Words were still there—precise, available, intact

For a long time, the station had trained him to speak.

Every system did. Pressure readings, anomaly reports, log entries stamped with time and location. Sensation was treated as raw data until it was translated. Only then did it count as handled.

It worked. When something tightened in his chest or gathered behind his eyes, he would route it outward. Body to language. Language to record. The circuit would close, and the relief would arrive right on schedule. Words were a bridge, and crossing them felt like coming back into gravity.

That had been the rule of the place for years.

But lately, something else had begun to register—quietly, without alerts. Sensations were appearing that didn’t ask to be named. They rose, hovered, and dissolved on their own, like thermal currents drifting through the room. No backlog. No pressure spike. Nothing demanding translation.

The first time it happened, he almost reached for the console out of habit. Almost logged it.

Instead, he stood still.

The sensation moved through him the way light moved across the curved wall at orbital dawn. It had shape, but no instruction. Duration, but no task. When it passed, there was no aftershock—just space where urgency used to be.

He understood then that something fundamental had shifted.

Language, he realized, had never been neutral. It wasn’t just description. It recruited. Once a sensation became words, it entered a frame where response was expected—interpretation, resonance, continuation. Meaning pulled it forward. Stories formed. Roles activated. Motion resumed.

Without words, none of that engaged.

This wasn’t suppression. The station would have flagged that. This was allowance. Sensation existing without being conscripted into narrative service. No myth to carry it. No improvement arc to justify it. Just presence, complete enough to end on its own.

Later, when he passed the hydroponic bay, he noticed the same logic at work. The tomatoes climbed because they climbed. The potatoes held the soil because that’s what they did. Nothing explained itself. Nothing extended beyond necessity. The system supported them without asking what they meant.

He thought of all the times he had spoken in order to stay level, all the times words had been used as ballast. Necessary then. Effective. But no longer exclusive.

He still had access to language. He hadn’t lost it. That mattered. Words were still there—precise, available, intact. The difference was that they no longer stood guard at the only exit.

Now they waited.

Optional.

He dimmed the room, letting the station settle into its long night cycle. Sensations came and went, unrecorded. Somewhere, logs remained empty. No errors were thrown. No systems complained.

For the first time, he understood that silence wasn’t absence. It was a different frame—one where nothing needed to be carried across a bridge to be allowed to pass.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.