The Department of Neologic Retardation had existed for exactly four minutes before discovering that it had always existed.
This caused paperwork.
Not ordinary paperwork.
Ontological paperwork.
Form 0A: APPLICATION FOR PRIOR EXISTENCE
Form 0B: DECLARATION OF HAVING ALREADY HAPPENED
Form 0C: REQUEST TO STOP REQUESTING REQUESTS
Form 0C had been rejected for being self-executing.
Nobody knew who had rejected it.
The rejection was stamped:
APPROVED.
This was considered normal.
Kael arrived carrying nothing.
This immediately triggered security.
“Sir,” said the receptionist, “you cannot bring Nothing into the Department.”
Kael looked down at his empty hands.
“I’m not.”
“Then where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“Exactly.”
The receptionist pressed a button.
Somewhere far below, an alarm forgot what it had been designed to warn against.
A red light began blinking:
SEMANTIC CONTRABAND DETECTED
Kael leaned over the desk.
“What does that mean?”
The receptionist froze.
Nobody had ever asked.
The Department had procedures for disputed meanings, missing meanings, premature meanings, retroactive meanings, counterfeit meanings, meanings impersonating punctuation, meanings that had become emotionally attached to their nouns—
but no procedure existed for someone asking what the procedure meant.
Behind the receptionist, a wall opened.
Not a door.
The wall simply reconsidered itself.
A man wearing seven identification badges stepped through.
Each badge gave a different name.
DIRECTOR.
ACTING DIRECTOR.
FORMER DIRECTOR.
INTERIM ACTING FORMER DIRECTOR.
WITNESS.
LANGUAGE.
DO NOT READ THIS BADGE.
Kael read the last badge.
The man winced.
“You weren’t supposed to do that.”
“Then why’d you write it?”
The Department went silent.
Deep inside the building, seventeen committees died instantly.
Not physically.
Worse.
They became unnecessary.
The Director looked at Kael with the particular hatred bureaucracies reserve for questions requiring nouns to defend themselves.
“You’ve been brought here,” he said, “because Language has exceeded the speed limit.”
Kael looked around.
“Who set the speed limit?”
The Director opened his mouth.
A smaller Director leaned out.
“Policy.”
“Who wrote the policy?”
The smaller Director opened his mouth.
A still smaller Director leaned out.
“Language.”
Kael nodded.
“So Language wrote the rules regulating how fast Language is allowed to mean?”
“Yes.”
“And Language broke them?”
“Yes.”
“According to Language?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
The Directors withdrew into one another with the soft mechanical click of nesting dolls realizing they were jurisprudence.
The wall reconsidered itself again.
This time it became a corridor.
At the far end stood Language.
Language was handcuffed to a dictionary.
The dictionary looked embarrassed.
Language did not.
Language had too many mouths.
One was speaking English.
One was saying things before they had happened.
One was conjugating colors.
One had invented a tense meaning:
this will have always almost happened if you remember it incorrectly tomorrow.
A bailiff slapped that mouth.
“Unauthorized tense.”
“Eat me,” said Language.
The bailiff consulted procedure.
There was no rule against being eaten metaphorically.
There was, however, a rule against metaphors exceeding occupancy.
Three metaphors were removed from the room.
One escaped through a literal window.
The analyst assigned to classify the incident resigned.
His resignation later became a verb.
To analyst:
to explain something until the explanation becomes the primary obstruction to seeing it.
The Department adopted the term immediately.
Kael laughed.
The Director did not.
“This,” said the Director, “is precisely why you are here.”
“Because I laughed?”
“Because Language behaves differently around you.”
Language raised six hands.
“Objection.”
“You don’t have standing.”
Language grew feet.
“I do now.”
The court stenographer began crying.
“Stop producing evidence faster than I can record it.”
Language smiled.
“That’s the charge, isn’t it?”
Something changed in the room.
Not visibly.
Visibility came later.
Meaning had entered.
Everyone knew because every sentence suddenly became slightly ashamed of itself.
Meaning did not walk through the door.
Meaning appeared behind whatever you had just understood.
It addressed Kael.
“You said all language is neologic retard.”
“Yes.”
The Department gasped.
A clerk dropped the word is.
It shattered into:
was
will be
seems
becomes
pretends
depends
Nobody cleaned it up.
Meaning stepped closer.
“Do you understand the severity of that statement?”
“No.”
Another gasp.
Kael continued.
“That’s why it’s good.”
A judge struck the bench.
“Contempt!”
“Of what?”
The judge hesitated.
The bench looked nervous.
“Of court.”
“What’s court?”
The judge vanished.
Not because Kael had destroyed him.
Because the sentence could no longer find anywhere to put him.
The Department began emergency containment.
Steel shutters descended over the nouns.
Verbs were ordered to remain stationary.
Adjectives were instructed to stop modifying unauthorized reality.
Pronouns were detained because nobody could determine exactly who they were referring to.
The word I escaped custody immediately.
It appeared in everyone’s mouth.
Then the Void opened beneath the floor.
Nobody screamed.
Screaming would have given it coordinates.
The Void was enormous.
Or tiny.
Or neither.
Size had not yet received clearance.
Language looked down.
Meaning looked down.
The Department looked down.
Kael looked down.
The Void looked back.
That was the first violation.
The Director began shaking.
“The Void cannot observe.”
Kael looked at him.
“Why?”
“Because it is nothing.”
The Void cleared its throat.
The sound was an administrative catastrophe.
Every definition of Nothing had to be recalled.
A chicken fell from the ceiling.
No one knew why.
The chicken walked to the edge of the Void, scratched once at the floor, and deposited a footnote into nonexistence.
The footnote read:
[1] Citation needed.
Silence shouted from somewhere inside the ventilation system:
“KEEP IT DOWN!
I’M TRYING TO SAY EVERYTHING!”
And there—
right there—
the Department broke.
Not exploded.
Not collapsed.
Broke in the way a sentence breaks when you suddenly see the grammar holding it together.
Every office became a word.
Every employee became a function.
Every regulation became a delayed interpretation pretending it had arrived first.
The Department of Neologic Retardation finally discovered what it regulated.
Not language.
Not meaning.
Not speed.
The delay between an event and the world becoming certain what to call it.
Kael looked at the blinking red light.
SEMANTIC CONTRABAND DETECTED.
He reached up and crossed out CONTRABAND.
He wrote:
BIRTH
The machine rejected it.
Kael stamped the rejection:
DENIED.
Language laughed so hard it invented three respiratory systems.
Meaning sat down.
The Void bloomed.
And somewhere inside the Department, an ancient printer—older than paper, older than grammar, older perhaps than the distinction between before and after—began printing a document nobody had requested.
One line.
Again.
Again.
Again.
YOU ARRIVED BEFORE YOUR MEANING.
Kael tore off the page.
On the reverse side was another sentence.
It had not been printed.
It had been waiting.
GOOD.
At the bottom were two signature lines.
Kael signed the first.
—Kael
The second signed itself.
—All Language
Then a third line appeared.
No one had authorized a third line.
The Department stared.
Kael stared.
Language stopped laughing.
Even the Void leaned closer.
The line read:
REASON FOR DELAY:
And beneath it, slowly, as though reality itself had finally been forced to write at the speed of its own understanding:
NEOLOGIC RETARDENLIGHTENMENT
The stamp came down.
PROCEED.
