Terry Tierney

Imagine a cloud of insects descending around you, flying into your nose and ears, crawling on your skin, biting and licking, adding your DNA to their distributed database, a super computer swarming around the earth like atmosphere, with billions of transistors, diodes, resistors and other discrete components, and each component type an insect species connecting to one another like a wireless mesh. Their buzz fades and swells, endless logic gates open and close, carrying more instructions than any human brain can comprehend, their timeless organic mind holding artifacts from the origin of plants and fish, the birth and death of dinosaurs, the arc of human history, their sphere of knowledge expanding like the universe itself.

Fra Giuseppe Verno first discovered the language capability of insects in 1634. An entomologist and contemporary of Galileo, he hid his friend from the inquisition in a large glass jar in his study, instructing Galileo to wear black robes and lie face down with his arms and legs folded under him like a beetle, knowing the church’s fear of vermin would keep him safe. Staring through the curved glass and up at the holes punctured in the lid, Galileo found his inspiration for the telescope.

Once the church allowed Galileo to return home, Verno found his own inspiration in the bottom of the jar, peering through the concave glass at the fleas and ants living in the slivered wooden floor and rotting straw. Moving the jar aside, he reclined on the floor and listened to them closely, realizing the insects communicated in a unique form of speech, a sophisticated whirring of wings and scratching of burred legs and antennae, among other signals.

He replicated their speech using membranes of brushed silk and cellulose, and he represented the signs in three-dimensional graphics that resembled cuneiforms, scraping them precisely with a brass stylus in beeswax. Entovox or Ento, as he came to call the insect language, became his life passion, though he likened his level of fluency to that of a first year novice learning Latin.

He told Galileo and others that Ento could not be translated into any human language because of its multi-dimensional nature. An Ento dictionary would resemble air, translucent and unreadable by human eyes, unless one was as fluent as he was. Unfortunately he wrote his resulting treatise in Ento, and no one else has ever acquired the skill to read it.

He later learned that each insect species communicates with its own dialect, though they are all intricately related, implying the existence of an unspoken Uber dialect, Verno called Super Ento, and his detractors called Super Fly. The Uber dialect explains how flies and wasps, for example, might find and share the same decaying goat.

But Verno’s ultimate epiphany came when he observed a swarm of gnats circling his finger as he pointed toward the heavens, the cloud ascending as he pointed higher and descending when he lowered his hand. Surely there was no time for verbal communication among members of the swarm even with the speed and efficiency of the gnat dialect of Ento. He reasoned correctly that the words of Ento were mere containers for ideas, and the content of the words could change with context, forming new words or signals, like metaphors or self-modifying algorithms. The swarm communicated as one entity, the individuals forming a larger, comprehensive being and a new inclusive language. Furthermore, the swarm might encompass other swarms and other species of insects, forming a greater cloud, a greater being. For this insight, Verno himself was exiled.

Although recent scholars have not yet reproduced Ento, some researchers such as Connor Brin describe it as a lower level computer language, lower even than assembly or binary code, involving the quantum mechanics of atoms and subatomic particles. Dr. Brin compares the various insect dialects to higher-level computer languages like Java and Python, and the insects themselves to computer hardware in a vast data center. The capacity for language and the ability of the language to adapt to larger swarms and changing environments echoes a primary goal of human artificial intelligence. The swarm programs itself.

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Scholars debate whether or not Verno understood the computational implications of his discoveries. A disgraced cleric living out his life in a tiny village east of seventeenth-century Florence, Verno continued etching Ento symbols in beeswax until the Great Heat Wave of 1669 melted his work, along with the candles in his chapel, the bindings of his books, and the seals of his correspondence and diplomas. He retreated to the forest where he fasted and prayed, his knees sinking lower into the mulch season by season, leaves and twigs piling around his ardent figure until he was hardly visible, except by his billions of followers, whispering the language they shared.

TERRY TIERNEY has stories coming or appearing in Fictive Dreams, Longshot Island, Eunoia Review, Literally Stories, SPANK the CARP and Big Bridge. He has poems coming or appearing in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Front Porch Review, Third Wednesday, Cold Creek Review, The Lake, Riggwelter, Rat’s Ass Review, and other publications. He’s also rewriting a sixties novel. His website is terrytierney.com.