The Babel Phone: By Nathan Brown
My uncle sent me a letter a few weeks ago saying that he was inventing a device to talk to god. He said he was on the brink of a major breakthrough. Yesterday I recieved a letter that he had been admitted to St. Largo's assylum for the insane. I ran to visit him as soon as I could. I got there around 5 o'clock. He didn't look like the other patients, he seemed perfectly normal except he was speaking complete jibberish like some kind of unknown language. He appeared to be asking me something, pleading for help but I could not understand what he was saying. He tried writing what he meant down but that too was indesipherable. It seemed to be written in some unknown ancient alphabet.
I spoke with the doctors at St. Largo's and they said that he does not seem to be a danger to himself or others and that he could be released into the care of a relative, me being his only living relation. I decided that I would take care of him. As of next week I will be my uncles legal gaurdian and he will live with me.
My uncle came to my house and I showed him to his room. The whole time he was trying to tell me something but he seemed to have no way of communicating with me and didn't seem to understand what I was saying to him either. During the next few weeks he tried to communicate with me in many different ways. He tried writing things down but it was still completely in comprehensible. Finally he drew me a picture. He drew a picture of a well known religious symbol and next to it something that looked like a phonograph. It took me a while to figure out what it meant but immediately I knew my uncle was not insane. He had found a way to communicte through pictures.
I finally figured out what the picture meant, my uncle was trying to tell my something about his invention he was working on to communicate with god. I understood him but did not know how to communicate that I knew what he was trying to say. I finally drew him a picture in response. I was trying to ask him if that device had anything to do with his current state. I drew a picture of a phonograph next to a picture of St. Largo's logo. When I showed it to him he seemed ecstatic. In response to my drawing he drew a picture of what appeared to be a work bench. I knew immediately that what he meant was his workshop. He must want me to go to his workshop, we will leave to go there immediately.
We are now at his workshop and he is leading me to a device that looks similar to a phonograph yet in a way looks like so much more. He turns the device on and suddenly he is speaking normally, I can understand him perfectly. I ask him why he couldn't just speak before and he tells me he has been. The he tells me to speak into the horn of the phonograph device and tells me it will allow me to speak with god. I do so, I ask the questions all humans have been wondering for years and I get responses. The answers I recieve are unimaginable and amazing. As I finish up I thank my uncle for showing me this amazing device and we head out to discuss his device.
As we enter a nearby pub a notice people are staring at us strangely as we speak. One of the server seems to leave the room quickly and when we order a drink the barmaid just stairs at us blankly. some of the other patrons are staring at us now and talking but their conversations are complete jibberish. A few minutes pass and the server returns followed by a police officer. We ask the officer what is wrong and he runs over to us and immediately ties our hands up.
Now I sit in a room next to my uncle's at St. Largo's and neither of us has any way of communicating with the outside world. We can only speak with eachother in the dayroom during the long days at the assylum. We try drawing pictures to communicate with the staff but the staff just dismisses our drawings. With no relatives on the outside to help us I fear we may spend the rest of our lives in the living hell. I guess hell is our reward. Hell is what we get for messing with things that are meant to be beyond human comprehension.
