The Short Read: Terrarium Hostel

Day 1 – Keeping a Diary

It was Octave one night in The Moscow Arms who told me about an article he saw in the paper about writing to aliens.

I laughed at first but when he explained that this thing called the Sol Project was a deadly serious scientific enterprise in which ordinary people had been invited to participate, I became intrigued and sent off for an entry form.

The Pinkland Space Agency is going to beam powerful radio signals towards a star about 35 light years away in an attempt to make contact with an alien civilisation they think is there. The signals will contain many different kinds of communications. There will be greetings and messages of peace from our insincere politicians and summaries of our knowledge from boffins in various fields. But also included will be diaries from average Joes like myself in order to give the aliens as wide an appreciation as possible of life in this neck of the galaxy.

I received the entry form a couple of weeks ago and ever since then Octave has kept asking me if I have started the diary. So I bought a large notebook and today I begin writing in my diary for the first time. I have asked him why he wasn’t also going to do it, since he is so enthusiastic about me doing it.

‘My diary would never be accepted,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ I said.

‘The judges will all be Darlingtons,’ said Octave.

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘Darlingtons?’ said Octave. ‘Culture vultures. Precious, self-important, loose-living bohemians. You know, arty-farties. Those kind of people wouldn’t consider a diary from someone like me for one second, no matter how good it was.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Just take it from me,’ said Octave, ‘I just know. The kind of people who judge literary competitions are always Darlingtons.’

I had never heard of the term. Must be a Terrarium word.

‘And they are all absolutely stupid,’ Octave added. ‘Total dum-dums. They wouldn’t understand anything I wrote.’

‘So why do you think my diary will be accepted but yours will be rejected?’

‘Because you are a fresh-faced, innocent idealist,’ said Octave. ‘They like people like you.’

There is a great expectation that the messages will be understood because apparently the radio signals will also contain sophisticated translation instructions which will, if you have information systems that are compatible, enable you, my dear alien reader, to read the messages in your own idiomatic language and render my unearthly existence in terms that will appear bizarrely familiar to that of your own species.

For example, whenever I mention my home star, I will write it as the name I know it as but it will appear in your text as Zeta Herculis B, which is your name for it. Obviously, I don’t call it that and have no idea what you call it. But that is how it will appear in the translation. Sometimes what you read will be a surprisingly accurate description of my reality. At other times though it will be an approximation or a symbolic interpretation of what my life is actually like.      But I think the idea is to always make it consistent with a correlate in your world while remaining true to the spirit of my world. I will probably sound more articulate than I actually am but the software will always try and render an accurate representation of what I am saying and strike an emotionally faithful tone. The best analogues will always be used.

For example, there is an intelligent aquatic creature in the oceans of our home planet that we call a …well, frankly, a vocalisation that is unlikely to be reproducible in your language … but which will be translated as a dolphin because that is the closest counterpart in your world. (If that last sentence appears even vaguely intelligible to you, I will be amazed because I don’t know if you have any intelligent aquatic creatures in your oceans. Do you even have oceans?)

I also might mention at some point that I play a musical instrument. I don’t know how this will be rendered. Do you guys even have music? Even if you do, what are the chances of you having anything like the thing I play? Pretty remote, I would say. But the instrument I play will be described in terms that you can understand – so I play a guitar. Neither of us will know how good a translation that will be. But who knows? Your instruments and our instruments may be remarkably similar.

My civilisation has made great advances recently in communications and many people are calling this translation technology the greatest thing we have ever achieved.

If you are reading and understanding this, my dear alien reader, then I guess they might be right. I am sure it will at least be better than the old indecipherable hieroglyphics and mind-bending mathematical brainteasers that you poor aliens used to get from us. There is still a possibility though of some very bad errors.

The artificial intelligence of the translation technology may find a suitable analogue in your world but not believe it and retranslate it into something preposterous to your ears. Apparently this has happened very occasionally in tests. So if you read the odd weird or unintentionally funny thing, put it down to the stupidity of artificial intelligence. But it’s not my job to explain the technical side. I don’t understand it anyway. My job is to describe my life. All the relevant explanations will be in the Space Agency’s ‘covering letter’, as it were.

What they told me in the guidelines is to write as if the reader is completely familiar with my world. I am not to attempt explanations. Personally, I don’t see how they will be able to explain about everything in their ‘covering letter’. Maybe they will explain most of the things that are of concern in the elevated circles of posh Space Agency eggheads and their counterparts on your planet. But I can’t see how they will be able to explain everything in the ordinary world which I inhabit. I might break the rules once in a while even though they say that makes for bad writing.

I am determined to keep a diary for the next couple of months and then send it in. The hundred best diaries are to be chosen and will be transmitted along with all the other political and scientific messages. 35 years from now, you will receive these messages. If and when you read this, dear reader, bear in mind it will by that time be ancient history. If you decide to respond to me personally, it will be a further 35 years before I read your reply. I will be 88 years old. I will probably be dead. But perhaps the hope that I might get a message from an alien will keep me hanging on to life until then.

My only worry is that I will never make the top hundred. My diary is surely going to be very boring. But Octave has told me it won’t be boring. He fully expects my diary will be chosen. He seems strangely certain. I don’t know why he is so confident about that. But I will take his word for it because I have enormous respect for that guy.

This is an edited extract from the book Terrarium Hostel  by Duncan Fraser (RiverRun, Foreshore Publishing London £10.50).