PSAMETIC

Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by inquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two newborn children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flocks. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bring goats and give the children their milk and do all else needful.

Herodotus, Histories

The dream of a universal human language has existed since the Old Testament; a lot of SANDMAN historians and theoreticians believe Babel is a meme laid into the Bible by Them to ensure humanity remains hopelessly divided and thus more vulnerable to programming. And of course 19th century utopians from Johann Martin Schleyer – whose Volapük was an early favorite of the Duncorne Foundation after they found out about Anunnaki linguistic taint in human languages – to L.L. Zamenhof and his Esperanto tried to fulfill the dream of world peace through unilingualism. Of course, both Volapük and Esperanto were far too Indo-European to fit the bill.

So in the years following World War II, as SANDMAN pivoted off of computing advances made during the war in cryptography, computer-aided weaponry and war planning, someone in SANDMAN's linguistics division got the bright idea to investigate the possibility of programming a computer to devise a constructed language that would have no Anunnaki-tainted linguistic antecedents. The problem, of course, was that the people doing the programming for such experiments were human users of language and thus themselves were inadvertently inserting taint into these conlangs. Then in the mid-'60s, as SANDMAN advances in processor power started outpacing civilian computing, someone had the bright idea to have a computer run nested loops of language construction that would eventually evolve out of Anunnaki taint.

In order to do this, SANDMAN had to apply artificial intelligence precepts to guide the program. (There was a lot of controversy over this in the computing and linguistics divisions at Granite Peak and at Duncorne; nobody wanted to be responsible for creating some kind of malevolent AI vulnerable to Anunnaki programming.) PSAMETIC is still working on these problems today, applying stochastic AI precepts to the problem of a completely artificial language, 7 or 8 years after the program got started, but the basic grammar of said language has been worked out. It's the vocabulary that needs to be developed. It's going to be called Aulang, the Golden Language.

Right now PSAMETIC (named after, yes, the late Egyptian pharaoh who conducted a famous experiment to isolate human children and see which language they'd develop, later also attempted by Frederick II centuries later) is just a tiny fringe office off of the main SANDMAN linguistics and computing departments, an odd little joint program that never attracted more than a handful of a half-dozen fervent experimenters in the past 25 years or so. What interest they might have in Charley?

Well, her past lives, as Archie notes with the Psametic experiments resulting in the children spontaneously speaking Phrygian, seems like a good bet. PSAMETIC has pretty high security for their operations — their computers are not networked with the rest of Granite Peak for fear of taint — but their office is, like, freely available in the office directory. The program itself isn't secret, just of very little interest to all but the most abstract and long-term of SANDMAN planners and thinkers.

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