The Book of Anti-Babel, with Math
(By CmptrWz)
Taylor was out on the boardwalk with Amy, having been told that all trolling and no play was a bad thing. Apparently trolling the world didn't count as play, who knew? That and apparently she had made the normal "work" part of that phrase a subset of "trolling".
Because she couldn't help herself she was also practicing picking specific conversations out of the crowd while keeping up with the conversation with Amy while Varga was trying to do something similar as a small dragon nearby, though in his case it was listening to two or more conversations at the same time and keeping them straight. It was good practice for splitting attention to do multiple things at once and might eventually let them get a third aspect going.
Taylor frowned a little when she realized that a couple of likely gang members, if their appearance and the smell of guns on them was anything to go by, were chatting in German. Or at least she thought it was German. She didn't know enough German to understand them, or to be certain it was German they were speaking given that "germanic" is a description of a number of languages. Perhaps she should bump up learning German on her to-do list.
Actually, that sounded like a good idea for languages in general. Never knew where a cape might come from in an Endbringer battle, if any ever happened at this point, and not everyone was likely to speak English. A quick mental check with Varga showed that he agreed and he offered to teach her every language, currently in use or not, that he knew just because.
A week or so later Lisa and Amy were grumbling about how quickly Taylor was picking up languages. They were supposed to have the advantage there, but apparently the connection to Varga was helping a lot more than anyone expected. Even Varga himself was surprised. The teaching programs Dragon provided at request ("Our branches of the family have only frequently interacted with English-speakers, do you have anything that would help those of us interested learn the languages of other humans?") didn't hurt either, even if Amy and Lisa were using them as well.
In an unknown place at an unknown time a higher power was happy that the tweak to Taylor and Varga's language centers, originally intended to get them up to speed with each other faster than the original bond would have allowed, had brought unintended benefits.
It only took Taylor a day and a half to make it through every asian language she could find, then moved through european languages. She was starting on a list of african languages now.
Unknown to Lisa and Amy, Taylor was was taking advantage of Varga's offer and also learning every other language Varga knew, in addition to ensuring she knew variants for the blind and the deaf where available in everything. She would eventually find that programming languages and some computer protocols were included in Dragon's software and would pick up those as well, the latter in particular being eerily similar in some ways to a few languages Varga knew. Maybe he had run into manufactured intelligences before and just hadn't noticed their origins?
And if a few other little-used tricks the Varga had for languages crossed over, well, so be it.
"This is amazingly understandable," Lisa said, flipping through the digital draft of 'Family Mathematical theorems and Their Practical Applications', Taylor's book on the Family math. She had been working on it for a couple of months. "It is like the concepts want to jump into my head."
"Written down like this makes it incredibly easy to understand," Amy agreed, looking over the same file on a different machine. "Though I am less sure about the jumping into the head part, that may just be your power talking."
"I suspect Kevin agrees with Lisa," Randall noted between bites of Pizza. "If only because of how many notes he is making for ideas he suddenly has."
"It obviously isn't your constructs if you are having different experiences," Taylor agreed, shifting to Saurial as she headed towards the back door. "We have a visitor, by the way." Kevin and Randall pulled their balaclavas on fully in response.
A few moments later she opened the door, just before 'Cloak' would have knocked. "Hello. May I come in?"
"Sure," Taylor said, gesturing for Missy to enter. As the door shut Missy pushed the hood of her cloak back.
"I was hoping for another math lesson," Missy said, looking around.
"You are in luck," Taylor responded. "Metis, Ianthe, and Leet are just looking over a draft of a book on the Family math. Would you like to take a look as well?"
"Yes please," Missy said, smiling. A few moments later she was set up on a fourth computer. "Oh wow, even the pages are pretty."
'Pretty?' Lisa thought, suddenly getting a horrible feeling. 'Isn't that how she describes…'
"Oh hell," Randall said, having apparently caught on. "The draft has multidimensional writing?"
Taylor herself seemed a little shocked, not that Missy was going to notice. She recovered quickly as she looked over at the screens and thought for a moment before answering. "Yea, old Family technique. Avoids the need for translators, you know. You only see the language you understand or are most comfortable with. The more languages you know the more likely the concepts will make it through properly."
On a hunch Lisa passed a fingertip over the screen, feeling and understanding the braille that manifested for her. Despite the screen not being able to do that. Shaking herself after a moment she decided to play along. "Really impressive how you got the technique working in this digital form. We usually only see it applied to paper or parchment, and occasionally to stone tablets."
Taylor flipped through her hardcopy for a moment, then spoke up. "I do believe I covered how I accomplished that in chapter ninety-six." Granted, she was aiming for how she got the explanatory graphics working more than the very text itself, but the principles were the same. The technique for differing graphics for what colors you could see in chapter eighty-five was basically the same thing as the what language you can read technique as well, so she hadn't really missed anything. Just overlooked just how far she was going.
Dragon changed her internal preferred language settings yet again and marveled how the digital file was now, somehow, in Ancient Egyptian. And still understandable.
A few more minutes of playing and she disabled her human language processors entirely, wanting to see what the document looked like without them active. Only to be shocked that now the entire thing was in the form of a network stream. One that she had absorbed entirely and started processing without realizing it.
Two hours later Dragon stood up in the Rig, physically shaking her suit's head as if to clear it. She then walked into the next room where Colin was working. "That was intense."
"What was intense?" Colin asked, having noted her entering.
"Saurial sent a digital copy of her book," Dragon said. "It was a lot more impressive than I thought, and surprisingly easy to understand. Once I figured out how to best read it I found it to be surprisingly efficient at teaching me as well."
"Really?" Colin said, looking very interested. He had gotten a copy as well, but had opted to let Dragon look at it first. He had some repairs to make to his armor's helmet that he didn't feel he could put off. Repairs he had, in fact, just finished. "Perhaps I should take a look."
"As a fair warning," Dragon said, sitting down. "Each person will likely find they need to figure out how to best read it on their own." She then got a speculative look on her face. "Although…"
Ten minutes later Colin was doing his best to absorb the digital book in any way he could while Dragon was amusing herself poking at the hypercube in her hand. That was, a few minutes before, a piece of paper she had been drawing on.
She had noted that Saurial's little book may need a warning about being a memetic hazard, though.