①
“Hmm. How to best explain?” the Alien Woman pontificated. “I know!”
②
“The resulting linguistic comprehension remains stable. Their communication is at a constant, but not in the linear faction as we experience it. Rather than go through life in a chronological path, they view the whole as a series of broken down parts, that are then filtered in a manner fitting to their comprehension. Filtered through our expectations but not theirs.”
“Uh...”
The Accountant intervened, “You’re losing her. Simplify.”
③
“They don’t experience time linearly.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Simply speaking, SeerSighters don’t experience time the same way we do. They experience all timelines simultaneously, breaking them down into segments for easier comprehension. But the way they do it is different from how we do it. They approach time as a language. And we’ve been mangling their grammar without even realizing it.
“Time as a language? How does that work?”
“In some cultures, the description is given first, then the object in question. Such as, say, a Green Apple. But in other cultures, the object is given first, then the description. Like an Apple Green.”
“Likewise, in math, some sections are grouped in ( )s to determine the order of operations. If those parenthesis are arranged improperly, it can completely change the meaning.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“It’s not a case of sentence structure, it’s entire swatches of dialogue remixed in a different order from what we’re accustomed to.”
①
“I’m slowly starting to understand. Nope, I still don’t get it!”
“How many times to we have to explain? It’s very simple. They see time differently than we do. While it takes us time to go through events in real time, they experience it all at once. Think of it as skimming over an article, looking for the parts you’re interested in, then jumping back at the beginning to see what it’s about.”
“I don’t read articles.”
“Okay, bad example. See, it’s like a book that’s bookmarked to a page with dirty bits - no even better, a news scandal where the highlights are repeated over and over. You want to see how it happened, so you skip ahead to the middle with the juicy bits before going back to the start, and read the rest from the beginning.”
“Right, so that was twenty seconds ago. So, that would make the starting point... about here.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m marking the divergent points when they happened. So, they peek ahead 20 minutes, go back 10, go through the same tedious minutes all over again, knowing what happens and... uh...”
Sensing frustration, the Alien Woman grabbed the Girl’s memories and highlighted the part near the end.
“Upon our first meeting, I greeted you, the Man with the Mustache showed up, and you started punching yourself in the stomach before leaving with him.”
“Wait, that’s not how it played out!”
“No, but that’s how the SeerSighters saw it.”
②
“Their method of cataloguing their perception of time comes in the form of 1,2,3 when for us, it would be 2,1,3.”
Why did you format it like that?
“Like what?”
“Put it as 2,1,3, instead of 1,2,3 for us? Why isn’t it labelled in the correct order?”
“While WE experience time as 2,1,3, THEY experience it as 1,2,3. If we’re going to understand their frame of mind, we need to process how they think first.”
“It was the breakdown of their memories that clinched it for me. At first, I thought they were deliberately rewriting them to suit their purposes. At first glance, these memories seem to be in sequence, but if you look closer, there are rows that are out of order.”
She looked at the nonsensical array of swirls and whorls making up the SeerSighters’ memories.
“They use present terms talking about future events that occurred in the past. It’s all done so smoothly that we don’t even notice unless we’re paying attention. But we don’t always follow their strict rules of rituals - human speech isn’t that rigid. It flows in unpredictable ways to the reactions of the people around them.”
“So when we talk about problems in the third tier, they get confused. They confront events that have already occurred, then they reverse-engineer their way to the right answer. That’s how they’ve been able to predict things that haven’t happened yet... because the answer hasn’t happened yet. I knew they were cheating!”
“That must’ve been an arduous undertaking, trying to understand the SeerSighters’ physical memories when it would’ve been easier to go through your own.”
The Journalist winced at this obvious workaround he’d just overlooked. He could’ve had his memories extracted in physical form for easier comparison. “You think I’d go through all this trouble for fun?? Journalists aren’t allowed to insert themselves as part of the story!”
“Wait, wait. I’m confused. Do they see the 2nd part or the 1st part first?”
“Oh, I think I see where your confusion stems from. They see all time frames at once, stretching from 1 to 3.”
“Oh... I... huh. That seems to make some sort of sense.”
③
“Oh now I get it!” And this time, she really understood. “It makes sense when you put it that way. But wait!”, she realized, “Does that mean I have to go through everything they’ve said to understand what was really going on? How can anyone experience life that way?? What would that even look like??”
The Alien Woman and Accountant looked at each other. Or to be more specific, he looked down at her, and she looked down at his ankles.
“I always go straight to business before social pleasantries.”
“I practically open up with ‘Let’s go over these mathematical theories! Oh, and good morning,’ waking up fellow Accountants in the middle of the night.”
“We have no need for small talk.”
“Can someone get me down?”, the Girl complained.
The Silver-Haired Reporter found a weak link in the stretched rope that extended through multiple walls in the room and unfastened it, sending her tumbling to the floor. Rising to her feet, she confronted the SeerSighters again.
“First things first, are we in the first, second or third timeframe now?”
{The third}
“Perfect timing. If you guys can see into the future, you must be able to see all kinds of things, right?”
{There is no future}
{There is only the now}
{Past is Present and the Present is Past}
{The Future is the Future}
“Don’t think you can surprise me with your so-called outlandish predictions! I now know how your minds work! Point is, you must know what’s going to happen to me. So, you can give me a little heads-up first. Go ahead! Give me your wildest insider info!”
{We already told you}
“No you didn’t! Wait, is this one of those temporal time things again?”
{As we said so many times, yes}
“No you did - haven’t - do’en’ted-er yet!” She hated this terminology. It was so confusing, as if time-spatial awareness wasn’t confusing enough already. In the previous example, she was trying to say ‘Didn’t say it yet’, but got her terminology mixed up, and wound up saying ‘Didn’t haven’t saider yet’, which is complete gibberish, but makes just as much sense.
{No one’s saying you have to die right away}
{All you have to do is find a spot for this door}
There was the front door, the only way in, and apparently, the only way out. Would it be so bad to just open it and get it over with? She had a sudden premonition of opening it and being sucked through the doorway into a vast inky void, left inert and gasping, suspended in an empty realm of space, far away from any point of reference and no way of getting home.
As much as she expressed curiosity, the Girl wasn’t really interested in explanations. All she wanted was to finish the job, leave this place, eat, sleep, and never have to face any of these people again.
She was almost tempted to open the door herself and succumb to the unfathomable horrors that lay behind.
Almost.
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