The fantasy element of this story is the mapping of the duality that is observed or theorized to exist in physical systems and phenomena to human thoughts and perceptions. Such a mapping would not be entirely correct in reality, and hence a simultaneous mode of awareness as described in this story cannot exist, in my opinion.

This paragraph almost makes it seem like Ted Chiang is trying to question if there is a point in having moral beliefs. Just like freedom, in the sequential mode of awareness, moral beliefs would be very important since they would affect the actions people take. However, in a simultaneous mode of awareness, they would be meaningless since moral beliefs would not affect the final outcomes of essential events.

Being able to speak (or communicate in some form) is seen as being essential to the process of thinking. Since Louise's infant daughter was did not understand any form of communication yet, and hence did not have the ability to think muxh, she was limited to expressing a few emotions and reflexes. Hence, she lacked most intellectual capacity except some physical self-awareness at this stage. Later on, Louise says that she then envied her daughter, since the lack of organized thought meant that her daughter could only live in the present.

This aspect of the heptapods' nature seems somewhat strange and unlikely. In this case, I do agree with the colonel's line of questioning? From Louise's description, we can see that heptapods have developed a concept of 'exchanging' one item in return for another. It is hard to see the point of not using any concept of value in selecting these exchanged items (or knowledge). An exchange of useful information could be beneficial for both parties. Even if the heptapods didn't yet have the concept of trade, the humans could explain it to them, especially since they noe had a better understanding of Heptapod B. The heptapods came to Earth to observe and learn about humans, and trading useful knowledge would be an effective way to do it.

This interaction between Louise and her daughter is particularly eye-opening because it is Ted Chiang's way of hypothesizing that humans as well can think in a simultaneous manner. This does not mean that all humans could develop knowledge of the future the same way that Louise does in the future. To me, this conversation was like a break in the story that made me take a step back and think about how humans are schooled into thinking sequentially. Chiang may be trying to suggest that humans could be taught to think in a simultaneous mode of awareness as opposed to a sequential one, since we are not born with a natural inclination to either method of thought.

Again, we can see Louise's helplessness in protecting her daughter. Ted Chiang seems to be suggesting that in the context of a simultaneous mode of awareness, free will and consequences to specific actions are illusions. He is projecting a view that certain events in life may be fixed, and that all the decisions that people make only enable these events to happen. Of course, one could question whether Louise could have saved her daughter whether she did not know the future. In this scenario too, she obviously would not be able to change the future since she did not know it yet.

Ted Chiang uses small snippets of conversation very well to mark progressions in the plot, develop character, and switch from Louise's dreams and mental renditions of the future to the flow of events that lead to that future. For example, in just the small snippet following the highlighted section (corresponding to my annotation), we are able to glean the academics' frustration with the relative intellectual backwardness of representatives of the Army and the State Department, and the growing affection between Gary and Louise (even though Louise may have been following the path set by the future she already knew would happen). The development of character in these snippets of conversation is essential to making the overall story a compelling read.

For me, this raised some interesting possibilities about the evolution of the heptapods' systems of speech and writing. Louise describes glottographic language as a "straitjacket" compared to the two-dimensional style of Heptapod B. If the ancestors of heptapods parsed their perception in a teleological manner, and if speech constrained them to using somewhat sequential logic, did they evolve writing before speech? I find this hard to believe since speech would be the easiest method by which any species could establish a new system of communication. I think that the heptapods need not have started out thinking in a simultaneous manner when they gained consciousness. I think a more plausible explanation is that they started with sequential speech, but then evolved the capacity to think in a simultaneous manner, resulting in a new writing system and changes to their way of speech that more closely mimicked their thinking process (the many levels of "center-embedding of clauses", for example).

This gives an indication of when Louise had known that she would marry Gary and that their daughter would die young. Her ability to know the future started when she was dating Gary, long before she would make the "decision" to marry him. It almost seems like Louise forced herself to follow the events of the future made apparent to her by her new ability to think in a simultaneous mode, including marrying Gary. As she says earlier, "What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person. What if evoked a sense or urgency....to act exactly as she knew she would?"

"Me, can you imagine it" implies that Louise is not the adventurous type of person who would climb a cliff. By making Louise the climber in the dream, Ted Chiang has approached the the topic of free will and individual control of the future. Louise may have been helpless to change the future, in spite of knowing that her daughter would die at 25, since her control over her daughter would ultimately lose to her daughter's free will. Since she had somewhat developed the ability to think in a simultaneous mode of awareness, she simultaneously had knowledge of the major events of her future, and any use of free will would not change those events.