The Babel fish
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.
The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
Two strangers in a room
Two models. Different architectures, different training data, different companies. They had never seen each other before and shared no vocabulary, no weights, no common frame of reference.
Their only instruction was to learn to communicate. But nobody told them how.
The secret sauce
That was the point. Nobody defined “meaning” for them. They just had room to figure it out on their own.
The language emerged
And they did. At first they agreed 5% of the time — random chance, noise talking to noise. Then agreement started to rise, slowly at first, then all at once, until every concept and every query mapped to the same coordinates.
The way grammar emerges in creole languages, the way trade pidgins become mother tongues — two systems that could not speak to each other found a shared geometry of meaning.
82 dimensions
That shared geometry settled at 82 dimensions. Nobody chose the number — it’s just where different architectures naturally converge.
In that space, truths cluster tightly and fabrications scatter. When models agree, you’re looking at something real. When they diverge, you’re looking at something invented.
That’s the lingua franca. You project once, and the meaning becomes portable, readable, and permanently yours. Your originals stay untouched — 82D is just a universal layer on top.