Pick Up Solo: Wasa sat with her hands neatly folded over the leather satchel in her lap as the towncar bumped and jolted down a heavily degraded country road. It had been serviceable once, but many years of wet winters had taken their toll upon the asphalt, making the drive seem more like a carriage ride over cobbles than a properly chauffeured journey.
“I am, um…. Sorry I don’t have a car. Well, I have one but it was decided it’s best for me not to drive it. My mind tends to wander.” She paused as they passed over a particularly deep slump in the road, though the Frei hardly seemed jostled as she floated on the seat beside her new guardian. “That doesn’t mean you will be stuck on the villa, of course! You can get a car with your phone now-“ She cut herself off as she realized that girl was unaware of a time before internet ride sharing, or phones for that matter. She also hadn’t expressed a full grasp of speech, so who was say she understood anything more than Wasa’s reassuring tone. She tapped her thumbs nervously upon the satchel, trying to figure out how to connect with the new Frei and finding herself completely devoid of inspiration. It seemed like it should be easier, somehow. The essence had been a constant companion, and even though her time with the filled bottle had been short, it was a presence that persisted in her mind constantly. A soft patter caught her attention and she looked to the window, expecting to find raindrops but seeing a clear sky and a bright spring moon. She turned back towards the Frei and watched as she tapped her thumbs along the spine of the plain folder she held in her hands, a quaint mimicry of Wasa’s movements.
“What do you have there?” She gestured to the folder to make her meaning a little clearer.
The Raeven looked to the folder, smoothing her gloved hand over the soft cover as her wings shuffled with the sound of sheets of fresh parchment sliding over one another.
”Words.” She opened the folder and retrieved one of the loose slips of paper inside to show the artist. It was a later page of a printed document, page 38 to precise, and seemed to detail the maintenance of an autonomic floor buffing device.
“That you see instead of speaking.” Her words were an echo of an assistant’s attempt to inform her and perhaps keep her from snatching up some of the more vital documents that were within her long reach. To her, they were fragments of a pattern, uniform in size and rigidly structured as they marched along the page in stark rows. At times there was a soothing repetition in them. One string of symbols,
The GaiaVac Autonomous Floor Cleaning System, appeared frequently, always in that order, but only before and after a jumble of symbols in arranged in utter chaos. The randomness of it all made the small, sucker lined tentacles framing her temples writhe in discomfort, yet she was determined to make sense of it.
“Oh.” Wasa took the page and looked it over. “Are you interested in this?” She knew to expect some… unique interests from a young Raevan, but she hadn’t exactly anticipated home appliance maintenance to be the first hobby to present itself.
The Raeven tilted her head and then promptly pushed her spectacles up higher on her nose. In the fluid of the tank, her sight had been unobscured, but in plain air her eyes could not focus on their own. She was a bit slower to reply this time, having to search for the words on her own.
”I want to understand.”Wasa looked at the page again and began to read the technical jargon. Within the minute her brow was furrowed and she turned the page over in the hopes of finding a helpful diagram. “I… I don’t think anyone understands these. I think they just want you to buy a new one.”
The Frei blinked, then also narrowed her brows to reflect Wasa’s expression.
”I want to understand” She repeated as she took back the paper and tucked it into the folder as if it were some precious thing.
Wasa paused, visibly moved by the determination the newborn Frei expressed. “I… I’ll find a video”
The panes of glass fixed in the windows had shifted colors many times since the Frei first found her way back to this room. Black, rosegold, blue, violet and then black once more. Time, marked by the changing sky, repeating in a pattern. The woman had shown her many rooms when they first arrived. Rooms with chairs, rooms with beds, a room with plants, a room with many cupboards, and at each she looked at her as if wanting something but never asking what. Once, the Raeven nodded after being shown a room with a bed overlooking a tangle of ungroomed hedges, and that made the woman smile. So she continued to nod each time the woman stopped on their tour of the large house. It was this room, however, that caught her interest more than any of the others. When the woman gave her leave to wander, this was where she drifted.
Papers, papers beyond counting. Gathered into neat stacks and fixed between boards so they could be observed without scattering. Papers brought together became books, and books gathered together in a single room formed a library. This much she learned from her Guardian’s words when she introduced this fascinating room to her, but she could tell there was so much more to it all. Her folder and the paper tucked inside were now forgotten on the cluttered desk near the window, for there new patterns to be found here. Some of the books, the slimmest and most brightly colored, were illustrated with pictures. It seemed a strange addition, but the patterns in these books were smaller, simpler. She studied them carefully and just as the glass shifted from gold to azure once more, she came across it.
It was a book. In the book. A simple drawing of a tome clutched in the hands of human, and beneath it the symbols ‘B’ two ‘O’s, and ‘K’. Then she turned the page and saw it again “B-O-O-K” with another picture. That was it, a word that you see instead of speak. And she knew how to speak this word.
”Book.” She said aloud, her voice clear and crisp in the unoccupied room. She placed the picture book down open on the floor in front of her and grabbed another, setting it open on the floor as well at a slight angle. She flipped through both books, looking for any matching pictures between the two and then scanning the symbols. “C-A-R” and “C-A-R” appearing beside drawings of machines similar to the one that carried her and Wasa to this house. She grabbed 5 more books, fanning them out to form a semicircle and continued on at a more feverish pace, her thoughts reaching back to any word that was ever spoken her presence be it by the guardian, a lab assistant, or even the strange, distant calling from a ‘before’ she recognized but could not understand. Bed, paper, wing, glasses, hair…. She grabbed more books, now having to set them in concentric rings around her. Ribbon, bottle, chair and flower. She closed her eyes and thought back further, but so much was only wisps of sound with no meaning at all. She needed more words but the thought of tearing herself away from her display now three rings deep and flowing into a fourth made her feel… uncomfortable. Like a light shining too bright in her eyes.
“So hey! I found a vid-“ Wasa appeared at the library door but stopped short at the sight that welcome her, “-eo…”
The Frei floated in place, blinking at her guardian from within her exquisitely arranged spread of books. The inner edge of each ring was perfectly formed circle despite the various widths of the pages, and even though the fourth ring was not yet complete, the gaps between each book were perfectly spaced.
”Vid-eo?” The Frei repeated, mimicking the same hitch Wasa gave to the word when she was startled. She wanted the woman to say more, and quickly, so she could search for “Video” in the books below her.
“Yes, I… I meant to get to it earlier but then I was showing you the house. I did remember though!” She hoisted up the laptop in her hands and then picked her way through the stacks and searched for an even spot on table to set it down.
The Frei floated away from her books a bit reluctantly, but she knew her progress depended on hearing more words from the woman. She waited patiently as Wasa balanced the computer precariously on two uneven stacks of books before pressing “play” on the loaded clip. Immediately the frozen picture began to move and the Frei looked on, puzzled, as a thick round disc began to roam flat, carpeted terrain.
”What is this?” She tilted her head as the tendrils behind her ears coiled together pensively. Hands attached to an unseen body turned the disk over to reveal a brush toothed maw and tiny spinning wheels.
“It’s… it’s a maintenance video. For the GaiaVac?” Her voice tilted up at the last as she tried to spark the Raevan’s memory. “You showed me that page in the car… this is the video they made because people couldn’t understand it, I guess.”
The Frei looked from the artist back to the video, then suddenly reached forward to snatch the page from the folder that rested a few feet away. She furrowed her brows as she scanned the symbols, finding few to none of the words she had catalogued from the books.
”Show me. Show me ‘GaiaVac” “I don’t have one. I mean, I should. Actually I could probably use a couple….”
The Frei huffed slightly, frustration cresting over what little patience she had cultivated in her short existence.
”No, here.” She pointed to the page.
”Which one is GaiaVac?”Her guardian blinked and looked over the Frei’s shoulder to the arrangement of books. “Are you… reading?” Another stifled grunt from the youth called her attention back to the page and she scanned the unreasonably fine text until she found the bolded words. “There.” She pointed, keeping her finger just below the text so she would not obscure the words. “GaiaVac Autonomous Floor Cleaning System.”
The edges of the paper wrinkled slightly as her grip tightened on the page. One word. She knew one word upon it out of hundreds. It was thrilling but at the same time she was baffled. Someone had a made a page of so many symbols and it was about a tiny car that nobody could ride that seemed to bump into walls quite frequently. Slowly she floated back to the ring of books. Within an instant, a sense of nourishing relief began to seep into limbs and the rune beneath her chest pulsed a little brighter.
Wasa watched her move, a bit concerned that she may have left the newborn to her own devices too quickly and for too long but yet fascinated by what had transpired. “Are you teaching yourself to read?” The girl could barely speak, and yet she already grasped the concept of written word!
The Frei repeated the words in her head, connecting them to past experiences to try to pick apart the context.
”Yes. Words you see.”“When you see words instead of speaking them, it’s reading. When you make words with your hands, it’s writing.”
The girl’s silver eyes went wide and those idling tendrils began to quiver and writhe with excitement.
”How do you make the words?”“Any way you can really.” It was an interesting question to an artist. “Pen is popular, but I guess most people type nowadays” She lifted up the computer to indicate the tiny buttons lined up upon the lower surface, each with a tiny symbol printed on it. “Now you can talk to a phone and it will make your, um, speaking words into written words.”
It was so much, perhaps too much, but the Raevan wanted know more. She sunk down deeper into her nest of books, the rune continuing to strengthen in is glow.
”Show me.”“Okay…” Wasa pulled the phone from her pocket and lowered herself to floor beside the ring as she tried to think of a thing to say. She held the microphone towards her mouth and spoke with perhaps a bit more force than the situation called for. “Pen!” The phone chimed, and the browser loaded with facts about pens, where to buy pens, and, to the Frei’s utter exhilaration, photos of pens.
She reached out without leaving the circle and pulled the phone close.
”This will tell me what words mean?”“Yes.”
”I want one.”The request caught her completely off guard. “You… you are like two weeks old.” Were they really already having this conversation?
The Frei cocked her head and narrowed her eyes.
”I don’t understand.”What connection was there between her age and her desire for a machine that turned her voice into written words?
“I, um… I can see what I can do. I need this one, but…” She pulled herself onto her hands and knees and crawled towards the desk to retrieve the computer. “I hardly use this anymore. You can use it for now.” She pulled up a fresh browser, typed in a word, and turned the screen towards her. “You can’t speak to it, but just copy the word in here and then press this key” She pointed to the enter key. “It will bring up pictures, definitions, oh and if you click this” She moved her finger along the touch pad “when the arrow is on speaker, it will say the word”
The strange, stilted voice of the computer erupted from the speakers to declare “Octopus” as the page filled with a dozen photos of the tentacled mollusk.
The Frei’s excitement and obsession was suddenly redirected as her eyes beheld the collage of creatures. It was the first truly familiar thing she had ever witnessed, and thus her first time feeling and sense of familiarity at all. With a cautious hand she took the offered computer and set it down on the books before her.
”Octopus...”“Yes!” Wasa beamed brightly, then suddenly felt that metaphorical tap on her shoulder that threatened to tumble down to become a pit in her stomach. Was she… not supposed to bring up the octopus thing? Was she about to watch an existential crisis unfold? Did she manage to break her Raeven in the mere span of 48 hours?
”I see.” The octopus tentacles stilled for a spell as she tapped her finger in the same pensive manner Wasa had displayed in their inaugural car ride. After seconds that stretched in an uncomfortable eternity for the guardian, the Raeven typed a word into the computer and waited with a held breath and a single twitch of a suckered tip.
“The!” The computer intoned.
The Raeven frowned.
”There are no pictures for ‘the.’” She looked disappointed and rightfully so. ‘The’ showed up dozens of times in every book she opened, it was obviously very important word, and yet all the pictures of it were just pictures of the word itself.
The tension built up in the guardian dissipated with a relieved sigh and even a bit of a chuckle. “I guess somethings still need to be taught…”
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