- - 17h10
I’ve been waiting on this plane for nearly 24 hours now. The west coast of the Atlantic Ocean is only three miles from the airport, so I spent eight dollars to store my bag, six on three bus rides, and nine on Moo Shu pork.
The beach was short and windy and well occupied, but not crowded. I wrote ephemeral passages in the sand, and wet my hair and my trouser legs in the saltwater.
And two dollars on water, after almost an hour walking in he sweltering heat in all my layers. Even shedding a few helped little. Heat, however annoying, is better than the chills that come from being inside in air conditioning after sweating in an outfit.
Three short sketches before I get into it:
- An elder middle-aged white man, thin and tan. His short hair matches the end of his cigar as he drives his motorcycle past at ten over. His shirt is yellow or blue, bright, not neon. I see the moment stretch as he passes, but there’s nothing to qualify it. It just stretches as I try to determine whether the cigar is lit or not.
- A mid-thirties black man with a thirty dollar haircut and a twelve dollar beard drove by in the opposite direction in his all-chrome BMW. He plays music at a reasonable volume, but it doesn’t change that the car exists at an unreasonable volume.
- At baggage claim a retiree walks up with a bag he’s just claimed to another of similar size and shape. They resemble one another as though they’ve long lived in proximity. They are happy to see each other, and one pats the others shoulder. As they turn to begin walking towards the door, they share a pecking kiss on the corner of the mouth.
17h10
‘I scrubbed these three times already’, Luc whined.
‘In the past—’
‘Uh, fortnight, fortnight and a half.’
‘So you’re certain they’re in perfect condition?’
‘They were when I finished.’
‘Which was when?’
Owen’s raised inflection suggested that he knew it had been over a week since Luc’s suit had been inspected.
Not that they really needed to be inspected that often, since they remained stowed most of the time.
‘Where is the internal pressure regulator valve?’
‘Phhh, come on. Really?’
Owen asked the question again in the same tone, one of polite but insistent need. This was akin to the quick recall training that Luc would get next year, but Owen gave the questions as though he were a paramedic examining a completely foreign suit.
‘Dead centre, in big dark shiny blue. Righty-tighty—’
‘Five. Technically correct, but always speak from the perspective of the observer if you aren’t going to use the correct terms.’
‘Sure, but the Offal terms suck.’ Luc countered quietly.
It was his own private victory that in the jump the Moonshot had finally left behind the, in his own terms, “inhumane oppression by the Bureaucratic Homogenisation Directive Establishment of Official Standards of Communication”.
Whether or not it was humane, Owen had dutifully learned the Offal terms used in collaborative ship manœuvres, as well as the nearly twice as many used when crews and captains from different corps trained together.
Most of the time, though, crews used their own languages even if they had to used the shared logographs in writing.
This establishes an Official Communications dialect with roots in Sino-asiatic logographic writing systems. I think that, while an Administrative Language with more grammatic stricture seems useful in legislation, the need for universally identifiable symbols throughout ships belies the need for a logographic set of representations specific to space travel.