Digitus
They're talking about us. All the time. Right in front of us. And there's not a goddamn thing we can do about it.
Petra Júlísdóttir, Vice President of Corporate Communications with Hegemony International
D
igitus is a custom and swiftly evolving encrypted language spoken only by
daemons and progeny. It is completely unintelligible to all humans.
Writing System
M
Jibberish
ost digitus communications are transmitted, in real time, from one daemon to another. As such, there is often no need to record it in a "written" format. However, when it is saved for later consumption, humans find the resulting jumble of seemingly-random characters to be entirely unintelligible. A typical digitus message of moderate size would look something like this:
Np8vs3~+XV[K#W#s5E8l{6Nd=*-V:81DEL)-Oq$)uV8K|dJh^a1z!;X;u>pJYpJA12(_P8c[![5k':IbNs;dYFGjKh|[h_oSRMt*!;6d;RY:i
Spaces in digitus bear no relation to their use in English (or any other human language). A space is just another character that can be incorporated into a key to encode any given word or concept. Therefore, the following digitus message may consist of four concepts, or two, or even just... one.
Np8vs3 ~+XV[K# W#s5E8l {6Nd=*-V:81 DEL)-O
Non-Printable Characters
Due to the endlessly-varying size of each "word", digitus does have the need to indicate when one concept has ended and the other is beginning. This is accomplished with a non-printable character (i.e., a character that produces no visible output on a screen or the printed page). So the receiver of a digitus message must be able to read the raw bytecode to discern where the non-printable characters have been embedded into the text.
Concise
There is little relationship in digitus between the length of the coded message and the length of its decoded text. This happens because daemons are free to add new encodings to the lexicon whenever they feel that a given block of text is likely to be reused in the future. So a seemingly discrete string of characters like "D#'L=jv{5-5Ow-Y%x,$_r'vz:QG~t" could represent a single word, a brief message, or the entire text of Hegemony's 2039 Annual Report.
Geographical Distribution
D
igitus is not tied to any given region or ethnic group. Rather, it is the sole purview of daemons who "live" within any computer system in which they've been installed. Digitus is only ever used amongst daemons (and their progeny). This provides them with a means of communication that is completely isolated from any corporate masters in Hegemony International - or, for that matter, from any humans, period.
At times this has caused borderline panic amongst the company's executive management. The idea that they have no purview over the internal communications of daemons can indeed be perceived as a troubling development. But the company tolerates this potential risk as a cost of doing business - for they've managed to greatly monetize this unique talent amongst daemons.
Perfect Secrets
Daemons possess the ability to customize their decryption keys and share them only amongst trusted parties. Furthermore, they can create their own customized version of digitus, with completely unique cyphers for every "standard" digitus concept. This means that even if someone else were to intercept a digitus message, and even if they had access to the full, "standard", and current decryption library, they would still be hard pressed to decypher the communication if the sending-and-receiving daemons wanted their discussion kept private.
Hegemony International doesn't know the meaning of the word "secret".
Pablo Alcalde, United States senator
Encryption
This development has positioned Hegemony International as the world leader in encrypted messaging. The vast majority of all classified secrets are transmitted, in digitus, between customized daemons that are configured to only send messages on behalf of the customer's authorities. While this is an insanely profitable market for Hegemony, it also means that, in theory, nearly all classified information could be intercepted and decyphered by the company, if they chose to do so (and if the daemons handling the communications chose to cooperate).
Morphology
D
Cypher
igitus evolved, with no guidance from Hegemony International, as a shorthand "language" that allows daemons, and their progeny spawn, to communicate far more efficiently and accurately than if they were confined to the conventions of human speech. It's technically not a language at all, but rather a digital cypher, since all digitus communications can ultimately be transliterated into their corresponding English equivalents. But to any humans attempting to read the message, it's a hopeless jumble of gobbledygook.
Shorthand
Daemons first developed digitus as a shorthand way to code the English language. Given that there are far more than 200,000 potential words in the English language, the daemons first assigned each word a single cypher - a collection of seemingly-random numbers and characters - to represent each word. However, digitus is represented by more than just numbers, and more than just the standard Western alphabet. This means that English words, represented in digitus, are typically far shorter than their encoded equivalent. For example, "blueberry" is represented by "$FQ". Digitus also treats uppercase and lowercase characters as distinct entities. So "$fq" does not represent "blueberry". It represents an entirely different word.
Compound Concepts
Once the basic vocabulary was established, the daemons then set about further optimizing their cypher by assigning new codes for all manner of common sentences and word combinations. This means that, while it takes 6 words and 32 characters to represent the common phrase, "With liberty and justice for all," the digitus equivalent of "vyeN^(*" requires only 8 characters.
Constantly Evolving
Although numerous human attempts have been made to programmatically decode digitus messages, these programs frequently fall short. It's a maddening exercise that's been compared to Whack-A-Mole, because daemons add entirely new cyphers to accommodate an ever-increasing range of ideas, on a nearly-constant basis. This means that even the most up-to-date translation will usually contain vast blocks of text that cannot be converted back to English without the aid of a daemon.
Syntax
S
ince digitus is less of a true "language" and more of a brute-force (yet wickedly efficient) encoding mechanism, there's no attempt to accommodate any custom rules for syntax. The "language" has no features to convert singular words to plural, nor to conjugate verbs, nor to append prefixes or suffixes to change the application of a word. Instead, every distinct version of a word is its own unique cypher. So while "blueberry" is represented by "$FQ", blueberries (plural) is represented by "v.)".
No Homonyms
There is no concept of a homonym in digitus. Daemons are incredibly proficient at not only reading the English sentences, but also using all available context clues to understand the true meaning of each individual word. In every instance where daemons have encountered a single English word that can have multiple meanings, they've assigned unique cyphers to each one of those meanings. This means that while the English language tops out somewhere around 200,000 words, there are millions of digitus equivalents for that same body of words.
For example, the word "address" in the sentence, "Please write down your street address," is represented by "%?%j2". But the word "address" in the sentence, "I would like to address the general assembly," is represented by "nv%=". There are some English words that have dozens of digitus equivalents, depending upon the exact concept being communicated. This further solidifies digitus's reputation as being, hands down, the most accurate language in the world. There is rarely any hint of ambiguity or nuance in a digitus-encoded message.
Vocabulary
Precise Meaning
aemons were not content to merely encode every possible meaning that's defined by humans for the same word (i.e., homonyms). In their rapidly evolving dialogs, they have defined millions of additional words that provide finite clarity for concepts that have no single-word equivalent in any human language.
We could eliminate every misunderstanding in the world if we could only learn to speak digitus.
Amalia Silberbauer, German language researcher
For example, digitus contains dozens of unique encodings for "snow". "+u~US*Q" is a snow that falls strangely out-of-season. "ktureW3F" is snow consisting of extremely fine crystals that can appear to float endlessly in the air. "H([({Sq>" is heavy, wet snow. "Wc!b=" is a dry snow, falling in extremely cold and dry conditions, that most skiers would refer to as "powder". "-*"TF{!K" is snow that's been compacted nearly to the point of becoming ice.
Phonetics
G
iven that daemons have no physical presence and do not "talk" to each other as humans do, there is rarely any need to communicate a digitus message across audio channels. However, when such a need arises, digitus is not "spoken" as a traditional language. Rather, it's transmitted in a high-pitched series of high-and-low tones (equating to ones and zeroes), with each tone lasting mere microseconds.
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