The Linguaphage

When linguist Dr. Cael Merrick docks at the Ashworth Array, the silence is already spreading. Communications officer Pinto Adekunle has been tracking the phenomenon from Bay Seven for weeks: a creeping void that strips language from data streams, minds, and memories. Entire colonies have stopped speaking. Linguistic patterns unravel mid-sentence. The crew calls it the Linguaphage. Merrick is the seventh xenolinguist the Array has summoned. The first six never made it back. With Yara Olusegun's signal data, Henrik Voss's classified archives, and Saoirse Bell's silence, Merrick begins reconstructing what the entity is, and what it wants. Tova Lindqvist's instruments start returning syntax that has no human origin. Idris Halvorsen finds unfamiliar glyphs burning themselves into the station's bulkheads. Pinto keeps watching from the gallery as the newcomer moves through corridors that grow quieter with every passing hour. The Linguaphage isn't attacking. It's learning. And when it finishes cataloguing human language, every voice in the system will close forever, unless Merrick can offer it something worth keeping silent. The question is whether any word still exists powerful enough to bargain with a god that eats meaning.