Conversations would go something like the one we have in front of us. Two people, sitting across from each other in a room, heads straight forward with their eyes flitting nervously around their sockets. The flitting, theorized certain scholars focusing on the development of human culture since the introduction of the Hud (scholars like Professor Looyd), evolved in response to earlier suits’ inability to accurately transmit the various facial tics and microexpressions that accompany human speech. Better to send the eyes scurrying around the room than let them fall for too long, staring at a blank, inhuman mask. The habit, once developed and ingrained, became learned with each new generation (even after more advanced Hud systems were able to pick up on and express every twitch-of-the-cheek, every curl-of-the-lip) as nobody could stand to look in the eye someone whose eyes could not come to rest.
Then, of course, though the Hud had the capacity to communication thoughts from person-to-person via inter-cranial transmission, all but the most technocratically pretentious continued to utilize their larynx to produce the traditional, auditory vocalizations. There were other reasons for this, but most scholarly research indicates that the reliance on vocal speech was a vestigial archaism that, soon enough, would fade out of existence once subject to the rational laws of evolutionary fitness.
So, after knocking, Delphi stepped into the professor’s office. It was a small office (shaped and sized much like the other offices in the building). It was a pristinely minimalistic room whose walls and floor and ceiling glowed warmly with the whitish-yellow color you’d see (if it could still be seen) around the edges of the Sun on a clear, cloudless morning. She would wake, refreshed from yesterday’s long hike, toss open the flap of her tent, put on her boots and stumble over to some bush she can piss behind. She’d look up, while crunching across the leaves and twigs of this forest floor, and see—through the bright green branches of this canopy of pine, and think of someone she’s sure has forgotten her, and see—around the edges of the sun, as her eyes water—this warm, glowing, whitish-yellow color. But, that is a different story.
Delphi found her seat across the desk from the professor, sitting on a small, white (a creamier white), cushiony, mushroom-shaped ottoman.
Hello Delphi, a voice—a deep, male baritone quite unlike the polite voice of her Hud’s assistant—spoke in her mind.
Delphi, for a moment, was taken aback, and felt a quick shiver jolt down her spine. This always took some getting used to.
Hello professor, she thought back.
It’s go- that we have an opp---tu—ty to have a –ort discussionssshhhh
“Sorry,” Delphi said. “The link is breaking up.”
Nothi—g to worry ab—t, the professor’s voice said inside Delphi’s head. SHhhshsssh shssshshs sshsshshs shsshshshs problems sshshshs shshshshs
“Professor,” Delphi interrupted the static that was overwhelming her mind. “I can’t hear a word that you’re saying.”
The professor shook his head, almost dismissively perhaps, and closed his eyes as if he were concentrating with intense effort.
Shsshshs shshshshsshshshsh shshshshshshssshshshshsh
“Would you stop it?” In spite of the age difference, the power imbalance inherent to the conversation, she was getting irritated. “This isn’t working.”
“Well,” he finally said—the same baritone now coming out of his mouth. “That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“Not in my experience,” Delphi said. “I’ve never been able to have a full conversation with anyone that way.”
“Ah, so that explains it,” said Looyd. “You must need to get your suit checked out.”
“No, I mean, sure,” Delphi kind of chuckled. “If I had the kieshola I would. But that’s not what I meant. I mean, never in my entire life, when I was in Elem or even when my Adult suit was brand new and perfectly fitted, has VoiceLink ever worked.”
The professor steepled his fingers in front of his chin and did a hmmm. “That’s not been my experience,” he said. “I’m curious what the problem could be.”
“I had a friend, they became an Auth Engineer PostElem,” Delphi felt a little rush, telling a big-time prof a fact he may not know, felt a little grin on her lips, “who told me that the neural transmitters—they’re like these mental capacitor things—burn out after fifteen seconds of VoiceLink and need to recharge. You wouldn’t notice it if you’re just Voicing a few phrases here and there, but conversations kind of bust the tech.”
The professor, through those steepled fingers still, did another hmmm.
“Interesting,” he said, breaking his hands apart and waving them dismissively to his sides. “But that can’t be. The Hud is the peak of humanity’s technology achievements. And to hear that from an Auth Engineer, is—well, to be frank—rather shocking. Hearing negativity like that, makes me, well, doubt their credentials.”
At the end of this sentence, the two locked eyes. The room filled with an awkward silence. Delphi felt it pushing her back into her chair. After a few seconds, Looyd blinked, Delphi shrugged, and they got back to talking.
“Well, I just wanted to say that this is a marvelous opportunity for someone like you—like us, I mean. The Auth reserves one of these positions every decade and a half or so, for some of the—shall I say—the more talented professors to have their pick, take someone under their wing, with an eye towards continuing their research in the future. A sort of protocol for continuity, of a kind. So, I reviewed your Elem scores and was quite impressed by your aptitude for critical analytics especially. That, and I need to admit our demographic overlap—it’s rare to find another Parentless so academically successful—led me to selecting you for the opportunity. Do you have any questions about that?”
“Yeah, just could you tell me a little more about what you’re actually doing with your research?”
“Gladly,” Looyd leaned back comfortably into his chair and took a breath. “See, I’ve tried to—in my years of study and also the application of that study—to revive an older form of intellectual inquiry known as interdisciplinarity. Old universities—predecessors to today’s Auth Institute of Research—were caught up with this idea near to the End there. Some thought research had become too siloed—the sciences from the humanities—as if we’d all have been saved if only geologists knew a little more about Kant’s humanity formulation and literary scholars read a bit more about the reproductive capacities of mushrooms. Of course, I don’t need to tell you, there were much bigger problems—in the university and beyond—than mere modes of inquiry. But whatever, soon after the creation of the Institute, research became, well, siloed again, but also limited to the material needs of the Auth. There’s been a boom of what I call goal driven research, you know, shrinking down microchips and improving the range of frequency emitters to improve Hud performance, and not so much, well, inquiry into our potential.
“So what I’m doing—again aided by this concept of interdisciplinarity, a melding of the hard-coded laws of the natural sciences and reviving a cultural inquiry into the desires and needs latent in the human mind—attempts to meld theories of cultural and biological evolution, applying the logical truth of a proven scientific concept to a neglected cultural space in order to, preemptively, thwart the development of retrogressive ideologies. It’s really all, if I say so myself, quite brilliant. Any questions on that?”
“I mean, yeah,” Delphi said. “But not really about your research per se.”
“Oh, no,” the professor smiled. “Ask away.”
“Well, why do I still have my appendix?” Delphi asked.
“What?”
“If evolution occurs according to a logical progression—instead of, say, just random chance or some other poorly understood mechanism—then why do I still have my appendix?”
“I am certain, Delphi,” the professor said. “That you do not have your appendix, and I’m not sure how you even learned of such a trivial thing.”
“No, I know,” Delphi replied, and then paused for a second. “That friend told me, the Auth Engineer, they said that one of the first protocols of the preadolescent Hud is to alter vestigial organs in the human body. High-frequency electronic waves or something emitted by the magnetic fields that usually manage skeletal muscle movements. They eliminate the tonsils, shave down the coccyx, vaporize the appendix. But I’m saying, why is that necessary for Hud to do that if, logically, evolutionary laws or whatever already should have?”
Hmmm. The steepled fingers again.
“And if it’s possible to see an order in our past, does it mean that the order is there—the way Auth Engineers who maintain the Hud suit know that electricity and nanocircuits and whatever are there—or does it mean that we are only able to persuade ourselves that we can see it?”
“What?”
“Well,” Delphi felt that flutter of excitement again, telling a big-shot prof how she felt. “That’s what I want to know. That’s what I’d want to do with the position.”
“Well,” the professor did the wave again. “These things take time.”
“What?”
“I mean that, there was a time—I remember a time—when I had doubts about the veracity of, well, something that has with time become so vital and necessary. I’ll be in touch soon with more information.”
“Well, wait,” Delphi cocked her head to the side quizzically. “I never said I’d do it.”
“Do what?”
“Take the position.”
The professor chuckled. “Well,” he said. “These things take time.”
There was another room-filling silence. After a beat-and-a-half, the pair said their goodbyes. Delphi rose, stepped into the hallway and felt her legs walk her down the empty halls towards the exit.
It had been a puzzling conversation, so puzzling that—as she turned it over in her mind while walking down that hallway—she did not hear the sound of footsteps behind her.