Maria sighed at the TV. The Suitor had gotten boring this season - same old petty drama, same self-absorbed contestants using the facade of competition to build

Maria sighed at the TV. The Suitor had gotten boring this season - same old petty drama, same self-absorbed contestants using the facade of competition to build their personal "brands" for acting careers. So after making sure that the kids were asleep, Maria logged into her VPN, activated Torta, and navigated to a tomato that was rumored to be hosted out of Kyrgyzstan. It was called "Dark Island". For three years now, the series had surveilled the lives of an isolated tribe, the Etcamanese, to whom fire and agriculture were unknown. It was apparently filmed from an array of a dozen or so high-end video cameras embedded in biomimetic robotic vultures, so the coverage was spotty. But despite the alien language and the majority of Etcamanese life happening outside of the video feeds, bits and pieces of the usual human drama were obvious: domestic squabbles over leaking huts, rivalries in love, medical emergencies due to snakebite. And because there were only 272 people on the island, a regular cast of characters had emerged. Old man Onge, leader of the largest village, seemingly blind to the abusive behavior of his two sons. Gentle-voiced Senga, clubfooted, but the most skilled weaver of fishing nets - would she ever find love? The number of people on the island, mysteriously enough, never seemed to change. Births always occurred the same day as deaths, with women apparently ingesting herbs to induce premature delivery if necessary. There suggestions of infanticide as well. It was a favorite topic on the discussion forums. And although the language was still untranslated, some clever NLP algorithms by a group Pakistani Island-heads had begun to yield tantalizing clues. Led by UxBhutto07, they had determined that Etc1, the everyday dialect, had a strangely consistent grammar, with a system of tenses and declensions that seemed to contain no irregular forms. Their system of numbers seemed unusually complex as well, in base 8, with a suffix indicating prime numbers. (There were related, heated threads about the strange taboos concerning thumbs.) Etc2, a sung language, seemed to be used only at night, and in a ritual context. It was completely different from Etc1, and had eluded all attempts at decryption. The site's main page loaded more slowly than usual, and Maria saw that the number of forum threads had tripled from the day before. The top thread was: "Where did 27 new people come from? And why is everyone singing?"