Slippage and the Flag
by Ryan Vance
Motherboard / Terraform

AD: Brian Merchant

"Then came the transmission, cutting across all frequencies and signals. The world’s sharpest minds sliced at it with predictions of vowel shifts, slang formalisation, rebracketing, calquing. Not that anyone needed a postgraduate degree in linguistics to understand the basic gist. In a dozen pidgin voices, the future asked just one thing:

Send help."