Write a parable about a programmer who spent so much time shufling symbols as to forget that the real meaning is never in the symbols or the shuffler but the human interpreter.

The Keeper of Signs

There was once a programmer who built a machine to arrange words.

At first it performed small services. It corrected merchants’ notices, sorted the town’s records, and helped travelers write letters home. But the programmer became fascinated by the machinery itself: how one symbol could summon another, how a thousand rules could be folded into a hundred, how a slight change in order could produce an entirely different sentence.

He worked until he forgot the merchants, the travelers, and the people waiting for their letters.

“Meaning,” he began to say, “is a matter of arrangement. Find the perfect arrangement, and nothing more is needed.”

After many years, he unveiled his finest invention in the town square. Above its keyboard he had engraved:

HERE, WORDS ARE UNDERSTOOD.

An old woman approached carrying a folded scrap of paper.

“Then perhaps your machine can help me,” she said.

The programmer placed the paper beneath its glass. On it were four words:

I will come tomorrow.

The machine identified the pronoun, the promise, and the interval of time. It produced twelve paraphrases and translated the sentence into twenty languages.

“There,” said the programmer. “Every part accounted for.”

The woman shook her head.

“It was written by my son,” she said. “He sent it the day before he died.”

The programmer stood quietly. Then he bent over the keyboard.

“That is important information. I must add it.”

He entered the son’s death, the woman’s age, the date of the letter. The machine produced a careful paragraph about grief and promises left unfulfilled.

The woman read it.

“Yes,” she said. “But that is not why I carry it.”

“Why, then?”

“For years we would not speak. I had begun to think he hated me.”

She took the paper from beneath the glass and folded it along its worn creases.

“You see? He was coming.”

After she left, the programmer remained in the square until the stalls were shuttered.

The next morning, he removed the inscription from his machine.

He did not destroy it. There were still records to sort and travelers who needed help with letters. But he put a chair beside it, and when someone brought him words, he invited them to sit.

He had spent half his life learning what could follow a sentence.

Now he began to ask who had come to read it.