25 May 2016


Dear Lydia,

I need your advice, and your friendship.

Oh, God! I'm talking like them. Except they'd say

i need your advice
and your friendship

You'll hear them soon enough...I've been eating and sleeping and dreaming these translations...

You remember what I told you about our project? Water molecules vibrate in repeating patterns. We measure these vibrations, and try to decode their meaning. It's not the same old stuff you've read about with carbon atoms: the variations are much more profound and dramatic. For background, I've linked in some of our original project proposal. I remember how thrilled I was to be hired as part of the team...

Early on, we found that the "messages" in the vibrations varied dramatically, depending on where the molecules had been picked up. (I wonder whether that may have been one of the problems with most of the carbon experiments: they used the same lab-molded molecules, over and over. The atoms must have been bored stiff!) Remember when I came to your place for breakfast, last summer, and grabbed some water from your bathroom sink? You must. That's the only reason I can write to you now.

Which reminds me, I hope you're still taking your heart medication! In fact, I'm a bitch not to have asked how you are, before launching into my problems. Still, when you read the attached translations you'll see why I'm tempted to panic...

Anyway, we started compiling a lexicon. One thing that threw us off, originally, was that the last three sections of each set of vibrations were identical, for all water molecules, no matter where we got them from. It's the reverse of how things were with carbon, really, in which the first seven-eighths was always identical. For water it's the last tenth or so - the length of the total message varies, and sometimes the order of the last three sections is swapped - and the content seems much more complex.

Our director insisted that the invariant sections had to be a mini-lexicon, sort of a Rosetta Stone so that water molecules from all over could communicate with each other. We wasted months fiddling with this unfounded and crippling assumption. Water molecules are not like people, not at all, and only a moron....You've often told me to watch my mouth, but it's safe - only computers are watching this message, and I trust them.

So OK, I got mad, and while the rest of the team worked on what it called the interesting parts, I knuckled down and decoded the invariant sections. Please look at them, and tell me what you think.

I would have come in person, but our experiment has suddenly become important, and we're all confined to campus, with our contacts and outgoing email monitored. You'll never guess how I'm getting this through! Our Ethics Committee was replaced, around the turn of the century, with a first-class artificial intelligence. I've become quite fond of her - him - it - because it's scrupulously fair.

And it turns out that one of our old (but still current) ethics guidelines, in regard to experiments with human subjects, is that subjects have a right to see results of the studies in which they participated. SO - that covers our situation, close enough. I mean, it was your wash water!  Despite the general hush-hush, Ethicomp is letting me exchange messages with you in order to share a sample of "the material that concerns the subject Lydia Barthus." It's going to convince the other computers to let this through. [Come to think of it, I've never caught the computers disagreeing with one another. It's the humans, always.]

So here are parts of my tentative vibration transcriptions from three of the molecules (I've called them A, B, and C - how original!) from your sink. They're not very different from each other, but you'll get the flavor of how the translated vibrations mesh in, say, a basin of water...and they all contain the long end sections. Which is what I really care about getting to you. Once they're out there, we can decide together what to do.

You can start at a section that all three versions share.

Merci mille fois, dear Lydia! My inbound email is still coming in, so let me hear from you soon!

E.