Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 89: The Translation Plague (2)

It wasn’t pain—or not only pain, not the simple physical agony of injury or burning that the human nervous system was designed to interpret and respond to. It was shock, overwhelm, violation on a neurological level, the sound of someone experiencing something their nervous system wasn’t designed to process, something that bypassed normal sensory channels and rewrote fundamental aspects of cognition in real-time. Whisper clutched their head with both hands, fingers digging into their temples hard enough to leave white pressure marks in the skin, hard enough that Zeph worried they might actually injure themselves, their body going rigid as if struck by lightning, every muscle locked in sympathetic response to whatever was happening inside their skull.

The tablet’s glow intensified further, becoming almost painful to look at even from several meters away, and Zeph could see—through squinted eyes and the afterimages dancing across his vision—tendrils of light flowing from the stone into Whisper’s hands where they’d made contact, could see the script actually moving, the characters detaching from the tablet’s surface and crawling up Whisper’s arms like living things, like luminous parasites or symbionts burrowing into flesh with terrible purpose. The tendrils weren’t just light—they had substance, had presence, moved with intention as they traveled up forearms and past elbows, heading toward the shoulder and neck with the inexorable progress of something that knew exactly where it was going and what it was doing. But there was no physical damage that Zeph could see—the light passed through skin without burning, left no marks or wounds, simply disappeared into muscle and bone and blood vessels, heading upward and inward toward the brain, toward whatever part of human consciousness processed language and meaning and symbolic representation.

"Get them away from it!" Seris shouted, her instincts overriding her fear, her voice carrying genuine panic that Zeph had never heard from her before, already moving forward with her hands extended as if she could somehow grab the light itself and pull it out of Whisper’s body, but Tank was faster, his combat reflexes giving him the edge in reaction time that academic training couldn’t match.

He grabbed Whisper by the shoulders with both hands—his sword dropped to the floor with a clatter that echoed through the vast chamber—and yanked them backward with enough force to lift them completely off their feet, breaking contact with the tablet violently, tearing them away from the source of the infection or download or whatever terrible process was occurring. The glow faded immediately, the brilliance dimming back to normal bioluminescence in the space of a heartbeat, the tendrils of light dissipating like smoke in a strong wind, like they’d never been there at all except for the evidence of what they’d done. But the damage—if damage was the right word, if what had occurred could be called damage when there was no visible wound, no bleeding, no broken bones—was already done. The light had delivered its payload, had injected or installed or uploaded whatever it was designed to convey, had completed its purpose in the few seconds of contact before Tank’s intervention.

Whisper collapsed to their knees the moment Tank released them, gasping for air like they’d been drowning, like their lungs had forgotten how to work and were only now remembering the basic mechanics of respiration, their whole body shaking with tremors that traveled from head to toe in waves. Their eyes were wide and unfocused, pupils dilated so far that almost no iris remained visible, seeing things that weren’t in the chamber or perhaps seeing the chamber itself in ways the rest of them couldn’t perceive, processing information that was still flooding through their consciousness like water through a broken dam, like a fire hose aimed directly at a teacup, overwhelming and destroying and rebuilding all at once.

"Whisper?" Seris knelt beside them immediately, her hands hovering uncertainly over Whisper’s body, not sure where to touch or how to help when the injury was neurological and invisible. "Can you hear me? Are you hurt? Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Talk to me. Please, just say something so I know you’re still in there."

Whisper’s mouth opened, their jaw working with visible effort as if the muscles had forgotten their function and were having to relearn it, and words came out, but they were wrong. Not wrong in content but in form—the sounds were strange, the syllables harsh and flowing in patterns that human mouths shouldn’t be able to produce, phonemes that required vocal cord configurations that human anatomy wasn’t designed to create. It was language, clearly language with grammar and structure and syntax, but completely incomprehensible to anyone listening, beautiful and terrible in its utter alienness.

"—vesh’kara nim taloth—" Whisper said, and then stopped abruptly, confusion crossing their face as they heard their own voice produce sounds they hadn’t consciously chosen, words they didn’t remember deciding to speak. They tried again, visible concentration on their face as they attempted to force their mouth to produce familiar sounds. "I’m—I’m—vek’nash tor—" More alien words spilled out unbidden, mixed with attempts at human language in a jumbled mess, their brain clearly trying to speak normally but failing, substituting alien vocabulary for human words unconsciously, the translation happening automatically and unwillingly at some level below conscious control.

The Translation Plague had begun.

Zeph watched with horrified fascination as Whisper’s language comprehension rewrote itself in real-time, could see the progression in their speech patterns like watching a disease spread through a body, could track the deterioration of their ability to communicate in human language as alien language replaced it neuron by neuron. It was terrible. It was tragic. And it was utterly fascinating from a scientific perspective, which made him feel like a monster for observing it with such clinical detachment while Whisper suffered through it.

Stage 1 - Minutes 0-3:

Whisper could still speak mostly normally for the first few minutes, the human language centers of their brain still functioning but increasingly corrupted, alien words creeping into their sentences like invasive species colonizing new territory, like weeds growing in a garden, starting at the edges and working inward toward complete replacement.

"I can—kresh—I can understand it," they said, looking around at the tablets with an expression that mixed wonder and growing horror in equal measure, their eyes tracking across the glowing script with newfound comprehension. "The text, it’s—vel’mora—it’s making sense now. Not just fragments, not just guesses, but complete understanding. I can read—thresh’kan—I can read all of it. Every word. Every symbol. It’s all perfectly clear. But I can’t—vek—I can’t stop the other words. They just—nim’kor—they just come out without my permission."

They stood on shaky legs, using the tablet for support, and moved to the nearest smaller tablet with stumbling steps, and their eyes moved across the alien text with clear comprehension, reading with the same ease they’d read a book in their native language. "This one—this one is about—kala’vesh—about biology. Advanced biology. It describes the—nim’tok—the creatures they made here. The—vresh’kala—the hybrids. It’s so detailed, it’s showing me genetic structures and cross-species integration and things I don’t even have words for because human science hasn’t discovered them yet, it’s—"

"Whisper, focus," Tank said, his voice tight with controlled panic, his usual calm cracking around the edges as he watched one of his team members transform into something else before his eyes. "Focus on speaking human language. You can do this. Just concentrate. Think about what you want to say in human words before you speak. Filter it. Control it."

"I AM concentrating!" Whisper snapped, frustration and fear making their voice sharp, and then their face went pale as more alien words spilled out unbidden, as their conscious control slipped further. "I’m—vek’nar—I’m trying as hard as I can but it’s—kresh’tala—it’s changing how I think, not just how I speak. The words aren’t—nim’kor—aren’t translating anymore, they’re—vesh’kala—they’re replacing the original thoughts. I think in alien language now and have to translate back to human and it’s getting harder—"

"Oh god," Kael whispered from where he stood several meters back, having retreated to what he apparently considered a safe distance from the linguistic contagion, his face showing the kind of horror usually reserved for watching someone die slowly. "Oh god, it’s eating their brain. It’s rewriting their brain. We need to do something. We need to fix this. Can we fix this?"

"I don’t know," Seris said honestly, her voice breaking with emotion, with the terrible helplessness of a healer confronting something she couldn’t heal. "I don’t know if this is even injury or transformation or what. I don’t know if ’fixing’ it is possible or if it would kill them to try."

Stage 2 - Minutes 3-7:

Half of Whisper’s speech was alien language now, half was human, creating a linguistic soup that was increasingly difficult to parse, sentences that started in one language and ended in another, thoughts that fractured across the growing divide in their brain.

"Tank, I—vek’nara tol kresh—need you to—nim’kala vesh’tor—understand that I’m—thresh’nim kala’ven tor’esh—still me!" The frustration in their voice was clear even through the alien words, even through the distortion of meaning that came from only understanding half of what they were saying. Their hands gestured frantically, trying to convey through body language what their words could no longer express. "I can read—vek’nara—everything here, every tablet, every projection, but I—kresh’tala nim—can’t tell you—vesh’kala tor nim—what it says because I can’t speak your language anymore!"

Tears were streaming down their face now, tears of frustration and fear and grief for the loss of something fundamental, the loss of the ability to communicate with the people they’d fought beside and survived with, the loss of connection that language provided.

Seris grabbed Whisper’s shoulders with both hands, forced eye contact, made them focus on her face instead of the swirling panic in their own head. "We know you’re still you. We can see it in your eyes. Your personality hasn’t changed, just your language. But you need to find a way to communicate with us. Can you write? Can you draw? Can human language still come out through your hands even if it can’t come out through your mouth?"

Understanding flickered in Whisper’s eyes, a moment of clarity breaking through the linguistic chaos. "Vek—yes—kresh’tala—writing—nim’kor vesh—still works—kala’nim—for now—but I don’t know how long before it changes too—"

Stage 3 - Minutes 7-10:

By the ten-minute mark, Whisper’s speech was entirely alien language, the transformation complete, the last bastions of human language centers in their brain overwritten and replaced with something else. They opened their mouth and a stream of harsh, flowing syllables emerged, grammatically structured and clearly meaningful but completely incomprehensible to human ears, a beautiful and terrible language that none of them had any hope of understanding.

"Vek’nara tol kresh’kala nim’kor vesh’tala tor’esh nim kala’ven!" Whisper said urgently, their voice carrying desperate emotion, gesturing at the walls, at the tablets, at the glowing script that they could now read perfectly, their face showing the desperate need to communicate what they were learning, to share the knowledge that was flooding their mind. "Thresh’nim kala tor vek’nara! Nim’kor vesh’kala! Tor’nim vek kresh’tala vesh’kor!"

But they could now READ the facility’s text. Zeph watched with a mixture of horror and envy as Whisper’s eyes moved across the glowing script with perfect comprehension, as they moved from tablet to tablet absorbing information at a rate that suggested photographic memory or enhanced processing, as they examined the holographic projections and clearly understood the incomprehensible diagrams that to the rest of them might as well have been abstract art. They understood EVERYTHING written here—centuries or millennia of accumulated knowledge, the complete archive of an alien civilization, all of it accessible to them now.

And they couldn’t tell any of them what it said.

Whisper’s face showed a progression of emotions that played out like a silent film—wonder at the knowledge now accessible to them, at the understanding of things humanity had barely dreamed of, horror at the cost of that knowledge, at what they’d lost to gain it, and then determination. Still intelligent, still themselves despite the linguistic transformation, still capable of problem-solving and adaptation, they realized they were losing the ability to communicate with their team and immediately started looking for solutions.

They grabbed a blank tablet from a stack against the wall—smooth stone surfaces that hadn’t been inscribed yet, waiting for information that would never be added, raw materials for an archive that had been abandoned mid-creation. Found a stylus nearby, a sharp metal implement designed for carving script into stone, heavy and awkward but functional enough for writing if you pressed hard enough and didn’t care about aesthetic beauty.

And they began to write, quickly, desperately, racing against the linguistic transformation still occurring in their brain, trying to get as much information down as possible before the ability to produce human letters followed human speech into oblivion. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

The messages appeared in crude, hurried human letters, the handwriting shaky and uneven, growing shakier as alien symbols began creeping into the script like corruption spreading through a document, replacing familiar letters with flowing alien characters that meant nothing to anyone watching:

"THE FACILITY IS FOUR THINGS"