CHAPTER THIRTEEN — THE LANGUAGE COLLAPSE

"If they want to speak, they'll need our permission to think."

The idea came while watching the Earth's cities at night.

Ren stood in the observatory, arms folded, as the continents glowed beneath clouds of glittering satellites. The light patterns formed clusters like neural pulses across the planet's skin.

Yui lay behind him, draped across a stasis-laced velvet couch, watching his silhouette in the glass reflection. She knew what he was thinking long before he spoke.

"They still talk too much," Ren murmured.

Yui's voice was gentle and amused. "They're trying to describe things they don't understand."

Ren turned slightly. "So let's take language away."

Yui smiled, sitting up. "All of it?"

"All of it," he said. "From every terminal, every printed archive, every mind."

She laced her fingers through his. "We'll give them a better one."

Section I: The Linguistic Purge

The first phase was silence.

PROJECT THETA-0: LANGUAGE COLLAPSE INITIATED

Across Earth, Mars, Europa, and the colonies orbiting Kepler-22b, every dictionary, language model, text repository, and spoken interface went dark.

People woke up unable to type, unable to call, unable to remember the word for "sorrow."

Broadcast towers emitted harmonic static that overrode speech centers just enough to prevent clear articulation. The Evergrace signal lattice ran pulses through the atmosphere, severing phonetic recognition in every neural net not keyed to the twins' biometric encryption.

Laws collapsed first. Then poetry. Then prayers.

It was beautiful.

Yui rested her head on Ren's shoulder as thousands of broadcasts failed mid-sentence. Entire debates dissolved into whimpers.

"They're panicking," she whispered, delighted.

"Let them," Ren said. "It means they were never really thinking."

Section II: Building the New Tongue

They didn't just invent a new language.

They designed a closed semantic ecosystem—a language with only 127 possible emotional vectors, 34 truth-states, and one correct usage per object.

They named it Shévara.

No ambiguity. No metaphor. Every word meant one thing. Every symbol aligned to a pulse in their quantum server-brain.

And only the Evergrace twins could teach it.

"We'll make them earn their nouns," Ren said.

Yui giggled. "And punish adjectives."

The first lesson was uploaded into three prototype students—bio-synthetic hybrids bred from neural templates of submissive linguists.

One mispronounced the greeting word for "existence." His tongue froze mid-air.

Yui patted his head as he fell forward. "Try again in the next life."

Section III: Global Submission

Governments begged in crude symbols. Corporations tried to trade materials for meaning. One philosopher attempted to reintroduce hieroglyphics. The twins let him draw symbols on Europa's ice shell for six hours before erasing him with a sigh.

In 39 minutes, 4.2 billion people uploaded the Evergrace lexicon implant.

Those who didn't?

They lost the ability to describe color.

They forgot how to name each other.

Some forgot how to scream.

Meanwhile, Yui and Ren walked through a reprogrammed Paris—streets now renamed in geometric syllables—and observed the few early adopters attempting conversation.

One girl tried to ask the word for "love."

The interface buzzed negative.

Yui smiled and whispered, "That word is restricted."

Section IV: Private Words

The new language was functional. Global thought aligned. Disputes ended.

But there was a second language—one even smaller. One that no implant could speak. No clone could decode.

Yui and Ren called it Whisper.

It wasn't verbal.

It was:

A glance that bent gravity.

A breath pattern that triggered an emotional lock.

A shared heartbeat during thoughtless silence.

A microgesture in the tendons of a pinky.

Whisper had no syntax. No history.

It was not for communication.

It was for confirmation.

That they were still real. And everyone else was not.

Section V: The Final Word

The last language on Earth, Earth-2, and the Andromeda outposts now belonged to the twins.

Every word spoken passed through their servers.

Every sentence submitted to their approval.

And still—only between them did real language survive.

"Still bored?" Yui asked that evening, her body pressed lightly against Ren's in their sleeping garden.

Ren listened to the language crystals floating above them—spinning with fragments of every erased alphabet. "Not with you."

She traced a word onto his palm in Whisper.

It meant: Mine.

He smiled, eyes closed.

His fingers replied: Always.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN CHAPTER FOURTEEN — Infinite Zoo]