🌘

“Then teach me your language that needs no sight,” you sign. At that, her eyes flicker pink and green.

[Akiko liked that]

She sits up, and you sit up facing her. “That’s my first language, it’s very important to me, the mode of thinking I default to in the hardest and the calmest moments,” she signs.

“I want to learn it, I want to talk to you in the deepest way I can,” you sign. “But I might need my interface for that.”

“Not at all. I’m a CommSpec, I don’t need augments to teach you a language.”

“Okay, I’ll try my hardest to learn then!” you sign.

She grasps you by the sides of your head and kisses you. Then she looks around the mislaid piles of fabric scraps on her desk and picks a long purple strip. She looks into your eyes for a moment, then her pink LEDs shut off. That’s the last thing you see before she covers your eyes with the fabric. You feel her wrap it around your head and tie it off behind you.

The next thing you feel is a touch on your shoulder. Her hand slides down your arm. When she reaches your hand, she takes it with her other hand and positions your fingers in a certain way--holding the back of her hand, with two fingers wrapped around onto her palm, one resting on her thumb, one on her index finger, and your thumb over her other fingers. From this peculiar position, you can feel her handshape, and her motions.

With your fluent knowledge of JSL, you’re able to reason most of the kana she spells out--going slowly for you. “Listening,” she signs. You have no way to respond yet, so you just listen.

She takes your other hand and sets it down on her thigh. She spells out a word--”backchanneling.” You only know this linguistic term from her infodumps. This is how you give feedback while listening, you understand.

Next, she takes her active signing hand and taps on your thigh, with four fingers, four times in rapid succession. She spells out, “Yes.” Then, she takes the same fingers and rapidly slides her fingernails back and forth, horizontally across your thigh. She spells, “No.”

You sign “Yes,” on her thigh, trying to indicate you understand.

From there, the lesson goes on. She shows you a lot of basic signs--”space,” and “æther,” like space but upside down. You sign “yes” or “no.” It’s intuitive to you with most of a year’s experience at sign languages--many signs are similar to their visual counterparts, but some things are very different. Instead of indexing pronouns visibly in the space around her, she indexes them on your body. You aren’t yet sure how you’ll incorporate this concept into your complete pronouns database.

Sometimes her motions are just stims, but that too is communication. Sometimes she pats you on the head. If you seem to understand something really well, she stops and kisses you. But the lesson goes on. Using her hand, her fingertips, her fingernails, she simulates soft or smooth or rough textures--many signs in this language describe textures.

Using space on your body, she draws out a map--you realize it describes the layout of the room you’re in, and she signs to describe the texture of various objects in it, indexing them on her body map. When she indicates where you are in the room, she strongly emphasizes “soft.”

“Yes,” you sign back.

“Now it’s your turn,” she signs. You let go of her hand, and you try the same thing she did at first--touch her on her shoulder and slide your hand down her arm, following the path of her conduit implants down to her hand. She takes hold of you in the listening position, and rests her other hand on your thigh.

On an autistic level, you appreciate the clarity of roles of speaker and listener in this language. Now you are the active participant in the conversation--what will you communicate first?

END CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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