Horns and tusks wander across the office wall. Alex moves his fingers behind Miles’s head, Nick holds a lighter, and the flame turns them into creatures that don’t exist. The power is out. Dana appears in the doorway.
“Heeey, there you are, boys! Hello, Horns! I could barely recognise you behind all those horns and tusks!”
“Only the shadows have horns,” Miles says. Alex lowers the two fingers behind Miles’s head. “We’re harmless. We have crescent rolls. Come in, Dana.”
“I brought candles. The power’s out in the whole building. No need to roast those little IT fingers on that overheated Chinese lighter. Come on, give me a tray. Let’s light this cave properly.”
Alex transfers the crescent rolls to a napkin and hands her the tray. Nick lights a candle. Dana drips a little wax onto the middle of the tray and fixes the candle in place, while he finally releases the lighter and rubs his thumb. Miles nudges a chair towards her with his foot.
The flame straightens. The shadows on the wall behind them grow darker and more distinct. They stretch up to the shelf; as Dana pulls her chair in, the movement of air sways the flame and the whole procession briefly jumps.
“Now I can really see you.”
Alex holds a crescent roll between the candle and the wall. An enormous tusk grows across Miles’s shadow.
“You said you were harmless,” Dana says.
“This one’s a herbivore.”
Miles cups his hands beside the tusk. Alex shifts the roll a little. Something large and ungainly appears on the wall, just alive enough to make them all look in the same direction.
The First Word in the Circle
“A mammoth,” Miles says.
“Looks like a rabbit to me.”
“Alex, those are tusks.”
“A sabre-toothed rabbit. It fed on tigers and other little kitties.”
Dana adjusts his finger. Miles bends his other hand. The back rounds, the head lowers. Alex adds two long ears above them. They move their hands a little and their creature sets off across the wall; the candle gives it movements none of them had thought of.
Nick looks at the creature, then at the three of them around the tray.
“What if this is how people began to speak? Beside a fire, sitting in a circle. Looking at the same shadow and trying to name it.”
“Then the first argument about language was mammoth or rabbit,” Dana says.
“Imagine we don’t have those words yet,” Nick continues. “One person points and makes a sound. Another repeats it. A third adds a gesture. They laugh, correct one another… and after a few evenings, that sound means something they all understand.”
Miles lowers his hands. The creature disappears.
“And then you can call it back even when it’s no longer on the wall.”
“Or invent one that never existed at all,” Alex says.
“Your rabbit is well on its way,” Dana says.
Nick pulls a sheet of paper from the printer and draws a rounded back. Miles shows him where to add the tusks. Alex leans across both of them and adds the ears.
“Look at us,” Miles says. “Ten minutes ago, we were each absorbed in our own screen. Now we’re all looking at the same flame and picking up one another’s thoughts.”
“Could the fire have brought their thoughts into a shared rhythm too?” Nick asks. “The warmth keeps us here, the light draws our eyes together. Stay long enough and you begin to catch someone else’s voice, their pauses, the look on their face…”
“And wait for them to finish,” Dana says, looking at Alex.
Alex closes his mouth. Then they all laugh, almost at once.
“There’s your rhythm,” she says.
The flame flickers. For a moment, they all look towards it. Dana moves the tray a little closer to the middle, and the circle settles again.
“And each time, someone adds something,” Miles says. “The next day, they sit around the same fire again, and yesterday’s nonsense already has a name.”
“And we’ve got time to talk nonsense,” Alex adds.
“To try a sound, repeat it, change it,” Nick says. “For someone to understand what another person is getting at. What if some of the first words grew out of idle time like this?”
Dana takes the pencil and extends a tusk in the drawing.
“First agree on what this is. The accountant’s coming tomorrow.”
“A sabre-toothed rabbit,” Alex says. “You all know what I mean now.”
Miles looks at the paper. They really do. Beneath the drawing, Nick writes: “Alex says it eats tigers.”
“Now imagine this in charcoal, on a cave wall,” he says. “Bring the fire closer and the mammoth starts to breathe. Someone acts out the way it ran, someone else adds a sound…”
“A third insists it was much bigger,” Dana says.
“A fourth asks what’s for dinner.”
They stop to look at their rabbit. From a single crescent roll, they have made a creature, given it a name and begun inventing its past. Nobody is rushing them. There is time for one person’s joke to become the beginning of the next.
Nick looks at the dark monitor. Before the power cut, they had asked the model about the purpose of life. It had replied: “Live it.”
“When the power comes back, I’ll ask it about language.”
“Let it guess the animal first,” Alex says.
Dana moves the tray away from the edge of the table. Someone in the corridor swears at the lift.
Mammoth for Four
Dana looks at the drawing, then at the napkin.
“Are we actually going to eat that mammoth?”
Miles picks up the napkin with the remaining rolls and sets it between them, as though presenting something for which he has just earned a round of applause.
“Please, help yourselves. The finest mammoth fillet, stuffed with sweetbreads.”
Dana looks at the morsel, then at him.
“From that herbivore of yours?”
“The very one.”
Alex tears off a piece, tastes it and gives a solemn nod. Nick puts the drawing down to take a bite himself. A few crumbs fall between the drawn tusks.
Dana bites into hers. The crust crackles softly between her teeth. She closes her eyes for a moment, chews and nods contentedly.
“Mmm. We could hunt this one again.”
“What about the sabre-toothed rabbit?” Nick asks.
“You leave him alone,” Alex says. “Bunnysaurus is a delicacy. In a pâté of fattened pterodactyl.”
Nick brushes the crumbs off the paper and writes beneath the drawing: “Bunnysaurus delicatus.” Miles checks the name over his shoulder, taking another bite.
“With that, I recommend a Late Cretaceous, southern slope,” he says, raising his mug.
Alex nods as though he has just sniffed the cork, then takes a piece from the napkin. Nick adds “southern slope”. They are still debating the side dish when Dana reaches towards the middle of the table. Paper rustles beneath her fingers.
She looks at the empty napkin, then at the three of them.
“Boys, since you started making up Latin names, someone’s eaten all the crescent rolls.”
At that moment, the ceiling light flickers and stays on. The air conditioning hums, the computers start up. The wall returns to the colour of office plaster. The shadows vanish under the flat light; no horns or tusks remain. There are crumbs on the napkin.
Dana blows out the candle and picks up the tray. A thin trail of smoke follows her to the door.
“I’m off. Hope you enjoyed that.”
She waves and leaves. Miles turns his chair towards his desk and pulls the keyboard closer. Alex puts his mug back beside the monitor and opens the document where he left off. The lift can be heard in the corridor.
The old conversation is back on Nick’s screen. Below the answer “Live it”, the cursor blinks. AI Pro is online again.
“Just one more thing to ask it.”
He types: “How did language begin?”
The answer appears almost immediately.
AI Pro: “It hasn’t yet. There have been attempts. Or do you mean a localised consensus on the vocalisation of phenomena?”
Miles reads it twice, then takes his hands off the keyboard.
“Huh. What kind of model have you got here? Is it being cynical or playing dumb?”
Alex leans over to see.
“I’d feel better if it had put ‘haha’ at the end.”
Nick is still looking at the answer.
“Now I don’t even know what to think about what it thinks of us.”
Miles looks at the screen, then at the drawing on the desk. Beneath the mammoth it says “Bunnysaurus delicatus”. He turns to Nick.
“Where did you get that subscription?”
A temporally incoherent sequel to “AI — Fire 2.0 and the Purpose of Life”. Every temporal inconsistency actually happened.