Heptapods

Here are some of the things we know about heptapods. Greek. Hepta, "seven." Pod, "foot." Seven feet. Heptapod. Who are they? We can see them and hear them, but the heptapods leave absolutely no footprint. The chemical composition of their spaceship is unknown. The shell emits no waste, no gas, no radiation. Assuming that the shells communicate with each other, they do so without detection. The air between the shells is untroubled by sonic emissions or light waves. Are they scientists? If they're scientists, they don't seem to ask a lot of questions. Why did they park where they did? The most plausible theory is that they chose places on earth with the lowest incidence of lightning strikes. But there are exceptions. We just don't know. How do they communicate? The first breakthrough was to discover that there's no correlation between what a heptapod says and what a heptapod writes. Unlike all written human languages, their writing conveys meaning, but it doesn't represent sound. How heptapods write? Their written language has no forward or backward direction. Is this how they think? Imagine you wanted to write a sentence using two hands, starting from either side. You would have to know each word you wanted to use, as well as how much space they would occupy. A heptapod can write a complex sentence in two seconds, effortlessly. It's taken us a month to make the simplest reply.