Unworded

They came for his words first.

At 9:42 a.m., Mason Kornic’s inbox blinked with the red icon of death, Notice of Public Conduct Review. His most recent essay, “On the Nature of Honest Speech,” had gone viral overnight, and not in the celebratory way.

A few readers had found his phrasing exclusionary. One line, just one careless metaphor, had been clipped, replayed, and dissected by the Board of Public Discourse until its meaning no longer resembled anything Mason remembered writing.

He didn’t know which phrase had doomed him. They never told you.

By noon, his social accounts were gone. His bank locked him out “pending ethical review.” His employer, the Cultural Communications Office, issued a statement, “We condemn the insensitivity displayed by Mr. Kornic and have terminated his contract effective immediately.”

Within hours, his digital ID, a required credential to buy food, enter a transit hub, or access medical care, was suspended. The message glowed on his wristband in bright, clinical blue: COMM STATUS: UNWORD COMPLIANCE FAILURE. APPEAL UNAVAILABLE.

It was astonishing how fast silence became a sentence.

The streets outside his apartment hummed with the quiet obedience of the compliant. Every billboard and speaker recited the Daily Affirmations, words calibrated to include everyone, to offend no one, to express the correct empathy at the right volume.

Mason used to help write those slogans. Now he couldn’t even repeat them aloud; to do so without authorization risked further violation.

He walked past a news screen showing the faces of other offenders. Their mouths were blurred, names reduced to initials, and the voiceover calling them “examples of uncorrected harm.”

He wondered if his own face would be next.

That night, he tried to log into his archive of essays and years of work, only to find it scrubbed clean. Every file replaced with the same message: LANGUAGE REVOKED. CONTENT UNSAFE FOR RECONSUMPTION.

His words, deleted from the world.

Three days later, the knocks began. At first, polite. The Inclusion Auditors always started that way.

“We just want to help you reintegrate,” one said through the door. “We can teach you approved phrasing. You’ll only need to relearn the basics.”

He didn’t answer.

They came again the next morning and were less polite. Mason heard the metallic whir of scanning equipment, the sharp scent of sterilizing mist seeping under the door.

When he looked through the peephole, he saw three figures in silver-gray uniforms, faces expressionless behind mirrored visors. One held a device that pulsed with words, floating holographic text spinning in midair.

The words were pure, unoffensive, state-approved. They called this machine the Linguacleanser.

He ran. Down the alleyways, through the soft rain of ash and smog, Mason clutched a crumpled notebook, the last thing the machines couldn’t delete.

Real paper and ink. Mason had written his banned essay there first, before transferring it to the net.

As he stumbled into the shadows of the undercity, whispers found him. Other outcasts lived here, those stripped of language but not yet erased.

They communicated in half-signs, coded gestures, and fragments of old speech. They called themselves The Unworded.

Their leader, a woman with ink-stained hands and scars across her throat, watched him with wary eyes. “You still have your voice?” she rasped.

“For now,” he said.

“Then keep it hidden. They’ll come to take it soon.”

Life underground blurred into days of silence and night whispers. Mason learned to trade in relics of language, old pages, banned poetry, fragments of thought salvaged from the pre-regulation era. Words were contraband now, smuggled like drugs.

One evening, a boy brought him a torn pamphlet. On it, Mason recognized his own writing, the essay that had condemned him.

Someone had handwritten the forbidden words in shaky ink. Beneath it, a message: YOUR TRUTH OUTLIVED THEIR APPROVAL.

He felt something stir inside him, a dangerous hope.

That night, the sky cracked open with the hum of drones. Light poured into the tunnels.

The Linguacleanser descended, flooding the space with its sterile glow. The Unworded scattered, some caught mid-step, their voices stripped from their throats by sonic pulses that left them gasping and mute.

Mason ran until he reached a dead end, the wall humming with static. He pressed his notebook to his chest, feeling the heartbeat of language inside him, unregulated, imperfect, alive.

When the drones cornered him, he faced them with ink-stained fingers and said the forbidden line aloud, “Words are only dangerous when they mean something.”

The machines paused. The air vibrated.

Then came the sound, a low, electric hum, as they activated the cleansing pulse. Light swallowed him whole.

Weeks later, the city broadcast a new Affirmation, “We thank the Council for removing residual harm from public discourse. We celebrate harmony through compliant speech.”

No one spoke Mason Kornic’s name again, his existence absorbed into the silence of correctness. But in the corners of the undercity, on scraps of paper and walls of damp concrete, someone kept rewriting the forbidden lines.

Each time it appeared, the words seemed a little different, but the meaning remained the same.

And the city trembled, not from rebellion, but from the faint, unbearable sound of language refusing to die.