When Sonny eventually started wandering again, he came upon something he had never seen before: the city. He felt intimidated at first, but he knew anything was better than the lonely outerlands. He spent his days roaming throughout the city. He could not understand what these people were saying to him, and he tried not to let them know he didn't understand. At first he used to try to communicate, but most people were very on edge when he did this. They tended to be this way with everything though. He noticed that most of the interactions he witnessed among the people on the street were veiled with fear. This was taken to the extreme with hIs interactions though since people didn't understand a word he said. So he tried to relieve the tension by learning to watch and listen while keeping in the shadows.
There was one place he found where people felt free to express themselves. It was a huge building with a huge room with many tables. People would sit around and talk for hours on end. They would move from table to table exchanging sounds. He found this place very comforting. He could sit in there all day and just listen. He would go from table to table and noone was ever disappointed to have an audience. Also, noone was ever intent on making others talk; he could just observe in peace. And learn. As he began to catch on he would notice how sometimes when he thought someone had been acting sad, they were really happy and vice versa. Everything seemed backwards at first, but with time he saw it was all consistent with itself. It was just different compared to his convention. This was fascinating. When he left at the end of the night he dreaded going back to the streets where he would have to find a place to sleep. Sonny met Go at the talking centers one night. He was a young outgoing man who didn't seem to mind the way that Sonny stumbled with this new language. As much as he couldn't fathom where Sonny came from, he knew that Sonny wasn't from around here.
After Sonny started getting a hang of things Go told him about the talking centers: "So do you know why we are all here? .... To get our chance at the big time. You hear that man speaking over the loud speaker every once in a while?" Sonny had always wondered what that was for. Go answered: "That is the announcer calling the next lucky group. It's not very often you get called on that. I got called on that once. They bring you into this little room and you talk. Just talk like always, but this time the whole world can hear you, or that's what you hope. You see, back before I was born, this man had a great idea. His name was Skylar Rippon. He came upon this contraption that he said could send sounds through the air. His idea was that we could send out all of our ideas and someone out there would hear it, and send back there ideas. It would all be one big party and you'd go away twice as smart. Nobody has ever called back, but we still try. We don't know if the reason nobody has called back is because nobody is out there, or just nobody knows how to call back or we don't know how to listen.Everybody still wants to say their little bit just in case somebody is listening. And alot of us like to hear ourselves talk. Meeting you has given me hope that somebody is out there"
Sonny left the talking centers not caring about the streets that night. Go had intrigued him with this thought of sharing information. What a beautiful thing. He knew that somebody was "out there", he was from "out there". He thought back about that night in the cave when he was cold and alone. He thought about how nice and warm it would have been with more bodies in there adding their heat. He saw how "information" at these talking centers were like "temperature" in the cave. Each person in the cave would add there little bit of heat. And each person in the cave could not take away the temperature or use it up any more than anyone else, they would all benefit from it the same. The temperature, like information, was not consumable. Contrast this to food. Food is consumable. Say people were in a cave with some food. Adding more people to the cave would threaten to use up the resource of food, each person getting less. But the temperature and information was not like that. Adding peolpe to the cave wouldn't threaten to use up the resource of temperature, it would instead just make the cave that much warmer. The more people adding knowledge to the knowledge pool, the smarter we all would be, no matter how little some people might add to it. It was beautiful to him like back home was. You had no reason to fear another man here because they could only help you, and hurting them would only mean you would be that much less informed, that much colder. Here we would not fight over a consumable resource, we would all add our little piece and enjoy that which could not be devoured.
Sonny spent alot of time with Go. He had taken him in and taught him about many things. He let him know that people did not like being scared of each other on the streets. It was just the instinct to fear that which is different. That is why it was so comforting for the people at the talking centers, they were all there for the same thing, even thought they were there for different reaons. And that was the real beauty. At the talking centers everybody felt the same, with there similarity being that they were all different. If they had all been the same the idea of the information pool wouldn't work. If everybody thought the same and was adding the same ideas, the information pool wouldn't grow much. But with everybody adding their own unique ideas, their thoughts would combine to form a monolith of knowledge. This reminded Sonny of a story from back home. It was about these people lost in the desert who drastically needed water. The group looked for water together for weeks to no avail. Finally somebody figured out they should split up. Everybody went looking in a different place. If just one of them could find where the water was they would all triumph. With more area being covered now they rapidly found water. Now they knew that you could split up and still be together. He also learned about these listening machines from Go. Go told him there was not many out there, and not many people cared to find them since they were never successful at picking up any messages. Sonny was driven to find one of these things. He wanted to see for himself if nobody was calling or if they were just broken. He finally came across one in an old junk shop. The old man in the store told him "Ah we got one of them , but that thing is busted, all it does is make crazy noises". When sonny turned that thing on he didn't hear noise, but sounds of celebration. It was making the same sounds that his tribe had danced to back home. Sonny was in awe. He now knew that the machine back home was not what he thought it was. He had thought it was a thinking machine with a mind of its own, but it instead was just a listening machine, a radio. It was just recieving transmissions from somewhere; what he thought of as music was somebody trying to talk to him. He had always known those sounds were trying to say something. Also, since the machine back home had channels speaking his own language, he now knew there were others in the world outside his tribe that spoke his language. His machine at home had been relaying a message from that place. Nobody had ever really talked about how his tribe had come to be in their remote land, now he thought maybe they had come from the place sending these messages.
