Revenge of the Mutant Algorithms! No Time To Speak

Saint Chibubalah held the unique distinction of being canonised by the Catholic Church before his death. Although it was undoubtedly an unprecedented honour, it was of very little use to him while stuck within the confines of a miserable cell. Technically, it wasn't a dungeon. The UN's special rapporteur had been given a tour of the Vatican's "facilities" and came to the conclusion that, despite the lack of sunlight, there were neither enough rats nor manacles to warrant further investigation.

Nevertheless, the absence of torture implements and provision of barely adequate toilet paper didn't quite make it the Ritz. No fewer than four cameras were trained on him and he could hear their servomotors whine as they tracked him pacing around the room. Two paces forward, a right turn, three paces, right, two, right, three. On Sundays he turned left. Or, at least, when he thought it was Sunday. His gaolers had given him the courtesy of controlling the lights in the room and choosing when he wanted to eat. With no clocks and no visitors, his body clock was probably drifting further out of sync with reality. St Chibubalah liked to think that he was free from the tyranny of the modern world and was returning to circadian rhythms of Adam. He was, of course, going insane.

"You should learn Aramaic, my son!"

He could still picture the pock-marked face of the travelling priest. The crumbs on his cassock and the stench of rum soaking out of his pores.

"Aramaic?"

"They tell me you have a gift with language. Aramaic was the language spoken by our Lord."

Chibs knew he was good at languages. Growing up in the camps he had been eager to make friends with anyone. Friends let you share a scrap of bread. Friends let you huddle under their tarpaulin. Friends hid you when people came looking to make trouble. Young Chibs found that the easiest way to make friends was to ask someone to teach you their language. Kids would teach you swear words, UN staffers would teach you the official way to beg for scraps, and priests would happily exchange a few sweet-flavoured ration bars if you could rattle off a psalm or two.

By the time the war was over and the people started drifting back to their old lives, Chibs had grown from a chubby boy with no friends to a tall and confident young man who knew everyone. The Priest had paid Chibs handsomely for directions to the house where fallen women could be saved on an hourly basis. As he led the priest through the alleys, he spoke a dozen different languages and greeted everyone by name.

"Aramaic, boy!" The priest rummaged through his pockets and produced a hip flask, taking a quick nip and looking approvingly when Chibs refused the proffered sip. "We have schemes to help young men like you. A decent education and serving God. You do want out of here, right?"

Chibs didn't know what he wanted. His whole life had been the camps. He felt useful here and, in truth, had no home to go back to. The priest wasn't the first holy-man to try and convince him to run away with him. But there was something different about this one. His clothes were neater, his hair wasn't messed up, and - despite the alcohol fumes - hadn't tried to proposition him.

"I don't know, sir. People need me here."

"God has given you a rare talent, lad. Here you can help a few thousand people. But with training, you could help millions. Would you care to come in and help?"

They were at the shack. A few tired-looking women hung around outside. Business had been slow since the UN had moved on to the next camp. Their lips turned up with smiles that didn't even pretend to reach their eyes.

Talissa spoke to Chibs in the slang of slums. "He needs your help? What? Can't get it up himself? Tell him we'll do a two for one special just for you!"

The bouncer on the door guffawed.

The priest looked the fallen angel up and down, coughed, and then answered in flawless patois, "Woman! I am here to save you - not lay with you! Do you wish for me to hear your confession and grant you salvation?"

Both Talissa and the bouncer had the good sense to look ashamed. They invited both the priest and Chibs inside, made them what passed for tea, and graciously allowed the priest to perform his rituals. Chibs translated the sermons, prayers, and confessions on the few occasions a whore had language unknown to the priest. It was magical. He'd written off religion as a con - but now he saw its transformative power.

24 hours later he was on an aeroplane to the Vatican's language school.

If only he hadn't learned Aramaic.

The next dozen years were a blur. Looking back from his cell he could only wonder where the time went. Digging around in dusty libraries, speaking at conferences in exotic hotels, getting drunk in airport bars, and absorbing ancient languages like a living Rosetta Stone. Was that really his life? The glamour, the prestige, the opportunities that he never thought he'd have. Were twelve years of freedom worth a life sentence? Would he have been better off if he'd stayed back in the camp? Every decision he took became fodder for his pain. He chewed over every decision which placed him here - the canonised captive.

What had he done to deserve this?

Oh, yeah, the crystals.

Chibs had been invited to a symposium to discuss his latest paper on Imperial Aramaic poetry and the clues it held to the way regional accents were pronounced. Although a deeply scholarly work, dense with footnotes and jargon, a few publishers had been sniffing around. Over indifferent wine (which he now knew how to properly assess - a million miles away from his upbringing) a coterie of literary agents subtly let slip the advances they were prepared to pay the Church for the publishing rights. After all, there were so few working Aramaic scholars left these days.

How he longed to taste wine again. Having once supped from the finest goblets and now reduced to pouring unidentified liquids down his gullet. Judging by the smell of the slop they fed him, he was lucky that his tongue had been plucked out. The stubby bit of flesh they'd left him with was adequate for swallowing the puréed food, but little else.

Why hadn't he gone to the after-party in the physics department? Some distinguished professor had wanted to show him... something? All he could remember was walking down by the frozen river on the way back to the hotel. The ice looked brittle and hazily reflected the half moon. The crack of footsteps behind him came a moment too late. He was bundled into a van, a scrap of black fabric covering his eyes, a foul tasting rag in his mouth. That short journey to the van was probably the last time he felt fresh air on his skin.

When they deigned to remove his mask, he was surprised to find himself in a rather dank crypt. The flaming torches had been replaced with high-efficiency LED lighting but the uncomfortable wooden pews remained. Chibs waited. He didn't have money, so this wasn't extortion. The Church had invested a lot in him, but was unlikely to pay a ransom. Even back in the camp he hadn't made enemies. So why was he here?

"Sorry for the subterfuge, my boy. You'll understand shortly." The priest swept in, carrying a laptop.

The priest! Chibs blushed in shame. He'd never questioned why the priest had vanished from his life. Since leaving the camps he had never once contacted his benefactor. He'd thought about it plenty in the first few years. But what could he say? Thank you for rescuing me? Sorry I thought you were a seedy drunk? What was your name again? It all seemed inadequate.

"I understand you're quite the scholar now." It wasn't a question.

"Sir?"

"Drink?"

"No."

"You may reconsider that in a moment. Tell me, what do you know about Quasi-Periodic Time Crystals?"

This conversation wasn't going the way he'd thought. A few weeks earlier Chibs was giving a TED talk. Some hotshot young physicist had her speaking slot before him and he stood transfixed in the wings as she took the audience through a crash-course in modern science. Afterwards, she'd sought him out to discuss his theories of language models. At the time, Chibs had thought it was curious that a self-described atheist would be so interested in the Church's meanderings through historical archives. With the benefit of hindsight, he realised that she might have been giving him a warning.

Chibs stammered an answer and vomited up what little he could remember of the Wikipedia article he'd devoured after meeting her. The priest looked unimpressed.

"The Vatican's research lab think they have created a new form of crystal. It vibrates at the same resonant frequency as a human voice."

The world stopped spinning for a moment and Chibs's stomach dropped. This could only mean one thing. A fundamental building block of the universe was trying to communicate with us. A voice reaching out across the cosmos. The voice of… did he dare think it?

The priest continued, "We rescued you and trained you for a reason. Our libraries contain many references to singing stones. The superforecasters predicted our need for someone like you; so you were cultivated. You have no past and you were last seen walking along a slippery path. There's a crack in the ice and a general unwillingness to look for you. You won't be missed."

Was that true? All his friends were really jealous colleagues. He was on nodding terms with half a dozen people on the speaking circuit. The tutors were all enmeshed in the Church. His half-remembered family presumably thought he had died decades ago. Perhaps Chibs was dead and this was hell?

"I don't say these things to be cruel. I merely wish to convey the gravity of the situation. You can either rot in this cell, or translate."

I was nothing more than a tool to these people, he thought. They didn't see me as human.

"Why kidnap me?"

The priest shifted in his seat and winced.

"You must understand, boy, we fear what this could reveal. An unknown voice buried in the source code of the world has the potential to destroy society. We need this work done by someone who…" He had the good grace to look ashamed, "who won't be missed if we have to bury the evidence."

Well. There it was. His brain had been fattened for the slaughter. He wanted to scream the crypt down and lay buried in its rubble. But the challenge was just too great.

Chibs gestured at the priest's laptop. "Play it."

The audio started with the short blast of a tri-tone chord. It sounded harsh and synthetic. A brief period of silence. Then a voice. A woman's voice!

She spoke in a harsh, guttural tone. Pausing in places, emphasising certain phrases, there was a cadence which indicated poetry, and she finished with a surprisingly mellifluous laugh. The tone played again and the audio fell silent.

They stared at each other. Eventually, the silence was broken.

"God is a woman?"

The priest was unimpressed with his levity.

"Can you translate it?"

"It contains features similar to Imperial Aramaic. There's a hint of Phonecian in there. You must understand that these languages haven't been heard in millennia. All we have are scraps."

"We will provide you with any resources you need, but you may not leave the room. I suggest you make a start."

The priest pulled a Dictaphone out of his cassock pocket and threw it on the table. Without meeting Chibs's gaze, he swept himself and the laptop out of the room. The lock on the door clicked.

Chibs hit play on the tape and listened.

That's how he spent the next year. Listening. Rewinding. Scribbling. Sending out for books and recordings. He could repeat her poem in his sleep. It was a beautiful song, full of intricate symbolism, and a message that chilled. By the end of the year, he had forgotten what sunlight felt like and how the air of freedom tasted. The priest was finally summoned. He heard the translation and swigged from his ever-present hip-flask. Once. Twice. Again. Draining it. He didn't say a word. Chibs was flown back to the Vatican on a moonless night. A dozen Swiss Guards surrounding him. The priest emptying the jet's stock of booze.

And so Chibs found himself thrown into an anonymous cell while he waited for an audience with the Supreme Pontiff. He painstakingly rehearsed what he needed to say. He refined his notes. He sang the song repeatedly. A day - or possibly a week or a month - later, the heavy door was drawn back. There stood the Sovereign of the Vatican surrounded by guards. Their weapons were drawn, but their ears were blocked by industrial noise protectors.

The priest squeezed past.

"Holy Father. This is our latest translator. He has got further than any other in the last few decades. I have heard his testimony, and I believe it should now be revealed to you."

The Pope dismissed him with a wave. He spoke to Chibs in lightly accented Latin. "Estne cantus admonitio?" He wanted to know if it was a warning.

Chibs warily replied "Illa canit tibi gratulationem." She sings you congratulations.

The Pope bade Chibs to begin his translation.

"The song starts by congratulating us on our triumph in deciphering her message. She gives praise to the wise men who have such knowledge. The first half of the song sets out the singer's position in history. She references several events to explain when she is. Some are stories which are known to us as historical fact - like the flood. Other events cannot be found in any records. She then describes several celestial phenomena we can use to calculate when the message was sent. Based on her description of what is likely Hayley's Comet, I am certain that her voice dates to around the year 550 BC."

The Pope remained impassive.

"The next part of the message is… once it is heard, it cannot be unheard."

The Pope turned to his guard to make sure their headphones were securely attached. Satisfied, he leaned over. "Susurri." Whisper.

His lips millimetres away from the holy ear, Chibs began his blasphemous message.

"If you have found this message, you have reached level two. There are seven levels. Most civilisations reach level two in around 1,000 years. If you have taken longer, you can continue but we recommend that you restart your civilisation. If you have taken more than 1,500 years, you will find level three to be crushingly difficult. In which case, we strongly recommend that you start again. The process for resetting the universe is…"

The Pope stepped back. He scowled at Chibs, turned around, and stormed out of the cell. The door slammed behind him. Outside was the sound of commotion. After a few minutes, the priest re-entered holding a briefcase.

"My child, the Holy Father wishes to convey his eternal gratitude to you. What you have done is nothing short of miraculous. Therefore, I am saddened to say that you will be privately and prehumously canonised. This is a great and terrible honour."

The priest opened the briefcase and started taking out some wickedly shaped metal implements.

"His Holiness commands that you must never speak the final prophesy of the Time Crystals. To that end," he paused to fill a syringe, "you will not be allowed to leave this room and, naturally, your voice cannot be heard again."

The priest stepped forward and Chibs had nowhere to hide.

The new Saint Chibubalah spent his days in silent contemplation. His lips repeated the song of songs until they were chapped and bloody. His mind raced with possibilities. She had taught him the spell to turn back the clock. It was complex and beautiful and impossible. Sat alone in the dank cell, he was visited by a revelation.

And so, Saint Chibubalah did something he'd never done before. He prayed.

Thanks for reading

I'd love your feedback on this story. Did you like the style of writing? Was the plot interesting? Did you guess the twist? Please stick a note in the comments to motivate me 😃

Hungry for more? You can read:

• 2024's "Revenge Of The Mutant Algorithms"
• 2023's "Tales of the Algorithm"