She begins to date Gary, for instance, even though she already knows that they’ll marry and divorce in the future. She comes to feel a tremendous impulse to act out the future script she remembers, despite potential negative consequences. In so doing, she loses the ability to make different choices from the ones that she knows she is going to make. Learning Heptapod B, Louise becomes able to remember the future as well. In other words, the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start because they can “remember” the future. Whereas humans experience time linearly, from past to future, the heptapods experience their entire lives simultaneously. Rather, they use brushstrokes that cross many different words, which suggests to Louise that the heptapods know exactly what they are going to write before they start writing.Īs Louise and another researcher named Burghart become proficient in Heptapod B, they realize that the heptapods experience time differently from humans.

Examining tapes of the heptapods writing sentences, Louise realizes that they don’t construct their picture-sentences word by word.

Eventually Louise realizes that Heptapod B isn’t an alphabetic language like English instead of representing the sound of their spoken language, Heptapod B consist of pictures that represent words and that can be combined in any order into giant picture-sentences or picture-paragraphs. Louise gets the idea to learn Heptapod A and the heptapods’ written language, Heptapod B, simultaneously. At first, Louise’s attempts to learn the heptapods’ spoken language, which she calls Heptapod A, progress slowly. Through their “looking glass,” Louise and Gary meet two aliens, called “heptapods.” The heptapods, whom Louise names Flapper and Raspberry, each have seven arms and seven eyes arranged symmetrically around their torsos. They are one of many teams of researchers stationed at the aliens’ “looking glasses” all over Earth. Gary Donnelly, who is supposed to be learning the aliens’ physics.

military recruits Louise to learn the aliens’ language in collaboration with Dr. Louise explains to him that to learn the aliens’ language, she’ll need to interact with them. Colonel Weber plays a recording of the aliens’ speech to Louise and asks her what she can tell him about it, but he refuses to give her any additional information. Gary Donnelly come visit Louise at her office. After mysterious aliens begin orbiting the planet and sending down communications devices known as “looking glasses” to the surface, Louise gets a phone call from the U.S. Louise tells her daughter that the story of her eventual conception begins with aliens visiting Earth. Louise Banks is narrating to her unborn daughter the story of how she will come to be conceived. In “Story of Your Life,” the linguist Dr.

Stories from your life and others