Wrds We Cnt Sy

A Short Story

The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Day 1

I woke to the drum of rain and the hush of language—two lullabies braided together. Freshman essays overflowed with eager modifiers, adjectives glittering like minnows in the margins. Feeling rich, I spent words the way some people spend vacation money: persimmon, effervescence, confluence, verve, coniferous.

Mom would be proud; she always said that speech was “a bridge we raise between souls—every stone a syllable, every beat a brick.”

I haven’t always been lavish with syllables. At eight, every sentence was a minefield. T‑t‑t‑today I w‑w‑would like…the stutter ground my thoughts to gravel until the speech therapist’s ticking metronome drove me mad. Mom slipped me poetry under the door: Hopkins, Dickinson, Rilke. I read the lines aloud, first in whispers, then in a rising crescendo until the words carried me instead of the other way around. Language became an escape hatch; the page, a kingdom where my tongue could finally keep pace with my mind. Mine was a journey from Babel to Boston.

That private victory led me here, red pen in hand, helping freshmen turn their leaden prose into gold. Ever since, I’ve stockpiled words the way beavers do for their dams—bundles of syllables cached against the fear that one morning the pantry of speech might stand bare again.

Day 12

A small oddity in Lecture Hall T-800: the loud‑speaker swallowed the second beat of Tues‑day. No one flinched. I filed the glitch beside other campus mysteries: phantom printer queues, the janitor whistling off‑key Chopin, the smell in the third floor bathroom.

Day 28

On the library cart, the poetry shelf came back with identical wounds: every final couplet clipped away. Ava shrugged: “Probably a misprint.” Her tongue snagged on the p—p’robly. Paper hides its erasures; a tongue has no cupboard.

Day 47

My inbox doubled yet felt empty. Colleagues replied in perfect paragraphs; identical perfect paragraphs. The signatures read “Composed with WriteGood™ for Faster, Friendlier Messaging.” Eliot came to mind: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Day 63

When did comprehension become optional? I scrawled the question after the station announcer said, “Pltfrm fr trn t Brkl—” like a cough. Commuters, earbuds in, marched on.

Day 89

Mom called twice in one afternoon.

Mom (voice bright): Thanks for the phone call earlier, dear. I feel lighter already.
Me (confused): I was lecturing all morning, Ma.
Mom: Oh… you sound different now. A cold?

A sick shiver: voice‑clone scams had been sweeping the senior center. It felt both tonic and cruel: the very voice my mother once coached from my stutter was now her siren, leading her astray. I would not lose the woman who helped me find myself—certainly not to a counterfeit built from that same hard-won sound. I changed every password and tried not to picture her wiring rent money to my digital echo.

Day 124

The Dean unveiled ClearComm™, an “efficiency overlay.” The overlay auto-compresses every noun phrase to its nearest emoji—verbs optional. Emails shorter, meetings silent but for transcript scrolls. No one clapped. Heads stayed bowed to their screens. A moment later our phones chimed in a delicate, haunting harmony: Presentation Complete. ClearComm had already served up a platter of applause via emojis. We tapped once: polite, brief, perfectly in sync.

Day 156

Mom spent thirty seconds climbing toward lavender and never reached it, settling on “the purple smell.” Her sentences were turning into windows left open in winter—nothing but cold air pushing through.

Day 178

Student projects arrived bite‑sized: Clr. Ptry. Cntxt. They called it focus. I called it famine.

Day 203

Faculty agenda printed without words—just bullet points, a parade of hollow circles. Debate stalled; no one knew what any circle contained. The Dean beamed: “Minimalist clarity.”

Day 231

A seminar on rhetoric crashed when LexiWrite auto‑summarized every spoken paragraph into three emojis. The AI applauded itself; the students followed its lead, screens glowing like bonfires in their laps. All light, no heat.

Day 247

Government presser: the minister’s teleprompter scrolled only icons—🔵⬆️ 🔴◻️ 😀😀. He recited them flawlessly. No one was left to applaud, the AI news readers offered the concise summary "!!"

Day 268

I clicked to the slide titled “Language as Liberation,” took a breath… and opened my mouth—“Lang—” The syllable died. Silence rippled through the rows; not a single head lifted. I mumbled “Sorry,” closed my laptop, and fled the podium; my argument stranded in midair.

That afternoon I visited Mom. She said, “You… m—” and the n dissolved. Instead she pressed my hand to her chest. Pulse—pure, precise—did the speaking. I understood and went home hollow.

Day 284

Campus Wi‑Fi renamed itself ////. Maybe the machines are laughing. I tried to write syllable in my journal. My pen stuttered like a dying moth—producing chicken scratch, not calligraphy.

Day 296

A colleague set her phone on the lounge table. Another phone answered. The devices chattered in chirps and icons while their owners sipped stale coffee, necks bent like wilted tulips.

Day 315

Backspace is faster than thought. Sentences fray. The doctor diagnoses PPA—progressive phrase aphasia. Hard to hear; harder to spell. Students smile kindly, as if my decay were a lecture in obsolescence.

Day 328

The smart-board shows only arrows now. Questions go —> directions; answers never return. I draw a curved line between two points, stop, can’t recall why.

Day 330

I hoard words in a notebook: luminous, thicket, breathe. They sound nice, but their meanings escape me. Pages shrink, ink fades. I say them aloud—“luminous… thicket… breathe”—each sound a stone dropped in water. But eventually waves flatten.

Day 342

Dream: endless phone wires loop with no towers. Vowel‑birds slide off the lines, sentences flash into the dark. I wake gasping, jaw on the threshold between then & none.

Day 351

Graduation replaced by a hyperlink. Grads clicked; confetti emojis burst across screens. No valedictorian spoke—WriteGood™ served a twelve‑second montage of trending quotes. Parents waved from videolink.

Day 353

The library deaccessioned spoken‑word reels, citing “inefficient storage.” I rescued one tape: Mom reciting Hopkins. The hiss sounded like surf; her voice landed like birds on water. I own no player.

Day 355

Mom & I = silence + palms. Heartbeats = proof. Nurses call it “non‑verbal companionship.” I call it a paper-thin kind of hell.

Day 356

Street signs r blank. GPS offers only a thin blue line—no key pts 2 nme. Even shadows seem 2 hv an ech0 n0w.

Day 357

ntbk —> blank

Mom: tap…tap on 🏠

I m0uth thm bck—no snd

Wrds h@ng & f@d3

Day 359

th n k g 0 n e

Day 360

C @ n t w r 1 t 3

Day 362

.

Day 364

D—
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D

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Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.

If you want to discuss any of the ideas or musings mentioned above or have any books, papers, or links that you think would be interesting to share on a future edition of White Noise, please reach out to me by replying to this email or following me on Twitter X.

With sincere gratitude,

Tom