My sister discovered a universal language, but she hasn't spoken a word since 2003

My sister discovered a universal language, but she hasn't spoken a word since 2003

My sister is a genius. When she was about thirteen she made this device that honestly still blows my mind. I’ve spent my entire life studying physics and I still don’t know what she did, or how—which is probably for the best considering how this all played out. I don’t know how she did it, but what I do know is in the summer of 2003 the laws governing matter and atomic mass didn’t seem to affect her anymore, she was invisible to the human eye, and she was speaking a universal language we’ve never been able to identify or reproduce.

Before I get into this, though, have you ever seen Firefly?

Allow me to quote:

I am very smart.

I went to the best medic-ed in Osiris, top 3% of my class; finished my internship in eight months. ‘Gifted’ is the term.

So when I tell you that my little sister makes me look like an idiot child, I want you to understand my full meaning.

This could have been written about me and my sisters. We come from a long line of gifted people. My father is a neurologist, my mother works for SpaceX, and my eldest sister is an artist whose work has been featured in galleries since she was twelve. I’m a full-time research associate of high energy density physics at a university I can’t name without risking my career. And, like Simon Tam from Firefly before me, I don’t tell you all of this to flaunt our intelligence or to make us look special. I tell you this so you can fully understand what I mean when I say Nirali made us all look like idiot children.

In 2003 I was about to turn seventeen. My interests weren’t like most teen girls, so I won’t bore you with the details of what I found more entertaining than TV, books, or the mall, but more often than not I was occupied with personal research projects. The first time Nirali made herself invisible I was in the middle of a research rabbit hole. I was deep into some really heady academic articles when I heard Nirali pipe up behind me.

“They’re wrong, you know.”

I groaned inwardly. We’d had the knocking talk, but she was still so bad at respecting boundaries. “Nirali, what did we say about knocking?”

“Oh,” she said, and sounded genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think about the door.”

“What?” I frowned and spun my chair around to look at her.

My room was empty.

Wait, empty?

I looked around briefly before rubbing my eyes, wondering when I’d slept last and already writing the conversation off as an auditory hallucination. Shaking my head, I started to turn back to my computer when I heard her giggle.

“Alright, jerkhole. Where are you?”

“Right here,” she giggled, her voice coming from directly in front of me.

“What the—how? Did you hide the speakers again?” I stood up, taking a moment to really look around the room. She’d pulled a prank like this before, hiding a complex set of speakers she’d modified to create a confluence of sound she could manipulate. It would sound like someone was anywhere in the room she specified. She’d even made it sound like she was moving around. It was really impressive, especially since she’d only been ten at the time.

This time, though, she’d either gotten much better at hiding the speakers or something else was going on.

She giggled again. “No speakers! Just me!”

“Okay, ‘Just Me’. But how?” I folded my arms, looking in the direction of her disembodied voice.

“That’s going to be hard to explain.”

That was Nirali for “you won’t get it”.

“Try me,” I said, because I’m stubborn.

She did, though, and I didn’t. I had the beginnings of a migraine chewing on my right eye by the time she was done. Almost none of it made sense. There was something about atomic frequencies, and post-dimensional drift, superliminal desynchronization, and something she’d dubbed the “Planck Supratemporal Parallel”. It was all way over my head.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my temple as I tried to digest it all. “But how did you get here.”

“I walked.”

Infuriating.

“I mean, how did you get in here?” I gestured widely to the door, which was closed, and the walls around us.

“Oh.” I could hear the shrug in her voice. “I just walked where the walls weren’t.”

I squinted at the spot I thought she was standing.

“You… what?”

She sighed. It was a special sigh. It was the kind of sigh that told you someone much smarter than you was put out at having to dumb something down enough for you to understand. An embarrassed heat flooded my cheeks. I knew she was smarter than me—smarter than all of us—but it still made me feel like I’d failed simple math in front of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and a puppy, and they were both disappointed.

“I walked where the walls weren’t. The walls aren’t everywhere, Divya. In fact, in most places, like… realities? The walls aren’t there at all. So I just walked in those places.”

I wanted to see the proofs of this statement, though I knew she wouldn’t have bothered writing them down except in scraps and incomplete snippets that only made sense to her. I also knew the proofs wouldn’t make any more sense than her original explanation. Even so, it bothered me that I only understood what she meant in the vaguest, most conceptual way. It wasn’t natural for me. That abstractness of thought warred with the linear way of my brain making actual understanding impossible and I hated it.

Sana would have understood. Her brain worked that way. But not mine.

I must have looked like I was struggling with it (and I was), because she continued on.

“Where I am, or technically when and how, everything is a Schrödinger’s puzzle of Is and Isn’t. All I have to do is observe the places where the state of something Isn’t and go there.”

This wasn’t helping. I mean, it was—I got the basic concept of what she was saying, but in terms of the practical application of physics it was a mess of meaningless sciencey buzz words. Nothing she said had any foundation in known science. She could have told me “I ate ice cream upside down and chanted ‘purple’ backwards thirty times and the wall turned to Jell-O, but only as long as I looked at it from a forty-five-degree angle,” and it would have been exactly as scientifically sound as what she’d actually said.

Yet she was the one who was invisible, so the limits of my understanding and science itself had no bearing on her corporeal existence.

“Do you still have a body? I mean, can you see you?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice pitched higher in excitement. “I look like a hundred versions of me laid on top of each other. Looking at my hands and stuff is kinda trippy, but I’m here.”

Cool. I had no idea what to do with this information.

She started giggling again.

“What now?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t noticed yet.”

“Noticed what?” I couldn’t keep the flash of irritation out of my voice. It wasn’t easy to accept the premise that she’d managed to trick physics into letting her pass through matter while being imperceptible to the human eye, but I’d had just about all the How Much Dumber Than Nirali Are You I could take for one day.

“What language am I speaking?”

I had to blink at that and think a moment. “It’s English, isn’t it?”

She giggled again.

“Say something,” I ordered in my most authoritative Big Sister voice.

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure…”

If I concentrated, I could tell the words I she was saying didn’t quite match what I was apparently translating in my head, but I couldn’t hear them for what they were. Except…

“Wait, is that the ‘lorem ipsum’ translation from De finibus bonorum et malorum?”

She giggled again. “Yep! Want me to try something in Hindi?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little stunned and more than a little curious. “Go for it.”

“May He in whose lap shines forth the Daughter of the mountain king, who carries the celestial stream on His head, on whose brow rests the crescent moon, whose throat holds poison and whose breast is support of a huge serpent, and who is adorned by the ashes on His body, may that chief of gods, the Lord of all, the Destroyer of the universe, the omnipresent Śhiva, the moon-like Śańkara, ever protect me.”

I frowned, torn between focusing on the words and trying to identify what she was quoting. I started mouthing some of the words as my mind ran back over them, and gawped a little as recognition settled in. “Did you just quote the Ramcharitmanas’ Ayodhyā Kāṇḍ invocation?”

Another giggle.

“But… how? That didn’t sound like Hindi at all!”

“Fascinating,” she said. “It didn’t feel like Hindi when I said it, but I was thinking the Hindi words. What did it sound like to you?”

“English, I guess. I mean, it didn’t sound like anything, but I understood you in English.”

“That’s so cool. Can you actually hear something other than English?”

“Kinda. I mean, almost. If I try I can tell the sounds you’re making don’t match the meaning of the words I’m… not hearing, but understanding? But the meaning overrides everything else so I can’t actually identify individual sounds or phrases.”

“Do you think you could identify the physical linguistics if we went word by word? It may be the processing of complete phrases prevents the identification of individual phonemes.”

“Maybe,” I said, shrugging, still trapped in awe of this aspect of her discovery. “We could try it.”

She had me run her through some general object identification to give me a chance to listen for the sounds she was making and how they differed from the words I knew—the words I was “hearing”—but I only ever caught the ghosts of divergent beginnings and ends.

She thought this was hilarious.

I thought it was magical.

She started making regular trips to my room in this state, usually after lights out or when our parents were at work. I didn’t blame her for sneaking. Sana wasn’t into the science stuff, and if our parents knew what we’d been up to we’d have been grounded for life, especially since Nirali had already been banned from experimental projects at home. (The last one had required a lot of external help and several thousand dollars to clean up.) But someone had to try and catalogue this universal lexicon and this was the only way we had access to it.

One night, as we lay awake on the floor naming objects (we’d tried making individual sounds before, but without the intent of meaning behind them there was no divergence), Nirali froze. I couldn’t see her, of course, but something changed. She stilled to the point I worried she’d maybe phased through the floor or something and left me alone. But somehow I still felt her presence along with something sharp and alien I couldn’t identify.

“Nirali?” I whispered, cold unease settling on me like snow.

“Shh.” It was her, but so quiet I almost missed it. I felt the urgency behind it, though, and hushed to wait in the silence with her.

As the seconds ticked by a prickling dread crawled across the room. It started at the edges where the shadows were thickest and spread outward, tainting everything it touched including me. My pulse quickened as a primal paranoia sank in. I knew it was just Nirali and me, but it felt like a predator was stalking the shadows, searching for us, and it was only our silence that kept it from pouncing.

To keep the paranoia at bay, I focused on the warm red readout of the clock above my desk. The slowly changing numbers were soothing and hypnotic. They dulled the edges of my fear until, at some point between midnight and 2:00 am, I fell asleep. I only realized this when Nirali finally whispered my name, pulling me back to reality.

“Divya, wake up…”

“Hm?” I swam back to consciousness slowly, shaking off the half-formed discomfort of a dream I couldn’t remember.

“It’s gone now.”

“What’s gone?” I rubbed the sleep still clogging my vision and blinked at the clock above my desk. So late… had we really been laying on the floor for two hours?

Nirali didn’t answer. Not for a long time. Long enough that I thought maybe I’d dreamed her waking me up, entirely.

“The shadow behind the walls,” she whispered, cutting the silence away like cobwebs. There was a weight to her words I couldn’t describe that tickled the primal centers of my brain again; an ancient urge calling to me, telling me to hide.

“The… what?” I croaked, propping myself up on my elbows, but Nirali was gone. Not just quiet. There was a difference in the room when she left, and I could always sense it. Even if she didn’t say she was going.

A few minutes later she was at my bedroom door actually knocking. The sound startled me, giving my heart a sudden workout with a spike of adrenaline. I snuck over to the door to let her in, too keenly aware of the night around me and jumping at shadows I suddenly worried couldn’t be trusted. Without a word she slipped past me and crawled into bed, hiding beneath the covers with her knees against the wall and her back to me. I took my cue as it was offered and crawled in behind her, offering myself as protection against the night.

Sleep was slow in coming as my body flushed the survival instinct from its veins, but eventually it must have come as the next thing I knew the sun was peeking through the windows and Nirali was watching me sleep.

“Divya?” Nirali said my name like she was testing it, as if she didn’t expect to hear it again.

“Yeah?”

“Nothing,” she said, curling back under the covers before adding, “thanks.”

It was a week before she came to me through the walls again.

“I think it’s drawn to the language,” she said, pulling me out of a dream about superfluid.

“What is,” I yawned, oddly comfortable with the resumption of our nightly conversations.

“The shadow behind the walls.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. Something big. Something old. Older than time, maybe.”

“What’s with the Sana talk? ‘Older than time’?”

“I don’t know, Divya, that’s just what it feels like.”

She was always like this, caught somewhere between science and emotion, like the perfect cross between me and Sana. I think it allowed her to think abstractly enough to escape the box of The Known to innovate, while remaining linear enough to build a new box to house her innovations. But sometimes it meant she didn’t have the math to back it up. Sometimes it was just a feeling or the hint of a notion, but even then Nirali’s feelings were always spot on, even if it took science a few decades to prove it.

“Alright,” I said, accepting that answer.

It was odd, I realized then, how a few weeks of exposure to what my mind told me was factually impossible opened me to the flexibility of The Possible. I was surprised, too, when I noticed my first instinct wasn’t to challenge her or demand proof just because what she said was beyond my experience or immediate comprehension. Instead, I would nod and accept that what she said—what she experienced—was simply truth and the limitations of my understanding couldn’t change that.

“What does it want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it talks. But, I think it listens. And understands.”

“That’s… unsettling,” I said, shifting under the covers. The superstitious child in me made sure my feet were hidden in the center of the bed because the shadows still couldn’t be trusted.

She hummed her agreement. “It’s not the only thing here, though.”

A chill surged through me, prompting my heart into a panicked gallop. “What do you mean?”

“I mean there are other things. Big things. Old things. Most of them can’t see me, I think. I’m not really where they are, same as I’m not really where you are, but they can hear me, same as you.”

“Are you safe?”

Nirali was silent. My stomach churned, because I knew it meant something big, and old, and dangerous was near enough to pose a threat. After several minutes passed, she answered.

“Sometimes…”

“Only sometimes?” I sat up, staring at the spot on the floor where she would have been seated.

“Only sometimes.”

“Then why are we still doing this, Nirali?? I wouldn’t have agreed if I knew you were in danger!”

“I know,” she said quietly. “But there’s so much here. If I focus on a color I can experience everything that color has ever been and ever will be. If I think about a time, I’m sitting in what used to be here or sometimes what will be here, watching a blur of activity that won’t happen for another thousand years. I’ve seen cities you can’t even begin to imagine made of glittering bone and glass. Monolithic wonders to shame the gods. Last night I was standing in the center of a black hole. Not a hologram or a simulation, but an actual black hole. Captured, contained, reproduced, harnessed, I don’t know what, but it was here and so was I and through the black hole I saw so many other universes, all laid out like mirrors into infinity.”

“Nirali,” I whispered, both awed and terrified. Had she been experiencing these things every night? All the hours we talked about nothing and nonsense?

“But there are also bigger things,” she said, her voice dipping into darkness. “Things that hide in the glint of starlight on glass. Things that follow me back from the future and wait for me in the past. They skip like stones on water, only touching the surface for a minute and never with their whole selves. But even that much is too much. It hurts to look at them. They’re too many shapes at once and all of them are hungry in ways I don’t understand.”

Tears welled in my eyes as I listened to her. It hurt to accept these things as truth. I couldn’t understand them or touch them or even experience them myself, but I had to accept they were real, because my sister was invisible. She could pass through matter at will and spoke a universal language to me every night. But accepting all that also meant accepting that my sister spent every night compelled by her own curiosity to go back to this dangerous state again and again, only to be terrified by what waited In Between.

“I’m glad they can’t see me, but I don’t think that will be true much longer.”

“What? Why?”

“The shadow behind the walls has been in my room all week. I can feel it following me around. It’s listening now, but I don’t think it will come in your room again.”

“Nene! You have to stop this!”

“I can’t,” she said, her voice thick with imminent tears.

“Of course you can. Just come back and we’ll destroy whatever you’ve been using to shift. We can fix this.”

“No,” she said, the word wet and bent beneath an anguish no thirteen-year-old should have known. “You don’t understand.”

“What could possibly be worth the risk??”

My heart broke in the silence that stretched between us. An eternity of pain and longing swirled between us and one final fragile breath spoke of the tears she held back when she found her voice again.

“I can’t speak English anymore.”

I didn’t understand. Like the first time she described the math to me this statement defied understanding.

“What do you mean you can’t speak English anymore?”

“I mean I can’t speak anything but this stupid Between language, Divya. I tried and tried all week, but all that comes out now is this ugly mess of gurgles and scrapes and noises I don’t recognize and I’m so scared. I’m so scared, because they can still hear me when I’m out there with you and out there I’m not invisible. And you, and Sana, and mom and dad aren’t invisible. And none of us are safe when I’m out there. And the only time I can talk right is when I’m in here,” she sobbed. “When I’m here with you.”

My heart turned somersaults in my stomach. I let this happen. I should have stopped her the day she showed me her stupid science-shattering trick.

“Nene,” I whispered, and all I wanted to do was hold her until everything was right. “You have to come back. I don’t know what we’ll do to fix this, but you can’t stay there.”

“I know,” she said through a heavy veil of tears. “I just didn’t want to lose you. To lose us.”

“You still have me!”

“But I won’t out there! Not like this.”

I didn’t have a good answer for her. “We’ll find a way to fix it,” was all I could say, and we both knew it wasn’t enough. We also knew that it had to be, because we didn’t have a choice.

I felt her presence fade and a few minutes later there was a quiet knock at my door. Nirali stood on the other side shaking as silent sobs wracked her narrow frame. I gathered her up, shutting the door behind her, and together we curled around each other on the floor and cried. We cried until we passed out from exhaustion and woke up long after the sun had risen.

I woke to Nirali watching me again and blinked away the haze of tear-stained sleep.

“Nirali?”

She nodded, mute; a sadness hanging over her shoulders.

“Can you…?”

She shook her head.

“Nothing?”

She glanced up, looking over me and toward the hall as someone passed by. I could tell a million thoughts were flitting through her head in that moment, most of them conflicting, but after a minute or so a stony resolution had settled in her eyes and she scooted closer, waving for me to do the same.

Her mouth was almost against my ear when something unimaginably foul rattled from her lips.

A shudder of revulsion rocked through me at the sound of each mangled phoneme. I’ve never been so disgusted and terrified in my life. I could hear her voice, but it was dripping with caustic venom, dragging over hot coals, buried in the deepest ocean and clawing at the edges of sanity with angry talons. It was wrong. And to this day it was the most vile, viscerally upsetting experience of my life.

The words, this language, was never meant to be spoken by man. Science won’t support me, but I know in my bones these words have power man wasn’t meant to use.

And yet, despite my mind rebelling from the mere sound of her voice warped around these hideous words, I still knew what she’d meant as if she’d said it in English.

Don’t tell mom and dad.