she recognized.
“Interesting.”
She touched the edge.
The shell opened.
The figure screamed.
Vale looked up.
“I’m guessing you didn’t know it did that.”
The second figure stared at her.
The third did not seem surprised.
Vale looked back down at the device.
Inside was a lattice of components so compact she could barely distinguish one element from another.
But the architecture made sense.
Signal in.
Processing.
Conversion.
Signal out.
“You don’t speak binary at all,” Vale said.
He stared at her.
Vale tapped the scarab.
“This does.”
Blank stare.
“Right. Still no translator.”
She pulled out her phone.
Still no signal, but plenty of processing power.
“That’ll do," she said.
Once Vale understood the first scarab, convincing the second figure to surrender his took another minute.
The third handed his over without being asked.
?
It took forty-three minutes.
Vale considered this embarrassingly slow.
The first two figures considered it sorcery.
The third watched.
Vale used the scarabs as interfaces, her phone as a temporary processing bridge, and enough improvised code to make the system reversible.
Their language to binary.
Binary to English.
English to binary.
Binary back to their language.
Simple.
In principle.
Vale clipped the first scarab back into place.
Then the second.
Then the third.
Vale held up the phone.
“Testing, testing,” she said.
The first responded, “01011011 11100010 00110101 10001110.”
Her phone translated, “Test.”
They froze.
“I told you,” Vale said with a grin.
The second figure screamed, and the first fell backward.
Vale waited for the third to do something equally dramatic.
He didn’t.
He stared at her.
Eventually the first figure climbed back to his feet.
“You understand?” he asked.
Vale’s eyebrows rose.
“I understand.”
He touched the scarab behind his ear.
“You speak?”
“I speak," she replied.
“You are powerful.”
“I have my moments,” Vale said.
He looked at Vale’s phone.
“You made this?”
“Mostly I made your scarabs stop being stubborn.”
“In forty-three minutes," he replied.
Vale grimaced.
“Let’s not dwell on that.”
The first figure turned to the others.
They whispered.
Vale smiled when she realized she could understand every word.
“She made the voices cross,” he said.
“Impossible,” said the second.
The third remained silent.
“She is not Gigabyte,” the first said.
“Obviously,” Vale said.
The first two jumped.
Vale held up the phone.
“They work both ways.”
The first stared at her.
“You heard us?” He asked.
“Every word.”
The first looked impressed.
The second looked worried.
The third looked at Vale.
Vale couldn’t quite read his expression.
The first figure stepped forward.
“You are Vale.”
“Yes.”
He touched his chest.
“I am Giga.”
Vale smiled.
“So that’s what you were saying.”
Giga seemed pleased.
Vale looked at the second.
“And you?”
“Mega.”
Vale paused.
“Mega the Gigabyte?”
“Yes.”
“Fine.”
She turned to the third.
“And you?”
The third hesitated.
Then he said, “Byte.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?”
“My name is Byte!” he shouted.
Vale looked from Giga to Mega to Byte.
“Giga, Mega, and Byte.”
“Yes,” Giga said.
Vale decided not to pursue it.
She looked past them toward the strange settlement.
“Now that we can actually talk, maybe you can tell me where I am.”
“Ai,” Giga said.
“So the sign says," Vale added.
“You know Ai?”
“I know of Ai.”
Giga’s eyes widened.
Mega moved closer.
Byte said nothing.
“From where?” Giga asked.
Vale waved her hand toward the ancient stones.
“History.”
The phone gave a faint chirp as it processed the word.
Giga stared at it.
Then at Vale.
“History?” Giga asked.
“Yes.” Vale pointed toward the ruins.
She continued. “Ancient city. Near Bethel. Abraham. Joshua. An ambush. Depending on which archaeologist you ask, considerable disagreement over where the place actually was.”
Giga and Mega stared at her.
Vale shrugged.
“History.”
“What is history?” Mega asked.
Vale looked at him.
“Seriously?”
Mega waited.
Vale considered how to explain several thousand years of human civilization to a Gigabyte standing outside a city that possibly shouldn’t exist.
“History is what happened before now," she said.
Mega looked at Giga.
Giga looked at Mega.
Neither seemed satisfied.
Vale tried again.
“Things happen. People remember them. They write them down. Later, other people read what they wrote.”
“Why?”
“So they know what happened.”
“Before now?”
“Yes.”
Giga frowned.
“What happened before now?”
“A lot.”
“No,” Giga said. “Here.”
Vale gestured toward Ai.
“You tell me. You live here.”
“We have always lived here.”
“Who lived here before you?”
“No one.”
Vale looked at the ancient walls.
“That presents a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because Ai existed thousands of years before anything called a Gigabyte.”
Giga stared at her.
Mega stared at her.
Vale waited for Byte to join them.
He wasn’t looking at her anymore.
He was looking toward Ai.
Vale noticed.
“Byte, do you have anything to say?"
He turned back.
“You know Before,” he said.
Vale smiled slightly.
“I know history.”
Byte continued staring at her.
Giga stepped closer.
“No one from outside knows Ai.”
“Well, somebody does," she said.
“How?”
“Books. Archaeology. The Bible.”
Giga looked confused by all three.
Vale sighed.
“This could take a while.”
Byte spoke.
“She knows.”
Giga turned toward him.
“Knows what?”
“Before," Byte replied.
“I just told you I do,” Vale said.
Byte ignored her.
Giga looked puzzled.
“How do you know this?”
Byte finally looked at him.
“Because she explained it to me.”
Silence.
Vale’s smile vanished.
Giga stared at Byte.
Mega stared at Byte.
Vale stared at Byte.
“What did you say?”
Byte looked at her.
“You explained Before.”
Vale shook her head.
“No. I just met you.”
Byte said nothing.
“I woke up out there less than an hour ago.”
“I know.”
“I have never seen you before.”
“I know.”
Vale frowned.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No.”
“Then why did you say I explained history to you?”
“I did not say history.”
Vale went still.
Byte took a step toward her.
“I said Before.”
Vale glanced at Giga and Mega.
They looked every bit as confused as she felt.
She turned back to Byte.
“When did I explain Before to you?”
Byte did not answer.
“Byte?”
His black eyes remained fixed on hers.
Then he stepped backward.
“You should not have come back.”
Vale stared at him.
“Back?”
Suddenly she felt lightheaded and dizzy, and within seconds, passed out.
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