It had been an hour at this point, an hour spent in an otherwise quiet booth of the Afterlife, the silence punctuated by the clack of keyboard keys and the occasional conversation between Sasha and the kindergartener while he stood watch. At this point, Maine was forced to confront the likely reality that he wasn't being pranked and that this was just how Sasha's sort of netrunner talked, English interspersed with purring, meowing, and punctuated with "nya."
As he stared down at the half-dozen empty shot glasses in front of him, he thought back to a conversation he had with Sasha, weeks ago. It felt like a previous life, now, after this much hard liquor, but he still remembered precisely what she said. It was the sort of non-sequitur that just digs itself into your brain and installs itself permanently, like cyberware routed straight into the nervous system.
"It's just history! Before Bartmoss, the Old Net was run entirely by old men in fursuits and catgirls in thigh-high socks!"
What a bizarre lie to tell, he thought at the time. He glanced in the direction of the two women, and began to suspect it wasn't a lie after all.
After a particularly long recitation of cat noises, the new girl asked, "Okay, but why, though? I didn't want to harp on it before we got to work, but it's been an hour now and I still don't get it. Why name your functions 😼🙀😸? Yeah, this is your signature, but why choose this for a signature?"
A moment passed in silence, and Sasha stared at her with a look that Maine half-recognized from times on their jobs. It was a look she got on her face when judging whether or not a paycheck was worth the risk, whether or not she was in or out of any particular client's request. Almost every time, she made up her mind quickly, and this was no exception. After only a few seconds of looking into the teenager's eyes, Sasha's expression lit up into a smile.
"It's more efficient! The thing about English is that it's the de facto language for programming languages entirely by historical accident. The field took off after World War II, and a lot of research took place in the old United States simply because it was the only industrialized nation that wasn't bombed to hell."
"So use Japanese?"
"It's not much better, in terms of keystrokes! With predictive keyboards, the winner right now is Chinese, but only barely. Natural languages just suck."
"I'd still rather read something like filterList than 😻🙀!"
"Would you though? Especially if you're on a job? When seconds count, you want the most expressive possible language for a job. 😸😺😹😼!"
The new girl was speechless for a second. "... it bothers me that I understood that."
Hell, it bothered Maine to hear that she understood it. Was this how catgirls reproduced?
Sasha was smiling, with something of a vicious glint in her pearly whites. "English has a natural entropy of 1 bit per character. Each character you read cuts down possibility space of a particular meaning by 50%, and information science bears that out. If you take 8-bit ASCII of English plaintext and compress it, you'll wind up with somewhere around 88 to 89% compression, expressing that 8:1 ratio. Wasteful! Humans have ten toes on their paws, so we should shoot for log base two of ten bits of entropy!"
Looking haunted, the new girl recited some cat noises that Maine had heard before, and hoped to never understand.
"🐱😼😹🙀😾😿😻😺😸😽"
"Exactly! Ten distinct characters, each conveying a different mood. Here, let me flick you my keyboard presets. Give😻🙀 another try.
Two keystrokes thudded, loud and ominous, like the sound of a guillotine blade finding purchase and a head hitting the ground.
"See? How much faster was that than typing out parseList? It's even faster to understand, once you map emotions onto data structures and algorithms."
The new girl got out of the booth then, and Maine, still staring ahead with the same stoic silence he always held when enduring a difficult job, quietly grasped for some shred of hope that this was now over.
Instead, she turned and bowed to Sasha. "Teach me more, sensei! 😻😼😹😽!"
"😼😺"
Maine ordered another drink.