So you think this definition of work can tell us something about the more abstract form of the concept we’re looking for?
His tone was uncertain, like a child’s. I could understand his trepidation. Up until now, we’d only been considering the idea of work in the broader, more common sense notion of the word—the first definition that would be listed were you to look up the term in a dictionary. Obviously, it would depend on what type of dictionary you were using, but generally work as an “activity” or “occupation” would come first, with the physics sense of the word probably being listed as the third definition or below.
“Good question,” I said, turning it over one last time in my head before I answered. It was definitely too soon to claim that it was undoubtedly related to the answer we sought, but my gut was telling me not to rule it out either. “Well, what if we think of it this way… Language is like a living, breathing organism.”
Coeus looked over at me with inquisitive eyes. He probably had no idea where I was going with this—and honestly, neither did I just yet. I was groping my way through the dark here just as much as he was.
“Okay, maybe it would be simpler to just say that language evolves... It’s words that are like living creatures—some die off, all thanks to natural selection., others evolve and adapt to the changing environment in which they are used. As we continue using them in more and more contexts, their meanings and connotations—even their pronunciations—change over time. It’s entirely possible that a century or two from now, a great number of the most common words we use today will have died off, to the point that we wouldn’t even be able to hold an intelligible conversation with our descendants. But on the flip side, this also means there’s an undeniable strength to be found in the core etymologies and meanings of the words that do stand the test of time.”
Though I’d stumbled a bit at first, the more I talked him through the idea, the more vivid it became in my head. Some things lasted, while others didn’t—and generally, there had to be a functional reason for it, barring exceptions that had survived unchanged through pure dumb luck.
“The word ‘work’ has several meanings today,” I went on. “It can be a verb that describes the nature of a given task. Or a noun meaning one’s occupation. Or as we’ve just seen, it can also be a specific scientific concept. We call all three of these distinct things by the same name, and we’ve been doing so for several hundred years now.”
I did my best to blur the lines between macro and micro, to give myself a fuller, if hazy, mental image of the concept as a whole, while still vaguely considering each of its individual parts. Work as a societal construct. The work of an individual. The work of a collaborative biological system, like our internal organs. The work nature does unto itself. And work as the product of force and displacement. And at last, I felt that I could answer Coeus’s question regarding the relevance of all of this with confidence.
“I think there has to be a reason we’ve given all of these things the same name,” I said. “So yes, there must be something it can tell us.”
The two of us looked once again at my crude side-view diagram. There was something this little box knew about work that the two of us didn’t, I was sure of it.
13
“Hey, we’re gettin’ pretty hungry in here!” Lei said, poking his head out from the zip-up door of the walled canopy tent to voice his complaint. I shooed him away with my hands like he was an annoying dog, and he begrudgingly retreated back into the tent.
I’ll try to go faster, said Coeus, clearly a bit flustered.
“No, you’re doing fine,” I reassured him. “Let the freeloaders wait.”
Coeus was always trying to do his very best not to let us humans down, but unfortunately, some humans were more deserving of that consideration than others. He and I were the ones doing the work here, after all. Moochers had no right to complain.
It was now the evening of day forty, and Coeus and I were busy making dinner. We’d gotten pretty good at this over the past month, but today we were attempting something a bit different. We were trying our hands at cooking outdoors on the coast near Yakutat, where we’d dropped anchor for the night. In the bitter cold, we’d set up a little rudimentary kitchen and a green canopy tent where Lei and Professor Beckmann were standing by, waiting for us to treat them to a home-cooked meal.
Our goal for today was to give Coeus an opportunity to dine with some new live bodies. It was a big step toward socialization that I wouldn’t have thought he was ready to take had he not suggested it himself.
The two of us had come to a realization over the course of this journey, as we cooked and ate meals together. For whatever reason, we almost always found the dishes the other person had cooked tasted better than our own. It was always a team effort, of course, and we collaborated on most dishes—but when one person took the lead on a particular recipe, the other person always seemed to like that dish more than any other part of the meal. Whenever it happened to me, I found it awfully hard to believe that Coeus wasn’t just flattering me or lying to protect my feelings, though I knew he wouldn’t do that. It was a baffling phenomenon, to be sure.
We had decided the only way to resolve this conundrum was to bring in an unbiased third party and get their impressions of our respective dishes. It wasn’t that either of us thought of this as a competition—we just thought it might give us a better idea as to why, or if, food always seemed to taste better when prepared by someone else, and Coeus said we should go for it.
I went over the potential risks with him beforehand, of course—how it may be too early for him to interact with people he wasn’t already close to, and how it may only serve to exacerbate his stress—but he was determined to give it a shot. His curiosity won out over his anxiety and compelled him to take this big first step toward socialization. I wanted to be as supportive as I could of this development. And if I wasn’t mistaken, his projected appearance had matured by another year or so recently, too.
Aren’t you cold, Miss Seika? Coeus paused in his cutting to ask me.
“Freezing,” I said. “But I mean, look where we are. Kind of comes with the territory…”
Not even my thermo-reflective poncho could keep the biting wind from doing a number on my cheeks. But as I said, we were trying to cook outside, in Alaska, in the dead of winter. This was not at all what I’d agreed to. The initial plan was to cook in the airtight tent—rendering it “outdoors” in name alone. We unfortunately had not foreseen that cooking would immediately fill the tent with unbearable quantities of smoke, hence we’d been forced outside to cook in subfreezing temperatures while our honored guests waited in the warm and cozy tent. I was almost tempted to barge in there and demand help, but we already had food-prep phalanges handling various tasks, so there were enough cooks in the kitchen already. And I couldn’t very well ask the men to come out and share in my pain just for the sake of fairness.
“All done,” said one of the phalanges as it steamed its knife to clean it, then wiped it off with a rag. On the cutting board before it was a veritable mountain of chopped salmon. Tonight, we were making a cream stew using one of Alaska’s most famous natural resources: the king salmon. And yet, it felt like something was missing.
“What else can we do with this?” I murmured, scratching my chin.
Is something wrong?
“Well, no. I just feel that all we do is stir this stuff together, it’s just going to turn out like any other stew.”
Stew was what we agreed upon.
“Yeah, but… Aha! I know what we need.”
I called out to one of the other phalanges and gave it some instructions. It hurried off, and in no time at all, brought back exactly what I wanted: a pill-shaped metallic cylinder with a door on the front—a smoker.