"I was seeing you. You watch everything. Houses, boats, ropes. I can see your eyes counting everything. Why?"
He chuckled at the question. He couldn't just say his ready-made answer that he was just a 'crazy spreadsheet lady.' He would have to explain it in another way for things to make sense.
"In my world, people live packed together. It's a lot of people. All the houses of this village would fit in just one building, and my hometown has hundreds of thousands of those buildings. There, if you don't count, you starve. So my brain just got used to counting by itself."
Aruá's face became more serious as she tried to digest that information. A world with so many big buildings, with so much need for counting, was alien to her.
"We count children. We count births and deaths. We do not count fish. The river gives, the river takes."
"Yeah, and it looks to me that it is starting to take more than it gives. That's why I think that we should table our resources."
"Table?"
Oh, right. No writing. No paper. No concept of spreadsheets.
"I need to show you something. But, for that, I need something in which I can make marks."
She frowned, but her curiosity had been piqued.
"Marks? Like body paint?"
"Kinda… But on wood. Aruá, do you have burned wood? From the cooking fire?"
She nodded.
"We scrape black off to make smoke marks on faces, sometimes. To scare beasts."
She goes to the place where they had stored the charred remains of the cooking fires, then comes back with some burnt sticks wrapped in a piece of cloth.
In the meantime, Caio had taken a piece of wood that was lying around. It was a small board that someone brought to use as a plate then discarded. It was perfect for what he had in mind.
Now, how do I explain the concept of writing? The idea of having sounds being represented by letters might be too abstract. Maybe if I begin with ideographs before going to alphabetic writing. Oh, better yet. Let's begin with just numbers, then we expand.
"Thank you, Aruá. These will work. Tell me, how many baskets of fresh fish are in this building?"
Aruá counted quickly, then answered.
"Four baskets."
"Good, now see this."
He deftly drew some lines on the wood, creating five neat rows.
"Now, tell me how many fish are in the first basket."
Aruá went to the basket and counted before returning.
"There are seven."
"Seven… So for each fish we etch a mark like this. One, two, three, four… But then the fifth is not like the others, we make it in the diagonal like this, crossing the others. That way, every time you see this group with a crossed line, you know that it means five. Then we make the other two… seven."
Aruá was knelt at his side, enraptured by his 'writing.'
"Now we do the same with the other three baskets."
Aruá quickly got up and counted the others, and Caio kept etching the markings.
"You see, now if anyone enters this place and asks how many fish we have, we won't need to count them. We just look at this and say the number."
Aruá looked at the baskets, then at the markings, but she wasn't entirely convinced.
"But we still need to count the marks. Huh?"
She was caught off guard by Caio's mischievous smile. She had just walked into his trap.
"That's why we create a mark that means the exact number. Like this. This here is seven. Once you know that this mark means seven, if you see it, you won't need to count anything, just like when we say the word 'seven'."
Aruá gasped at the simplicity of the idea. One marking to mean a number. It's just like the ritual markings in the body paintings, but for numbers.
She mulled it over for a bit, then she frowned and asked another question.
"But there are too many numbers. If you keep counting, numbers never end. How can we remember all markings?"
The smile that showed up on Caio's face right now was a real one, born of true admiration. He reached her face with the hand that wasn't tainted with the coal and brushed her cheek.
"You're very perceptive and smart. I like it."
She blushed but didn't recoil from his touch. He continued his explanation.
"There's a way around that. In Waterspeech you count until ten, then you use 'ten and one,' 'ten and two,' and so on, right?"
"Yes… Oh! So you use a marking for ten and the one for one?"
Teaching place-value mathematics to someone who had never seen numbers or writing before feels so surreal…
"Almost! Ten is one, two-tens is two. For example, if we count all the fish in this table, we have four-tens and five. So here in the last row we write a four and a five. The last one is a unit, the second-to-last is a ten. Always in that order. That way, you'll always know how many there are."
"But if the wood is among other woods with other markings, how do I know that this one is about fish?"
It wasn't Aruá who asked the question. Caio glanced back and saw Hessa, Pita, and Saori behind them, looking with full attention at the markings Caio had been drawing.
"Oh, good morning. Well, there's the easy way and the hard way, Hessa. I'll show first the easy way."
He drew an abstract figure of a fish on the corner of the wood.
"You can look at this and see that this is counting fish. But you still won't know where the fish is or when it was counted. But you can draw more things to add more information, but then you have to make sure that whoever tries to read it later will be able to understand the drawings."
Hessa, who had asked the question, nodded gravely.
"It still is very impressive. It will make trading easier."
Pita chimed in.
"Yes, and it will help when we have more children. Because we will be able to know how much food each person eats every day and then how much more food we'll need to gather when the population expands."
The two women were visibly excited, and so was Caio. He nodded and started to speak like a preacher.
"Yes, that's the greatest advantage of writing and keeping records. It makes everything more predictable. We can plan ahead with more safety and reduce the food stress just by applying this knowledge."
Saori added her own spin on the idea.
"So wood remembers. Like water, but dry. You mark memory in wood like our songs mark memory in water."
In the corner of his eye, a notification appeared.
[COG +2 — Recorded Abstraction Introduced]
[HEARTH DOMAIN: INITIAL SPARK REGISTERED]
Hehe… It's working. Good to know the invisible spreadsheet aproved.
The group chatted in wild excitement for about an hour, then they began to record everything that was possible to record.
Word traveled across platforms. Women carrying baskets set them down mid-step to watch. Children gathered and followed them everywhere, asking a thousand questions. By midday, the whole tribe had heard about 'the man who makes wood speak.'
Soon, Rana, the Reed-Queen, was asking him to show what that 'wood memory' was about.
He took a group of seven pieces of wood to show her. They had the counting markings, the numbers, and the drawing of a hut, plus the symbol of a House. One wood board for each House.
Rana was older than any other woman he had seen in the tribe, though she was probably still in her fifties. But she was anything but frail. Her braids were threaded with small shells in practical buns, and her gaze weighed and measured everything it landed on.
She pointed to the board of the Dawn-Eels.
"This is wrong. We have more."
She actually understood at a glance. She's damn impressive. A reminder that this woman rules not through force, but through an unyielding, razor-sharp mind.
"Some houses I haven't seen yet. But I left space so we can add later."
She stared at the space he pointed at, then asked another question.
"And if storm takes a house? What do your scratches do then?"
"Then we cross it out. And remember why. So we don't pretend the river was kinder than it was."
The woman stared directly at him. It was a cold stare, but he was sure he could see a sign of respect underneath.
"This is River-Speaker work. But she counts omens, not… fish and women. I do that."
She let out a slow breath, thinking, before speaking again.
"Keep scratching, caio. If the wood complains, I will answer."
***
That was considered high praise for the women that were present.
Aruá was beaming with pride, holding his hand when he wasn't writing or she wasn't getting more boards for him. Every time he stopped to check the notes, she would lean against his arm to see the symbols. Her breath was warm on his skin, making him a bit too conscious of her closeness.
These wood planks are heavy. But this river has a lot of reed, so it must have something we can make paper with. But that will come later. Baby steps, Caio, baby steps…
He, Aruá, Hessa, and Pita spent the rest of the day making a full report of the resources the tribe had. Sometimes, he would point out some inconsistencies and propose some ways to make the labor distribution better.
The women weren't stupid, nor were they just waiting for a man to come and 'solve' their ways. They argued, sometimes they corrected him when he had misjudged something. But often he was right, and his solutions proved to be effective.
By nightfall, he had earned a new respect from the tribeswomen. And the System, obviously, loved it.
[LAB +3 - Task Allocation Efficiency Improved]
[HRM +1 - Cooperative Labor Observed]
[HEARTH DOMAIN: EMBRYO STATUS - STABLE]
Each notification was absurdly satisfying for him. They were concrete proof that he was doing the right thing, after all.
They were back at the communal center, bodies tinted with coal, discussing how to store the planks with information and waiting for dinner to be ready.
Aruá's shoulders were more relaxed than the day before, and gone were the circles under her eyes. She was tired, as was everyone else, but it was the weariness caused by doing a good job one can be proud of.
She suddenly spoke.
"You changed the way the current touches us."
Caio didn't know how to answer that, but she spoke again before he could think of anything to say.
"He's happy now. It hums. The melody is different, but not wrong. It's beautiful."
Caio had lived in a society where systems were abstract. GDP, climate data, populations, demographics. Here, a river hummed its opinion about his existence.
Wait. Isn't it just like the System sending me notifications? But in the form of hearing the river's melody?
While the other women commented on Aruá's remarks and she leaned on his shoulder, he pondered about that idea.
It was at that moment that Pita arrived in a hurry.
She came fast, running through the planks of the walkway. Her hair was in disarray, and her hands were stained with a dark tint.
"Rana! Aruá!"
The way her voice cracked sent a shiver down Caio's spine. Before he could react, every woman had already moved towards her.
"What bit you? Beast? Nuhu pocket?"
Aruá was already inspecting her body for wounds, but Pita shook her head.
"It's not that. Up-gardens. Leaves black at the edges, soft in the middle. Fruit falling, smells wrong."
Rana frowned, underlining how concerned she was, to the point of letting her emotions appear.
"How many beds? One? Two?"
"Four. I cut the worst and burned but… The wrong is still there. Spreading."
Aruá was still looking at her hands.
"You did not touch the water after burning?"
"I am not child. I washed hands down-current."
Pita's voice carried a hint of her being offended by the question. Caio was about to ask to be taken to that place to see what he could do when notifications appeared in her vision.
[RESOURCE THREAT DETECTED — CATEGORY: FOOD STABILITY]
[LOCAL AGRICULTURAL NODES: COMPROMISED]
[PROJECTED IMPACT (UNMITIGATED): POPULATION DECLINE WITHIN 2–4 CYCLES]
[RECOMMENDATION: INTERVENTION REQUIRED]
[OPTIONS: TECHNOLOGICAL • RITUAL • COMBINED]