Lexicon

something.”
    “Sure.” He slung the rifle and came toward her, his hands reaching for hers. “Name it.”
    “
Kikkhf fkattkx hfkixu zttkcu
,” she said. “Shoot me.”

BROKEN HILL TO REMAIN SEALED
    The Sydney Morning Herald, Vol. 183 Issue 217 Page 14
    A government body charged with reviewing the toxicity of Broken Hill—site of the 2019 disaster that killed more than three thousand people—has recommended that the town remain fenced off for an indeterminate time.
    The review was triggered by photographs last summer of what appear to be two large helicopters hovering over the town. This fueled long-running local speculation that the town was not uninhabitable, with conspiracy theories proclaiming the town as home to everything from a secret mafia treasure trove to government military programs.
    The review, which published a 300-page report today, should hose down such talk, with scientists finding critically high levels of methyl isocarbonate still present in the soil.
    “As much as I enjoy a good story, it would be highly dangerous to start thinking it’s okay to go have a look at Broken Hill,” said spokesperson Henry Lawson. “The town is, unfortunately, a grim reminder of what can happen when people and businesses operate without proper oversight.”
    Broken Hill remains the site of one of the world’s worst environmental disasters.

MEMO
    Subject: Re: revisions to models post-BH
    Update as per request—report not finalized, don’t quote me on this, etc. etc.
    Our chief finding is that what we saw in BH was a multilingual effect. Which I realize makes no sense on the face of it, since no relevant parties are/were multilingual to any known degree. But whenever we’ve seen rejection of this magnitude before, it’s been because the recipient is fluent in more than one language. (Can be reliably reproduced in testing: e.g., while counting in Dutch, bilingual subject exhibits increased resistance to compromise in English.) We’ve theorized that when the brain is keyed into one language, words from another are more likely to be first-stage filtered as nonsense syllables—not actually processed as words, i.e., carriers of meaning.
    So the question is, what second language? And—again, don’t quote me, data to be crunched—our answer is the language of the bareword. Whatever that is. We haven’t dealt with a bareword before, so our knowledge here is sketchy. But we believe a bareword belongs to a fundamental language of the human mind—the tongue in which the human animal speaks to itself at the basest level. The machine language, in essence.
    We’re still not clear on exactly what relationship existed between V. Woolf and the outlier Harry Wilson—some kind of love affair? But we accept that upon discovering he was alive. She shifted to a primitive, animalistic state. Mentally, she was operating in that underlying language, feeling desire as a bareword.
    As we know, when a subject experiences conflict from instructions of roughly equal compulsive power, results are situationally dependent, i.e., unpredictable. That scenario, we’re basically talking about free will.
    (Note that when instructions conflict, they do not cancel out. Subject experiences desire to do both. Just worth bearing in mind.)
    Bottom line, we see no reason to discard established models. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This may sound like we’re trying to cover our asses, i.e., avoid admitting flaws in past research, but it’s our honest opinion.
    I realize this may create something of a political issue, given the current organization restructure/bloodbath. Sorry about that. Although the bigger issue, for me, are the questions raised by this underlying lexicon. What are its words? How many are there? Can they be revealed through lab research, i.e., direct excavation from the brain? Can we learn to speak them? What does it sound like when who we are is expressed in its most fundamental form?
    Something to think about.

    R. Lowell

[FIVE]
    He rose at four and pulled on his pants and boots and jacket. The house was cold as glass and he tried to coax life out of the remnants of the fireplace but there was nothing there. He tucked his hands into his armpits and went outside. The air was frigid, the sky an open box with no real hint of sunlight yet, and he traipsed through the near paddock to the barn. The cow, Hong, heard his approach and mooed hopefully. He led her inside, positioned the bucket, and took