The Telling Words

A number machine can do only what it is told. The telling words are how people tell it. They look like words, but they work like machine parts: each one makes the machine do one small thing, the same thing each time.

What they say

Here is the kind of thing telling words say: take this number. Add this other number to it. Compare what you have with zero. If it is bigger, do this; if not, do that. Then go back to the top and do it all another time.

That is all. Add, compare, choose, and go back to the top — a thousand thousand times each moment. All the things a number machine looks like it is doing — the games, the moving pictures, the words you are reading now — are made from these small doings, one on top of another, more than you could count in all your years.

Zero and one

Far below all the telling words, there are only two words: zero and one. Yes or no. On or not on. Each thing the machine holds — each word, each picture, each sound — is a long, long line made from zeros and ones, and no thing else. Eight of them, side by side, can hold one small piece of writing — one of the marks you are reading now.

The small animal

When people write telling words, they often say a thing they did not mean. The machine does not know this. It does what the words say, not what the person meant — quickly, a thousand times, before the person can stop it. People have a name for what happens then: it is the name for a very small animal that goes where it is not wanted. People who write telling words give many of their days to finding these small animals in their own work. They hold their work inside the tool that takes pictures of work, and go back through the pictures to see when the small animal went in.

The first writer

Writing telling words is work now, in all countries — work that pays well. But the first person to write them, about two hundred years before now, was a woman. She wrote telling words for a machine no one had made — a machine with a thousand metal wheels and more, planned but not made in her years. She saw what machines like it could become before one existed, and she wrote that a machine like this could, one day, make music.

Most telling words are written. But some, now, are grown: the machine that says one more word is telling words that no person wrote. What the telling words will say one day, no one knows.