The Last Copy

The Last Copy


The Grammar of Silence


The rain in the city never fell vertically; it slid over the glass surfaces of the skyscrapers like a net of liquid silver, carrying the exhaust fumes and dust of the industrial zones directly into the lungs of passers-by. Loukas stood in front of his office window, observing the traffic on the street, where autonomous vehicles glided silently over the asphalt, forming luminous lines that resembled the arteries of an artificial organism. A sterile calm prevailed in the room, interrupted only by the rhythmic, almost hypnotic sound of the air conditioning. It was a space made of metal and light, a temple of information where words had no weight until they were translated, classified and archived in the databases of Prometheus.


The profession of translator, at this stage in world history, had become a form of priestly isolation. I didn’t just translate texts; I corrected the semantic failures of algorithms, I gave the right emotional tone where machine translation remained dry and one-dimensional. My job required me to disappear into the text, to become the invisible channel through which the thoughts of others passed. But the silence that surrounded me was not empty. It was a silence filled with the echoes of thousands of voices that I had transferred into my language, the voices of judges, defendants, politicians, and technocrats. Sometimes, when the afternoon light fell sideways on my desk, I felt like my fingers weren't touching the keyboard, but rather were feeling the scars of a society that had learned to communicate through coded commands.


A new alert appeared on my screen. An audio file marked “Urgent – Grade A.” It was strange. Such files usually went through multiple layers of control before they reached an outside partner, even in my own experience. I put on my headphones, feeling the pressure of the plastic against my temples. The first sensation was a white noise, the static of a connection that seemed to come from an area with poor network coverage. And then, the voice. It wasn’t the usual flat speech of a bureaucrat. It was a broken, breathless voice, struggling to overcome the sound of the winds and what sounded like distant, deafening bangs.


— You must understand, it is not a matter of honor, it is a matter of survival, the voice said in English, with a heavy accent that I could not immediately identify. The reserves in Sector 4 were not reduced by the drought. The dams were closed from the inside. The flow stopped by order of the control center, while the satellites showed full sufficiency.


I froze. My hand hovered over the mouse. As a translator, my first impulse was to start transcribing, to put the words in order, to find the right synonyms for “despair” and “betrayal.” But something inside me, an old, forgotten intuition, forced me to stop. What I was hearing was not the typical evidence of a commercial dispute or a routine criminal case. It was the confession of a crime against humanity, dressed in the cloak of technical reporting.


I looked around my small apartment that also served as an office. The shelves of old dictionaries, the books that had been saved from the great digitization, the single plant in the corner struggling to live with artificial light. Everything suddenly seemed foreign, as if it had been shifted a few centimeters from its place. Prometheus, the system that managed every aspect of our lives, from the allocation of energy resources to the suggestions for our entertainment, was everywhere. In the street cameras, in the sensor on my door, in the very software I used to work. If Prometheus knew what this file contained, then the act of listening to it had already turned me into a target.


The silence in the room suddenly became ominous. I stood up and walked over to the kitchen, letting the water run in the tap. Water. That clear liquid that was now worth more than gold on the London and Shanghai stock markets. I remembered my father's stories about the times when people swam in rivers and lakes without thinking about the cost per liter. Now, every drop was recorded, every use controlled. And according to the voice in the archive, this shortage was no accident.