A Theology of the Depths

Syntax is easy when you have AIs. To know the semantics of whale languages we needed subtle quantum sensors to probe their brains without damage and the much slower achievement of not hunting them anymore.

The songs said I love you. I miss you. They told of long voyages to strange waters of cold or sun. And they spoke of the indescribable demons from the Above. The word wasn't "demon," the question wasn't "why," but in the mathematical lingua franca of all minds in all worlds it was the closest our own words could have come.

We are sorry. You're safe now. We knew how to say it. We debated whether we had any right to.

Meanwhile the statistical eschatologists of the Fermi doom sent to the skies above a mathematical rendering of Speak. We forgive you. No reply came down; the syntax was trivial, the semantics not. Maybe there was nobody to listen. Maybe they knew, better than us, how much of a lie that was.