Chapter 21: How Many Tongues Must a Mirror Swallow Before It Burps a Name?
The walls are glass but they don’t reflect—only refract, repeat, revoice. A thousand Priyas spliced at different angles, snipped and knotted into recursive cubicle prisms. Navi Mumbai blinks under monsoon mirage, glass-paned, chrome-throated, humming with 60Hz delusion.
“Good evening, this is Sarah,” Priya says, her mouth two syllables behind her skull. “How may I assist you?”
Sarah is the name they gave her. A placeholder, neutral as boiled rice. Her real name rattles like a loose cable in the ceiling.
The headset hisses—a static throat clearing in the cables of the void. The man on the other end breathes in consonants and exhales compound error messages:
“Heyyyyy I got a probz with the... like... fuxnet driver-thing? Keeps goin’ like voop, ya dig?”
She nods though he cannot see. “Sir, I can help you with that,” she says in a clean, clipped, sterilized vowel stream. But even as she speaks, the script scroll on her second monitor is jittering. Misaligned bullet points. Steps repeat backwards. Font turns Devanagari then Wingdings then pictographs: an eye, a chain, an open mouth consuming its own tongue.
“Have you tried—” she starts, but the words smear. Tried becomes त्रिअईईइउऽd, and he laughs. No, not the customer. The one inside. The one behind. The syntax-smearer.
“Miss? You glitched there. You okay?”
But it is not she who glitched. It is the code of the world, and it is contagious.
In the cubicle across from her, Arjun is parroting lines from two calls at once. One in Texan drawl, one in machine Cantonese. His voice forks mid-sentence, larynx splitting like a wishbone. A laughtrack plays faintly from nowhere.
To her left, Farah’s mouth moves but it’s birdsong, tight warbles and featherflap phonemes. Her screen displays nothing but the word YES in seventeen alphabets.
Priya’s headset tightens. Her scalp itches. Her own voice returns to her through the feedback loop:
“Good evening, this is Sarah. How may I—” “—Sarah. How may I—” “—Sarah. How may—Sarah—Sarah—S̶̞͌Á̸̗R̶̟͛A̸̢͊H̷͓͐.”
She taps MUTE. Silence doesn’t come—only the sound of cicadas speaking in old dial-up tones. She unmutes. A new call has connected.
But no number blinks. No flag of origin. No name.
“Good evening,” she hears. “This is Priya,” the voice says. “How may I assist you?”
The voice is hers but younger, edges unprocessed. Her pre-American self. The voice she buried under training videos and phoneme drills.
She opens her mouth to respond. But only static. Not white noise—color noise: magenta with hints of ancestral dread. In it: a grandmother’s lullaby half-reversed, a schoolyard taunt from a Marathi child, a cold American slogan about convenience.
She screams, but the headset absorbs it, transmutes it, returns it in a slower cadence.
“T͡͞h̛įs̨ ̨is̷ ͞th̸e̵ ͏ca̴l̷l ̨yo̴u ̴pl̢a̡cęd,̴ Pri̡y̵a.̛ ̛R͞e̕m͘e͜m̴be̛r͢?”
Her co-workers are chanting something now—not in sync, not in language. Their mouths open and close like elevator doors stuck between floors.
She sees the window: her face, the headset, a halo of typoed light. Her reflection says:
“You are the call center now.”
Then clicks into hold. Forever.