He’s lost his language.

His name is Sebastian Wren. You watch him from across the green in Soho Square, London. It’s a grey day, and it threatens to rain. The gardener’s hut in the middle of the Square is long gone, replaced with a stark, bizarre sculpture: a flat rectangle of stainless steel standing about seven feet high. Some prosaic imitation of art.

Another man arrives. He, too, has lost Ralaine. They don’t shake hands, or greet in any readily discernible way. They begin talking.

There is no risk of hearing what they’re saying—you’ve been deaf for a long time, and besides, it is the language which they speak that is the danger. But you can read their lips with absolute precision, and even without hearing them you know what language they are speaking.

Neme. The parasite vernacular. The invader tongue.

Although you’ve never heard it, somehow you know how it sounds: rattling and tuneless, with clunky phonemes and percussive fricatives. It is bereft of inflection.

You’re told they see the world in a different way, and you reflect on whether different patterns of the tongue can make the world seem alien, whether language is merely a lens.

You barely believed it when they first told you—but you watched the Houses of Parliament crumble: dynamite and bulldozers and smoke, and you saw the language-enslaved struggle to express how they felt about Parliament’s demolition. Neme lacks the words for such nuanced emotion.

(The detonation had been at a quarter past nine in the evening. You remember because the clock tower darkened at precisely that time, hands frozen, and it tumbled down to Whitehall. Twice a day, at a quarter past nine, you’re reminded of it.)

How confused they were when New Parliament was built: a concrete box with a single towering entrance, perforated as if by bullets with row upon row of miserably square windows looming over the Thames. They walked its halls uneasy, discomfited, physically unable to describe their feelings, as if trying to find a word for the smell before rain.

And you feel sorry for them. Watching the two men from across the Square, you wonder if they even know they’re speaking it, whether they believe their world is still structured according to verb and tense. Do they think they’re speaking Ralaine?

This thought amplifies your pity, because of how precious Ralaine is to you. You realise you couldn’t imagine ever not speaking it, or thinking it.

And you realise you have a responsibility here. A duty. Somehow, you feel it is your job to free these people.

You received the note late last night. Situated somewhere in what used to be Kilburn, the majority of the old estate’s flats are uninhabitable, the floors rotten and unsafe and crawling with rats under the floorboards. The whole structure is a platter for termites.

Your room is on the ground floor, along with the schoolroom and the soundproofed clinic. You often come across children being escorted from that room, bleeding from their ears, either red-faced and crying or passed out from the pain, carried by their guardians. When they come to their first lesson, usually a week or so afterwards, you make them feel special.

It was cold last night. The fire, in a rather hazardous makeshift fireplace, was dying. For a moment you had yearned for the sound of crackling, sputtering, but the feeling was quickly gone, replaced by anger at the machines infesting your head, whose function necessitated your deafness.

You sat awake against the headboard, thinking, unable to sleep. Esther stirred next to you. Her naked skin brushed warmly against your waist as she turned away and curled up, slept deeper. And as you glanced towards the door, distracted by a change in the light of the fire, you saw it.

A small piece of paper on the floor. Someone had slipped it into your room. Esther didn’t wake even as you flung the covers from you and erupted into the cold room. The paper was new, totally unwrinkled. A stark, cuboid shape was printed in the top right-hand corner. The seal of New Parliament. And in the centre were scrawled the words, in rough Neme, which had brought you the next day to Soho Square. Upon reading them, fear sunk cold and heavy in your stomach, and you became all too aware of your nakedness, and hurried back to bed.

This morning your friends called you stupid, arrogant, and said your plan was dangerous. You reflect on how even insults in Ralaine are oddly, perversely beautiful, and nearly laugh.

Neme’s influence is ubiquitous, they said, and its adoption exponential.

It has been compared to a virus before, and really that was not far from the truth. One person, one brain, had been all it took. One malfunction in one piece of nanotech, somewhere in the world. According to some of your friends, those apparently ‘in the know’, contraction of Neme started slowly at first. You woke up one day, and found, for example, you realised you’d forgotten the word for what you used to call music. Now it was just a random, unpredictable, meaningless jumble of sound and percussion, just aural nonsense. And because you couldn’t describe it, very soon you began to hate it. Music would become somehow alien and threatening, something to be avoided and, eventually, destroyed.

You sometimes fantasise about finding this person, seeking them out somehow, throttling them, tearing out their tongue so they couldn’t anymore speak the parasite language, and show them what they had done. Show them what they had done to everybody, to the world.

But that was impossible.

The two men are still talking. They’ve turned partially away from you, and you’re frustrated that you can’t see what they’re saying.

Not that it matters. You suspect there is something more to this, that this is merely a precursor to whatever will happen next, if anything, and anyway their talk thus far has been small and meaningless—or, as close to small, meaningless talk as Neme gets.

Your mind wanders to a lesson you were taught when you were younger, when you sat amongst the other newly-deafened children, being taught in signed Ralaine. Some of the children’s ears still bled through their yellowed bandages as they squinted up at the teacher, learning to read her lips, her hands.

“Letters,” she signed, “are symbols. They give us information as to how to pronounce them. Symbols … express themselves to us. And through them, do we. Every language works this way. Even sign language.” You smiled up at her, understanding, and you felt the dried blood on your cheek stretch against your ruddy skin. Like the others, you were unclean, your hair matted with settled dust.

Then she said, “Every language, except Neme.” And that was when you learned the sign for the invader tongue: a sharp swipe at your throat from left to right, and another across your lips from right to left.

But you also learned another thing from this, just much later on. You learned that all of humanity’s efforts to eradicate its most common, aggressive, and deadly cancer, war, had been utterly in vain, and that we were just as stupid and vicious and prone to violence as we had always been. And now, we’d lost the only tool that had the potential to remedy it: language.

Z

A blackbird touches down on your bench. It looks at you with that curious, cocked-headed stare that birds so often have, comically inquisitive, as if wondering what you are. It sings for a second, in its own autonomous language, blinks at you, then flits away.

You continue watching the two men across Soho Square. Their lips flutter mechanically—when you can see them—and they speak with apparent enthusiasm. It’s odd for them to be doing this. They appear to have organised to meet, privately, to communicate something to each other. This hadn’t really crossed your mind until now. They are discussing something important, something secret.

Your suspicions were right.

The man on the left, the first man you were watching, is Sebastian Wren, although in Neme he doesn’t have a name, for names are symbolic, and therefore needless. You made it up. His hair is hazel and thinning, stretched slickly back over a moon of balding scalp. He works in New Parliament.

You don’t know the other man, your new arrival. He is bald, middle-aged, and portly. There is a smell of sex about him, although Neme doesn’t allow for lust beyond that required to multiply. And there is something strange about the way he is speaking.

You’ve learned Neme, thoroughly. You learned the words solely by reading them, spelled out in phonetic Ralaine. You know the shapes the mouth makes when making Neme words, and you know its bizarre sentence structure. You learned, though maybe never comprehended fully, the fact that Neme has no word for ‘I’, or ‘me’, or ‘mine’, and those succumbed to it are unable to conceptualise the self. You’ve seen its utter lack of physicality, needless of gesticulation to drive home a point.

And yet this man’s left hand is twitching. There. And again. He appears to be fighting the urge to move as he speaks. There is rhythm to this, too. Could it be …

You adjust your skirt. You’re not wearing makeup, and you made certain to wear grey today. Colour implies Ralaine. You suddenly feel nervous. The note slipped under your door goes round and round in your head:

Have Truth.

51.515, -0.132

It had been strange for you to see Neme written by one who speaks it—written, not typed. The handwriting was cursive, yet urgent. Where there should have been curved lines, there were sharp points. You found some dim humour in how a language so coldly efficient in its spoken form could look so slapdash and erratic when written.

But here you are: 51.515, -0.132. Soho Square. It’s lucky that numbers are universal.

You resist the urge to have a cigarette. Addiction implies Ralaine.

Sebastian Wren finishes talking. You think just for a second that the other man is going to shake his hand, but of course this would be folly (Neme does not allow for pleasantries), and he resists. They appear to have finished their business. But as Wren leaves, the other man says something. Wren doesn’t notice, but you do, and you know why immediately: because he said it silently, and to you.

“Have truth,” he mouths, and a minute twitch of his head is all you need.

Wren doesn’t see this silent exchange. The other man follows him, and they are soon side-by-side. You follow cautiously.

They head south, down what used to be Greek Street. How appropriate, you think. They don’t talk, or don’t appear to.

Shaftesbury Avenue. Leicester Square. People mill about, and you know the place is quiet because no-one’s lips move. All you hear is the dull, familiar ringing you’ve heard since your deafening, and again that yearning to listen invades your thoughts. What you wouldn’t give to hear the shoe-soles slapping flatly against the concrete, to hear a human voice. You can’t even remember the sound of your own, or Esther’s. (There are few positives in your situation, but your love for her is precious to you, the way you communicate with each other in your own special sign language, and sometimes you don’t even need to sign. Just a look from her says all she needs to.) Oddly, sadly, you remember your mother’s voice, but not your father’s.

What used to be the National Gallery is on your right. For some arcane reason, they’ve kept the building as it was, now closed and still.

Rumour has it books are stored here, in Ralaine, English, Arabic, French; vestiges of linguistic freedom. You wonder why they’re stored at all, and not destroyed. You and your companions keep a whole host of books hidden back home, in a dark room on the top floor: Bibles, Torahs, a dusty, handwritten Qur’an; famous works of fiction, slipped through the fingers of Neme’s relentless inquisition.