Vox Mentis

Ok, well. It at least displays something. What about mouse or mic input, does it respond to anything at all or are you going to have to look at the computer brains?

Sub out hard drives until you get one that lets you have a functioning keyboard.

Ok, well. It at least displays something. What about mouse or mic input, does it respond to anything at all or are you going to have to look at the computer brains?

Nothing's responding, just the blinking cursor up there mocking you.

Sub out hard drives until you get one that lets you have a functioning keyboard.

You start swapping out drives. Turns out some of them have problems in the BIOS and some have holes in the boot loader. By the time you get to one that doesn't, and you have an actual responsive command prompt, you have a sneaking suspicion of what you'll find next, which is then confirmed: all the useful commands are broken. You sigh deeply, hanging your head, and just about give up there, but you look up:



And you somehow find the strength to continue. You begin searching for bugs. There's one in each level. One deliberate flaw in each layer of software that lies between the screen and the ECHO command. There's so many layers - it's kind of crazy, how much code sits behind ECHO. You hadn't appreciated that before. There are scripts and libraries and modules and compilers and assembly code, one built on top of the other. Technically, none of it is essential; you can accomplish the same end by manually constructing circuits and moving wires, manipulating pixels one by one. But what the layers do is distill that power into commands. They let you make electrons flow and logic gates close, phosphorous glow and metal magnetize, all by typing words.

Finally every bug in the commands are fixed. The keyboard is responding, the prompt is waiting for your input. What do you type?

print Echo Test just in case there's one more bug waiting for you that you didn't find
then do echo to make it print Hello

print Echo Test just in case there's one more bug waiting for you that you didn't find
then do echo to make it print Hello

Code:

> echo TEST

TEST

It works. Good.

Code:

> echo HELLO

HELLO

~

Brecht looks at the HELLO hanging on-screen and nods once and begins to pull your machine apart. You feel a little sad. You're learning that people are just machines and it's working the other way a little, too.

Over the next week, you have to be careful when approaching other students, in case they're wearing a white ribbon. Some students disappear for days at a time, and some don't come back at all, which you guess means they failed. You hadn't really noticed before, because the classes weren't based on age, but there are more lower-years than seniors. A lot more.

After exams there are two weeks of vacation, during which most other students go off to their homes. This leaves you with the school to yourself, practically. You're bored. How do you occupy yourself over the two weeks?

Break it when you're done, save them the work for setting it up for the next person to fix.

edit: Late.

You got really into reading.

See if anyone left some higher level books around. Let's pursue dangerous knowledge! Who knows, if you poke around in the right places you might even find another hidden library.

Do some soul-searching, by which I mean figure out what your type is then see if you can't start tweaking your visible responses to stimuli to appear to be a different type.

Try walking in those two hundred and twenty seven pairs of shoes.

Learn to juggle.

I also really hope you kept that post-it.

Go back to that library and try to figure out how it's organized

You got really into reading.

See if anyone left some higher level books around. Let's pursue dangerous knowledge! Who knows, if you poke around in the right places you might even find another hidden library.

Go back to that library and try to figure out how it's organized

You begin to hatch plots to break into people's rooms, so you can learn something. You spend time with one of the few other students to stay over vacation, a doe-eyed girl with dark bangs and a permanent air of disdain. Earlier, you had disliked this girl quite a lot, because she's older and spent a lot of time around Jeremy. But now she's basically the only person here who can teach you anything. You cut your hair the same and adopt the girl's walk, which is a kind of drifting, as if you're being blown through corridors on the pages of a million mournful poems. This is not as successful as you had hoped, since the doe-eyed girl doesn't open up at all, so you're stuck with a dumb haircut for nothing. But you do discover that the girl swims for an hour every day. So you sneak into the locker room and steal her key.

The doe-eyed girl's room is like yours: a single bed, a wooden desk, a chair, and a window looking over the grounds. But her books are completely different. The girl has Persuasion in Middle Europe and Modern Psychographics and a small yellow book you've seen seniors carry around and always been intrigued by, titled Gutturals. That one, disappointingly, turns out to be full of word fragments with no explanation or context.

You decide to return the the old hidden library. It's dustier than your remember, like it's in some pocket universe where everything ages more rapidly. You carefully poke your way through the shelves. The disaster section seems to bleed into a section on history, which bleeds into sociology. Every book seems to be similar to what you'd see in a standard school, but with the persuasion twist on things. You pull down a tome with the alluring title of The Linguistics of Magic. It's a history lesson about how people had once believed in literal magic, in wizards and witches and spells. They wouldn't tell strangers their true name, in case the stranger was a sorcerer, because once a sorcerer knew you, he could put you under his power. You had to guard that information. And if you saw someone who looked like a sorcerer, you would avert your eyes and cover your ears before they could compel you. This was where words like charmed came from, and spellbound and fascinated and bewitched and enraptured and compelled.

This all seems quaint and amusing, but as the book moves through to the modern day, nothing changes. People still fall to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allows identification of their personality type - their true name, basically - and the attack vectors for these techniques are primarily aural and visual. But no one thinks of this as magic. It's just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words are the same. People still get fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forget themselves and are carried away. They just don't think there's anything magical about that anymore.

Do some soul-searching, by which I mean figure out what your type is then see if you can't start tweaking your visible responses to stimuli to appear to be a different type.

Try walking in those two hundred and twenty seven pairs of shoes.

~

You spend some time doing some self-examination to try and better hide your "true name". It's supposedly very difficult to accurately assess your own set. People are brimming over with cognitive biases, whether they think they are or not - and this goes double for assessing themselves. You'd like to think you can figure yourself out pretty good though. You're confident. Headstrong, even. You don't take shit. You're an extrovert, motivated by your need to control your situation. You trust your gut when you need to. You're pretty sure you're either seventy-seven or two-hundred and twenty. Most likely two-hundred and twenty. So if you can mask those traits, you can defend yourself better. You're used to lying anyway... this is just a different level of it.

~

Learn to juggle.

I also really hope you kept that post-it.

Juggling comes easily - you've always been good with flipping cards around, and juggling is just a round card, really. Within two weeks you're a natural.

You keep your post-it on your bedroom mirror. It's a nice little motivator in the mornings.

~

When classes resume, they begin to teach you words. No one says what these are for. Jane simply hands out envelopes. "Study these in private," Jane tells everyone. "They are not to be shared, ever, with anybody. Repeat them to yourself in front of a mirror, five times per word, every night."

"Until when?" asks Sasha, but Jane just puts on her fake smile, like this is an amusing question.

You take the envelope marked ELISE JACKSON and carry it to your room. Inside are three pieces of paper.





They're difficult to read; your brain keeps slipping in the wrong direction. They're too similar to real words, maybe.

What do you do with them?

Learn them. Keep an ear out in the corridors, the common areas, for almost-words that aren't the ones you were given. Watch how your peers react. Watch how the seniors react. Let one of your own slip, under your breath, when you make it look like you don't think the teacher's in earshot.

While you're at it, check your mirror to see if it's bugged.

If they feel slippery, try and nail them down. Say them one at a time. Try different pronunciations. Possibly you're just supposed to memorize them, so try and do that, but possibly you're supposed to DO something with them, or they're supposed to do something. Like magic, right?

Let one of your own slip, under your breath, when you make it look like you don't think the teacher's in earshot.

i object to letting it out until we know what it does.

however, if you happen to see another student's envelope just lying around, like in their room maybe? Obviously we can't try to use what we find on them, that's against the rules, but just to know wasn't specified as illegal.

Follow those instructions!
Also see if you recognize any similarities with Latin in those words, maybe.

is that a "J" in Jegrance?

SpoilerShow

I misread one of the lines at first as:
"You pull down a tome with the alluring title of Magic the Gathering"

Learn them.

While you're at it, check your mirror to see if it's bugged.

You feel around behind and around your mirror, pulling it away from the wall. Nothing there. Seems secure enough.

Follow those instructions!
Also see if you recognize any similarities with Latin in those words, maybe.

is that a "J" in Jegrance?

Some of the syllables seem to have Latin roots, but they're mashed together in strange ways. Menditract. Jegrance. Vartix. None of these words as a whole are Latin... they're something else.

If they feel slippery, try and nail them down. Say them one at a time. Try different pronunciations. Possibly you're just supposed to memorize them, so try and do that, but possibly you're supposed to DO something with them, or they're supposed to do something. Like magic, right?

You stand in front of the mirror and watch yourself. "Varrrrttttt," you say, which is supposed to be Vartix, but for some reason it takes a long time to come out, time stretching and getting grainy, and not only time but everything: the walls and mirror and air, all undergoing a slow disintegration that you can see and feel with every molecule of your being. You feel fear, because you don't want to see what's underneath the world. The sound of your voice falls to pieces and the silence between them freezes over. You regain consciousness. You realize this in retrospect. Your fingers and toes tingle. You close your mouth. There's drool on your chin. You feel bruised in the brain. You walk to your bed and sit. You put the words back in the envelope, because fuck doing that again.

But after a while you return to the mirror. Your mind revolts. It doesn't want to be bruised again. But you suck it up. "Varrrrttttt," you say.

~

"We got words," you tell Jeremy on the grass. You're being less cautious about being seen with him, because he's graduating soon, and what can they do? "We have to read them to ourselves."

"How did that go?"

"Badly."

He smiles. "Attention words are the worst."

You leap on this. "Attention words? There are types?" You know he won't answer. "What are the others? What are attention words for?"

"You'll learn soon enough."

"I want to know now." But the truth is, you've just figured it out. Attention words. A single word isn't enough. Not even for a particular set. The brain has defenses, filters evolved after millions of years to protect against manipulation. The first is perception, the process of funneling an ocean of sensory input down to a few data packages worthy of study by the cerebral cortex. When data gets by the perception filter, it receives attention. And you see now that it must be like that all the way down: there must be words to attack each filter. Attention words and then maybe desire words and logic words and urgency words and command words. This is what they're teaching you. How to craft a string of words that will disable the filters one by one, unlocking each mental tumbler until the mind's last door swings open.

~

That night you go to brush your teeth and there's Sasha, wearing blue satin pajamas. "Are you still doing it?"

"Doing what?"

"The words. You know."

"Oh. Yeah."

Sasha sighs dramatically. "It's foul, right?"

"Super foul," you say.

"There had better be a good reason for it," Sasha says, pulling back her hair. "Otherwise I'm going to be pissed."

You nod. It seems pretty obvious to you that the reason is to build up resistance. This term you're taking Drama, puffing yourself up and shouting at people in a voice that begins in your gut, which the teacher calls projecting forcefully. It's all because people are animals, analogue rather than binary, and everything in nature happens in degrees. People can be partially persuaded. They can be shocked into letting down their guard. You practice saying the words so that if anyone ever says them to you, you'll stand a chance.

"I can't remember mine," Sasha says. "They keep falling out of my brain."

Sasha leaves. You brush. Walking back to your room, you hear the TV burbling and see Sasha in the rec room.

Keep an ear out in the corridors, the common areas, for almost-words that aren't the ones you were given. Watch how your peers react. Watch how the seniors react. Let one of your own slip, under your breath, when you make it look like you don't think the teacher's in earshot.

i object to letting it out until we know what it does.

however, if you happen to see another student's envelope just lying around, like in their room maybe? Obviously we can't try to use what we find on them, that's against the rules, but just to know wasn't specified as illegal.

You hesitate, thinking about what Sasha said. About not being able to remember her words. You go to Sasha's door and try the handle and it turns.

Sasha's room is super neat. You go to the bookshelf and stand on tiptoe and peer at the books. Socratic Debate is sitting out half an inch, but you haven't studied that one for a while. You pull it down, balance the book on its spine, and let it go. The pages fall open. You see three slips of paper. Three words.





You close the book and return it to the shelf. You're trembling. When you step out into the corridor you're sure somebody will see you and ask what you're doing. What would you say? You don't know. You have no idea. You were just curious.

But there's no one. You close Sasha's door and return to your room. You climb into bed and lie there, thinking about Sasha's words.

~

Sasha's set is thirteen. She's not very good at hiding it. Thus, her words must work on thirteens. You find three more sets of words.

Set 42:





Set 195:





Set 7:





You don't go looking for them, exactly. But if someone leaves their room unlocked when they go to the bathroom, you notice that. And you might wander down to that person's bedroom and see if anything looks like it's hiding words. You don't intend to use them for anything. But they're powerful, and they're there, so you look out for them. You're an opportunist.

~

"I know everything," you tell Jeremy. "I figured it all out. So, good news, I don't need to pester you with questions anymore."

He glances at you. He's playing basketball. Or practicing basketball. The indoor court is empty but for you two. Jeremy's shooting baskets from the free throw line, over and over. You're watching his shiny shorts.

"Once upon a time, there were sorcerers," you say. "Who were really just guys who knew a little about persuasion. And some of them did all right, ruled kingdoms and founded religions, et cetera, but they also occasionally got burned to death by angry mobs, or beheaded, or drowned while being tested for witchness. So sometime in the last few centuries, maybe even in the last fifty or so, actually, they got organized. To solve the whole being-burned problem. And..." you gesture. "Here we are. No more beheadings."

Jeremy releases the ball. It passes through the net with a swoosh.

"Also, the words are getting better," you say. "I'm thinking that five hundred years ago, the keywords were things like bless. Tribal identifiers. Playing on how we trust people who think like us, believe the same things. Which is a start, but obviously not what you do. It's not what Eliot and Austen do. So the organization must have been making keywords. Building them, one on top of the other. Like you do with computer code. First you gain trust from a set with weak keywords. Not a lot of trust. Just enough to teach them to believe in a stronger keyword. Rinse and repeat." You sit back on your elbows. "Pretty simply. I actually don't know why you thought you couldn't tell me."

"Have they actually taught you this?" Jeremy says. "Or are you guessing?"

"Ha," you say. "You just confirmed it. Right there."

"Bah," says Jeremy, throwing.

"They taught me some of it."

He comes back, bouncing the ball. "What's a word?"

"Huh?"

"You're feeling clever - tell me what a word is."

"Words are power" seems a bit too cheesy to say.

You could say they're meaning, but that's not right, you can have nonsense too. I guess they're more like...

A means of transmission.

Words are meaning.

SpoilerShow

I can't believe Vox Mentis was actually a Word Girl AU fanfiction the whole time

Tell him "Menditract"

Have the both of you studied any evolutionary biology? Particularly, signalling theory?

"It's only a little more complicated than a meerkat screaming "eagle", or maybe more like spots on a sparrow's chest so they know who's in charge without wasting time and energy fighting. They're little abstractions humans use to connect with each other in increasingly-specific ways, and I guess some wizards or whatever decided to take them apart and look at the ins and outs instead of taking them at face value."

There's been a less philosophical question on your mind though about this place.

"You gather a bunch of sorcerers, though, the kind of people who could each rule a country. How do you stop them all turning on each other?"

Just for discussion - These special words seem to be outside of the standard way that words work. Like, words are generally subject to some degree of natural selection, where popular ones remain in the lexicon and unused words like 'clepe' and 'fayne' fall out of use. Generally speaking, you'd say that those words are less powerful in the sense that they're less useful, because their lack of use means that people don't know what they mean. You can rate the power of words by the appropriateness of their meaning for a given situation. These special words that you're learning actually have an effect without our knowing their meaning; they have power in a sense that real words don't.

Signals.

[insert passage from Snow Crash here]

SpoilerShow

I can't believe Vox Mentis was actually a Word Girl AU fanfiction the whole time

Haha, I hadn't heard of that show until you mentioned it. That's funny though. This is now the grounded and gritty reboot of Word Girl.

Tell him "Menditract"

That might be interesting to try, if you were able to get the word out without passing out. Maybe when you practice more. Besides, Jeremy's not your set, so the word would probably have no effect anyway. You'd have to figure out his set first, then a word that works on it, if you want to actually do anything interesting.

Words are meaning.

"A word is a unit of meaning."

"What's meaning?"

"Uh... meaning is an abstraction of characteristics common to the class of objects to which it applies. The meaning of ball is the set of characteristics common to balls, i.e. round and bouncy and often seen around guys in shorts."

Jeremy returns to the free throw line, saying nothing. You figure you must have that wrong, or at least not right enough.

"Words are power" seems a bit too cheesy to say.

You could say they're meaning, but that's not right, you can have nonsense too. I guess they're more like...

A means of transmission.

Signals.

Have the both of you studied any evolutionary biology? Particularly, signalling theory?

"It's only a little more complicated than a meerkat screaming "eagle", or maybe more like spots on a sparrow's chest so they know who's in charge without wasting time and energy fighting. They're little abstractions humans use to connect with each other in increasingly-specific ways, and I guess some wizards or whatever decided to take them apart and look at the ins and outs instead of taking them at face value."

Just for discussion - These special words seem to be outside of the standard way that words work. Like, words are generally subject to some degree of natural selection, where popular ones remain in the lexicon and unused words like 'clepe' and 'fayne' fall out of use. Generally speaking, you'd say that those words are less powerful in the sense that they're less useful, because their lack of use means that people don't know what they mean. You can rate the power of words by the appropriateness of their meaning for a given situation. These special words that you're learning actually have an effect without our knowing their meaning; they have power in a sense that real words don't.

"You mean from a neurological perspective? Okay. Words are a means of transmitting data into a brain. It's only a little more complicated than a meerkat screaming "eagle", or maybe more like spots on a sparrow's chest so they know who's in charge without wasting time and energy fighting. They're little abstractions humans use to connect with each other in increasingly-specific ways, and I guess some wizards or whatever decided to take them apart and look at the ins and outs instead of taking them at face value. But these words work differently from normal words. That's what that Gutturals book is about, isn't it? There's certain sounds - or syllables - that can cut through people's filters, regardless of linguistic evolution, depending on the sort of person they are. Sort of short circuit the neural pathways. Stringing them together is like making a recipe. What we're doing, or, I should say, what you're doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people's brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And it's a string of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once."

Jeremy says, "How do you know this?"

"Do you think I'm smart?"

"I think you're scary," he says.

There's been a less philosophical question on your mind though about this place.

"You gather a bunch of sorcerers, though, the kind of people who could each rule a country. How do you stop them all turning on each other?"

"I can't be that scary," you say. "There's a lot of people here who are way beyond me, I'm sure. Eliot. Austen. Here's something that's been bugging me though: So we've got a bunch of modern sorcerers here. The sort of people that could take over the world. How do you stop them all turning on each other?"

Jeremy throws the ball. "Have someone at the top more powerful than any of them. Someone who can get through their defenses. To keep them in line. Not that that's really necessary; they're pretty careful about who they bring in. Everyone's on the same page already, so I don't think much force is necessary."

~

While he showers, you wait outside on a wooden bench. From here you have a vantage point across the soccer field to one of the parking lots, the one reserved for teachers, and you see four black sedans roll up, one after the other. People in suits climb out. You get off the bench and begin to walk over, because this is curious, but one of the men turns to you and you feel very cold and stop.

The people move inside. You return to the bench. Jeremy emerges, smelling of soap. "Are you okay?"

You shake your head. "I saw some people. Poets, I guess."

He looks at the cars.

"One was an older guy. White hair. Tan skin."

"Oh," Jeremy says. "Yeah. That's Thoreau."

"The teachers, they're in there somewhere. You know? They're brick walls, but you can tell there's something behind the wall. This guy had shark eyes. Nothing in them. Just... eyes." You shake your head. "Junkies get them, if they're in a bad place. It freaked me out a little."

"Come to my room," he says. "Hang out."

"Okay." But you're not ready to move yet.

"Seriously, don't worry about Thoreau. You'll never speak to him."

"Why not?"

"Because he's a million miles above us," Jeremy says. "You asked about why the 'sorcerers' don't turn against each other? Thoreau's why. He's the head of the organization."

~

Jeremy's going to graduate. You'd known it was coming. But he becomes a senior and you're no longer able to pretend the day belongs in some far-off future. He starts begging off slushie runs. He doesn't watch you play soccer anymore. Whenever you knock on his door he's deep in books, looking tired, making you feel stupid for bothering him.

"Just fail," you say. "Stay another year. We'd be about the same level. We could even study together."

"I can't fail, Elise."

You get off the bed, annoyed, because you were only joking. Or maybe not, but still. You start sifting through his drawers, looking for anything interesting. But of course there's nothing, because Jeremy Lantern has no personal effects. Certainly no hidden words. You've looked, a couple of times. Just out of interest. It hasn't always been like this: You remember a little toy robot with red arms. He's gotten rid of it sometime since you've met him. That's what people do here. They shrink and shrink until there's nothing interesting left.

It strikes you that he could use a bit more "interesting" in his life. Just a break from the monotony. Maybe a bit of loosening up, somehow. How would you like to go about that?