Perhaps someday, decades from now, people will read about your name in textbooks. You’ll give lectures about the day you first translated a completely alien language into human terms. You picture yourself, in 2050, with a futuristic blue haircut and chic collarless blazer, giving a lecture surrounded by glowing holograms.

“While the Spinners’ language bore some superficial resemblances to the mating dances of the family salticidae,” you’ll say, “it obviously contained many complexities that were uniquely their own. Complexities such as—”

You sigh. Such as what? Ever since the Spinners began to dance, the voice has remained stubbornly silent. It feels like a moderator was present to help you communicate, and now she has left the room.

They have danced, and you have gestured, and they have jumped up and down, and you have tried to speak simple English, and you still haven’t made any meaningful progress.

The vision disappears like a puff of smoke. Solving, it turns out, is much harder than dreaming about it.