conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a plot for a book about Learning, Sky, Lady.\nThe entitled Learning the World.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Learning the World: The novel is a first contact story, following the generation ship But the Sky, My Lady.\nThe Sky.\nas it approaches the Destiny Star.\nHumans have been colonizing the 500 light-years around Earth for a few thousand years, and have never run into a sentient alien species\xa0— until now.\nThe discovery of an Industrial Age alien race upsets the established protocols of the ship, leading to uncertainty and delays in habitation, which in turn leads to societal unrest and conflict aboard the ship.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nThe Sky.\nas it approaches the Destiny Star.\nHumans have been colonizing the 500 light-years around Earth for a few thousand years, and have never run into a sentient alien species\xa0— until now.\nThe discovery of an Industrial Age alien race upsets the established protocols of the ship, leading to uncertainty and delays in habitation, which in turn leads to societal unrest and conflict aboard the ship.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Learning the World
  Orro laughed. "They may have rival powers, like us! It's as if a ship from Seloh saw a signal from a beach in the wilder parts of the Southern Rule, and thought it came from a Gevorkian landing party, whereas in fact it was from the natives."
  He hurried out. The remaining two eights or so of people in the room stood or perched around the receiver.
  Darvin turned to see the Sight agent who'd recruited him. Bahron, he called himself. He hung around the camp and gave vague explanations about site security. Everybody knew who he was and what he did, but kept the pretence that they didn't. Darvin hadn't noticed him in the room earlier, and guessed he'd just arrived, or that his penchant for the shadows had kept him unseen.
  Bahron shrugged. "For the very reason you raise the question. If they looked too much like us, we'd be suspicious."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The neural structure of the human brain's language-processing module, named in deep antiquity Chomsky's Conceit, had been known since the Caves. The genetic code of the Destiny II biosphere was known from aerial microorganisms returned to the stealth orbiter. The amount of information and genetic instruction that could be packed in a nanoassembler was vaster by far than even the vast amount stored in natural genomes and machinery, cluttered as they were with redundancy and junk. The information-processing hardware capacity of the ship was beyond all human conception, and the amount of information its science software could extract from the slenderest and most fragile of evidence was limited only by the ingenuity of the human inquiry that initiated it.
  So... they'd had the means to install Chomsky's Conceit on any big enough brain down below. They had the means to generate radio transmitters within host bodies, as they'd done with the dung-beetles. And faced with the crash-and-burn and banning of that project, they'd skipped blithely ahead to a bolder one. They couldn't install Chomsky's Conceit on the brains of bat people—the aliens' brains already had a language module of their own. That would have given rise to wetware conflicts and deep grammar errors, and anyway, ethically, that would never have done. Oh no. That would have been wrong. That would have interfered. What they had done, bless their reckless little souls, was to set up the machinery to install the module on the brains of the slaves, who had (they'd figured) no language module (and who were, therefore, not slaves but beasts). And once they'd received and filtered and processed and quantum-handwaved the information coming back from brains learning the bat people's languages, the translation protocols had been—
  It was turning into a big day for flash meditation. Much more of this and she might attain flash enlightenment.
  Synchronic had already shown him the breakout she had witnessed. She flashed him a pointer to the file.
  Synchronic was astonished at the ruthlessness of that argument. It was so outrageous and unexpected that she couldn't begin to answer it. She concentrated instead on the appalled promptings now pouring in from her allies.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She concentrated instead on the appalled promptings now pouring in from her allies. The genetic code of the Destiny II biosphere was known from aerial microorganisms returned to the stealth orbiter. The amount of information and genetic instruction that could be packed in a nanoassembler was vaster by far than even the vast amount stored in natural genomes and machinery, cluttered as they were with redundancy and junk. The information-processing hardware capacity of the ship was beyond all human conception, and the amount of information its science software could extract from the slenderest and most fragile of evidence was limited only by the ingenuity of the human inquiry that initiated it.
  So... they'd had the means to install Chomsky's Conceit on any big enough brain down below. They had the means to generate radio transmitters within host bodies, as they'd done with the dung-beetles. And faced with the crash-and-burn and banning of that project, they'd skipped blithely ahead to a bolder one. They couldn't install Chomsky's Conceit on the brains of bat people—the aliens' brains already had a language module of their own. That would have given rise to wetware conflicts and deep grammar errors, and anyway, ethically, that would never have done. Oh no. That would have been wrong. That would have interfered. What they had done, bless their reckless little souls, was to set up the machinery to install the module on the brains of the slaves, who had (they'd figured) no language module (and who were, therefore, not slaves but beasts). And once they'd received and filtered and processed and quantum-handwaved the information coming back from brains learning the bat people's languages, the translation protocols had been—
  It was turning into a big day for flash meditation. Much more of this and she might attain flash enlightenment.
  Synchronic had already shown him the breakout she had witnessed. She flashed him a pointer to the file.
  Synchronic was astonished at the ruthlessness of that argument. It was so outrageous and unexpected that she couldn't begin to answer it.The neural structure of the human brain's language-processing module, named in deep antiquity Chomsky's Conceit, had been known since the Caves.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I called him up just as the ship was leaving. He wasn't as busy as I'd feared. We talked a little about what are, to me, old times, and new ideas.
  I swallowed. "That we're not the first," I said. "Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We're a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars."
  The picture and sound became hopelessly indistinct. He may have said more after that, but I didn't catch it and could never retrieve it. The transmitters the bat people build back there on Destiny II are good, but not good enough to reach us now as we accelerate away.
  But as I go about my work with the rest of the crew I'm haunted by two thoughts. One is of a man in the Moon Caves, looking at a high-energy physics experiment and looking up and saying, "But the sky, my lady! The sky!"
  The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved—then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.