The Common Language

Crivsola laid out everything she knew about the senses on the wall of her workshop, using charcoal to draw a column for each one.

Sight. The eyes receive light. Something at the back of the eye converts light into a signal. The signal travels along a path to the head.

Hearing. The ears receive shaking from the air. Something deep inside the ear converts shaking into a signal. The signal travels along a path to the head.

Touch. The skin detects pressure. Something in or beneath the skin converts pressure into a signal. The signal travels along a path to the head.

She added two more columns. Heat — the skin could tell warm from cold. Taste and smell — the mouth and nose detected something about food and air, probably substances dissolved in liquid or carried in the air.

The Pattern

Five senses, apparently as different from one another as fire was from water. Light had nothing in common with pressure. Sound had nothing in common with heat. And yet, when she looked at her columns, every single row followed the same pattern.

Something from outside. A specialized part that detects it. A conversion into a signal. A path to the head.

The outside triggers were different. The detecting parts were different. But the last two steps were the same every time. Every sense converted its particular kind of information into a signal and sent that signal to the commander along a physical path.

One Language

This meant the commander in the head did not experience light directly, or sound directly, or pressure directly. It experienced signals. Only signals. And if Crivsola's model was right, the signals from every sense were the same kind of thing — the same language, spoken by different translators.

How, then, did the head know the difference between seeing and hearing? If all the signals were the same, why did a sound not feel like a flash of light?

The difference is not in the signal. It is in the path.

Signals from the eyes arrived along one set of paths. Signals from the ears arrived along another. The head knew what kind of information it was receiving because of where the message came from, not because of what the message looked like.

Grujla's Evidence

Grujla confirmed this indirectly. Her three numb fingers could still move — she could grip, point, and curl them without difficulty. But she could not feel them being touched.

"If I close my eyes," she said, holding up her hand, "and you press on these fingers, I know nothing. But I can still make them do whatever I want."

The movement paths were intact. The feeling paths were damaged. Two separate sets of paths running to the same fingers — one carrying orders out, one carrying reports back — and they could be broken independently.

This supported Crivsola's model. The sense of touch was not carried by the same paths as the commands for movement. Each kind of signal had its own dedicated route. Damage one route and you lost one ability while keeping the other.

The "Each Sense is Completely Separate" model — the idea that every sense worked by its own unique mechanism, sharing nothing with the others — was wrong. The architecture was shared. Detect, convert, send. The only things that varied were the detector and the path.

The Deeper Question

Crivsola visited Lomytguya that evening. The prison had grown quieter since her own release — fewer inmates, stricter guards — but Lomytguya still occupied the same cell, still asked the same merciless questions.

Crivsola explained the shared design: every sense translating its own kind of information into the head's common language, every signal travelling along its own dedicated path.

Lomytguya listened in silence. Then she said: "If the head only receives signals — if it never touches the world directly — can it be tricked?"

Crivsola opened her mouth to answer. Then she closed it. The question was better than any answer she could give on the spot.

If the head relied entirely on signals — if it never saw light, never heard shaking, never felt pressure, but only received translated messages — then yes. A false signal would be indistinguishable from a real one. The commander would have no way to check. It would believe whatever its translators told it.

She walked home slowly. If perception could be tricked, then what a person saw and felt was not necessarily what was real. It was merely the head's best interpretation of the signals it received.

And that, she suspected, was something she could test.