Chapter 10: An App For That
They arrived blinking like newborns into Moriél, or Morielle, or perhaps Moor-elllehhh, the diacritics licking their ears with tongue-unknown. Sun like a god’s slow forgetting. Streets cobbled in drunken syntax, twisted past-future-villages that undid themselves one alley at a time. Greg and Mallory, hand in sweaty hand, two passport-shaped ghosts drifting on the border of comprehension.
Their phones were charged. That was all that mattered. Tools against the babble.
Greg held up the camera as the waiter droned the menu in floral baritones. 📱 “Your pig is not ready for the funeral. Suggest the basil sadness instead.”
Mallory stifled a laugh. “Maybe that’s the lamb?” She tapped her phone. 📱 “Can we eat the basil sadness?”
The waiter blinked, pupil wide as an eclipse, and said: 📱 “You must mourn before you digest.”
The food was brought in silence. Greg bit into something that hummed with vowels, like an old radio trapped under his tongue. Mallory chewed slow, eyes adjusting to the color of the plate as it changed mid-meal. Pinks into greens into sounds.
Outside, a dog barked in Morse code.
Back at the hotel, the receptionist handed them a key made of air. “No one checks out anymore,” she whispered, and her smile was full of teeth the translator rendered as [DATA CORRUPT].
Each night the phones updated. The language pack grew denser, like moss, like a tumor. Greg dreamt in subtitled breath. Mallory heard insects conjugating.
Day 4. The museum: shapes describing events that had never happened, or hadn’t happened yet. A guide approached, gesturing at a fresco of men boiling a dictionary until it screamed. 📱 “Here our people first dislocated the sentence. It bled for seven days.”
Greg nodded. “Fascinating.” Mallory whispered, “I don’t think these are mistakes. I think this is how they speak.”
In the gallery of maps, a room where every country was named Elsewhere, they heard a couple arguing—not tourists. Locals. Their mouths opened and closed, and nothing came out but tones, like bells melting.
📱 “Translation not available: source language has become extinct.”
They left.
Later, trying to buy water, Greg held up the phone. 📱 “Please we thirst.”
The vendor handed them a dead fish and kissed the barcode on its eye. 📱 “Swallow the grammar and you’ll find your way home.”
Mallory turned the fish over. It whispered in dial-up, fins glitching.
“Greg,” she said, “I think we’re being taught something.”
Greg was sweating syntax. He tried to say What, but the word ran backward up his throat and came out as Taw. Birds stopped mid-flight.
On the last day—was it a day?—they opened the app to speak their farewell. The screen showed only a spiral. No input. No text. Just a low chant:
📱 “You’ve arrived at fluency.”
Mallory screamed. Greg just nodded, language having long since left his mouth for wetter, older places.
The locals watched as the tourists flickered.
They would not need their passports again.