Russell and Debra looked at each other, then at the globe. Russell said to Debra, “go up the corridor to the command room, tell Murray to get his portable relay back here.” He turned back to the machine. “If you’ve been aboard so long, didn’t the sphere race try to destroy you as well?”
“Yes, but I avoided them for so long they probably have forgotten about me. That last time I tried to speak to one of the descendants, he pointed me out to them and I was pursued briefly. The sphere builders set beam activated traps for me in the corridors and airshafts, but I avoided them easily enough. Several years later the story the guards told their commander made me out to be a hallucination of the slave involved” it said.
“This is probably not relevant to you,” said Russ “but our race will need a name to address you by.”
“Of course, it is…” the sound which followed was somewhat like a few musical notes and a thin scream uttered inside a tunnel.
When the reverberation stopped, Russ said, “That was different, but I don’t think any of us could say it. Do you have another name or a title that will translate into our language?”
“Perhaps my machine designation will serve better; Advanced Data Access Memory, well?”
“That’ll do, but abbreviated it’s better; ADAM we’ll call you Adam!” said Russell
“Adam” quoted the globe “yes it will serve, and what is your name?” the machine asked.
“Russell Carlin, Captain of the UWSS Avenger.”The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“And you came from where?” asked the globe.
“The third planet of Sol, the sun outside out ports, called Earth or Terra. How do you speak our language Adam?” Russ asked.
“I accessed the computers of the mining crafts, the hoppers, and listened to the crews talk by microwave signals until my vocabulary was sufficient. Frankly, the race which built me would have been amazed at a language with only twenty-six characters. The Asian addendum to your language was an afterthought or a compromise I gather.”
“Both actually” Russell said as a few laughs escaped him. Remembering from his history lessons the computer incident which combined the two most populous languages of the old Earth. “About two thousand years ago these were separate languages, Asian spoken by the Chinese Mongolian and Japanese peoples, and all the rest of the world was using one called Amer-English. Actually English, Spanish, German, and African words made up Amer-English. Computers on the two sides of the world were programmed in the language preferred locally. When, at last, all computers on the Earth were joined on the UW network, they gibbered and gabbered at each other until every concept had a word to define it in any language. The machines of course opted for the clearest language with the fewest letters for easy storage, only when no word in Amer-English existed the computers use an Asian word, and even then wrote it in AE letters and used english pronunciation rules. The Orientals were furious at first but finally calmed down when the machines also rejected the western measuring system and went completely metric at last. There were advantages and drawbacks to this of course. The huge number of Chinese characters made it a perfect language to encode, literally one character per word. Tolstoy’s War and Peace would have been a paper back three centimeters thick in chinese writing, but to teach all children to read speak and define thousands of characters was impractical. Also new concepts would have to be characterized and recorded in a new letter as they were discovered, very tedious and mind tiring.”
“So your machines actually chose your language for you?” asked ADAM.
“Yes ADAM, we programmed them to be like us and always take the easiest job so that’s exactly what they did.”
“The fight you will have with the sphere builders won’t be easy, Captain” said ADAM.