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At this point in history, the conceptual and theoretical constructs are distilling and summarizing the past into programs that mimic natural and human activities; and conversely, the rich paper records are being concealed, secreted away in caves like the treasure of the Niebelungs. The distillation remains in databases, hoarded by large corporations and governments.

More and more the world is seen in terms of information no matter what the reality is. Just look at the account books, the numbers, the projections, the returns. But computerized account books tend toward a sort of semi-autonomy---market-to-market, interactively linked---and drive this outer reality before it. The investment in computer-compatible thought is so great that more and more we become trapped in this new culture and they cannot admit that we have been led down the wrong fork in history's decision tree.

If all is fundamentally the same, it follows that a database in one language should have the power to talk to databases of other disciplines in other languages (mediated, of course, by programmers, protocols, translators, modems, computers, networkings\ld). One might have to descend into the primal language and then, choosing the right fork in the decision tree, emerge into the proper language. If only one can design the right protocols, ones that will not only link among unlike, competitive machines with unlike, competitive architectures---IBM's, Control Datas, Apples, Crays, DEC's---but also unlike transmittal systems run by competitive companies. Languages can be united because each field and domain, each way of looking at things, should be a subset of the one, universal, primal language. Perhaps what is expressed in one domain should be considered an encryption of what is expressed in another domain.

However, not only do computers in different disciplines not translate into one another well, but different manufacturers and communicating companies (to say nothing of nations)---while proclaiming one world, one language, falling prices, one global village, and universal compatibility---fight one another tooth and nail. They erect a maze of priced mediations and product differentiation, countering speed and directness of transmission with profitable labyrinths; in different time-zones, each turn and gate tolled and tariffed, competing and maintaining secrecy, organizing those to whom they sell services on a need-to-know-and-pay basis, playing the differentials among different states of being, business and knowledge\fnote{Citicorp, for instance, computerizing and gaining speed, places its headquarters in South Dakota in order to---taking advantage of the laws---gain advantage which allows it to keep checks for a certain time and thus enjoy a float in the empyrean.}

There are certain laws to be deduced from the observation of business practice. Information management, traffic control and pricing follows the timeless strategy of railroads in the past: which is to say, given a certain limited distance, the problem becomes to increase distance by increasing price. Economies of scale are developed, need for certain volumes regardless of content, development risk to be paid for by the consumer. Tesseracts of tax shelters spring up. An incredible maze of contradictory laws emerge requiring incredible expenditures of intellectual energy and computing time. Information theorists always leave out the costs. Claude Shannon quantified information; AT\&T and IBM priced it. Shannon's theory did not develop in a vacuum; he did his work for Defense and Bell. Where did the money come from? What did the funders want and what did they not want? What other enterprises cross-subsidized these developments? What solids were melted down, who was liquidated to fund the Great Enterprise? No different than the practices of the ancient Phoenecians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Venetians, Fuggers, or any other merchants in history. (In addition, of course, the amounts of energy, in terms of electricity, required to run and cool computers is staggering.)

If we take into account the human, informal, anti-organizational, shadow-organizational networks, the person-to-person contacts, those who emerge to resist this development, those who have an interest in not sharing information; we see vast, centrifugal forces at work. On the one hand, the emergence of a unified system, a sort of electronic Catholic Church; on the other, a sort of electrofeudalism.

Given all this potential convertibility, how can money talk to nuclear particles, pension funds speak recombinant genetics, prime numbers retrieve fictional heroes\ld ? Can we really create a translation program, which is to say a unified field theory? Or should we, not having been invited to the initial feast of reason, create a \e{disunified field theory}?

The primal-language business, like the origins business, is highly competitive (since the costs of computer runs is much more than paper experiments). One of our many ultimate transformational and alchemical media---a primal liquidity in which all life is dissolved, reconstituted and redissolved---is genetics. What is the market value of bioengineering as expressed in some form, with purchases involved, with manufactured products and processes at the end\ld\ investible end-products and investors screaming for their dividends, trying to hurry time up? Will it cost the world's savings to transform humans\ld\ and will we be left with one creature at the end?

We raise the same questions about particle-wave physics and its ruinously expensive paraphernalia. Finance, literature, genetics, nuclear physics: four (of many) primal languages; three media in which translations from realm to realm can be seen as new versions of progressive metamorphoses.