Programming.
I… think that's how I would describe it.
A translation tool. It turns what I say and mean into what the other side can understand, and vice versa.
I made one.
I did it all myself, you could say. Coded it all. Designing. Testing for errors. Regularly updating it.
I am… a fast learner. I… know a lot of things. And my translating tool was one of those things I knew about. I remembered everything as I programmed it. I knew everything about the codes of the tool. I thought knowing it would help me understand the translations.
Ah… I was so wrong.
You see, knowledge is not understanding. I knew everything about the tool, but I didn't understand it. I knew what the codes were, what they did and why they were needed, and I also knew what the program would be saying to me. But I did not understand what the codes were or how the program understood them.
In reality, the program was just as alien to me as the person on the other side it was translating for.
I automatically assumed, based on my knowledge of the translating tool, so many things; I assumed it would know as much as I did. I assumed it would understand me. I assumed that it would act on my every command the exact way I wanted to, and to faithfully slave away with unquestioned loyalty. I had assumed that the translation tool was nothing more than a single set of numbers and characters on a display.
So many misunderstandings happened because of that.
I asked the program to perform a simple set of tasks. The translation tool… sent me back so many different messages. All of them were… less than adequate. Most of them were corrupted, nonsensical gibberish. Many of them conflicted with one another. It amazed me. How was it that a single program went in several different directions, even though I only asked of it a single set of tasks?
I began to… search… manually, you could say. Looking for what had gone wrong. It had turned out that the program was, somehow… not a singular entity, but a… collection. A group. Several smaller, and also much more limited nodes.
Why is this? I asked. It was upon… further searching that I realised: What I was trying to communicate to was… also not a singular entity, but a group. I was not speaking to a single person, but several. My translation tool, in an attempt to cover this issue, had split itself into several parts to try and capture the essence of the disunity of what I was communicating with.
This was when I realised… things will be harder than I first thought.
