My sister is a genius. When she was about thirteen she made this device that honestly still blows my mind. I’ve spent my entire life studying physics and I still don’t know what she did, or how, which is probably for the best considering how this all played out. I don’t know how she did it, but what I do know is in the summer of 2003 the laws governing matter and atomic mass didn’t seem to affect her anymore, she was invisible to the human eye, and she was speaking a universal language we’ve never been able to identify or reproduce.

Before I get into this, though, have you ever seen Firefly?

Allow me to quote:

I am very smart.

I went to the best medic-ed in Osiris, top 3% of my class; finished my internship in eight months. ‘Gifted’ is the term.

So when I tell you that my little sister makes me look like an idiot child, I want you to understand my full meaning.

This could have been written about me and my sisters. We come from a long line of gifted people. My father is a neurologist, my mother works for SpaceX, and my eldest sister is an artist whose work has been featured in galleries since she was twelve. I’m a full-time research associate of high energy density physics at a university I can’t name without risking my career. And, like Simon Tam from Firefly before me, I don’t tell you all of this to flaunt our intelligence or to make us look special. I tell you this so you can fully understand what I mean when I say Nirali made us *all

• look like idiot children.

The Day Physics Broke

In 2003 I was about to turn seventeen. My interests weren’t like most teen girls, so I won’t bore you with the details of what I found more entertaining than TV, books, or the mall, but more often than not I was occupied with personal research projects. The first time Nirali made herself invisible I was in the middle of a research rabbit hole. I was deep into some really heady academic articles when I heard Nirali pipe up behind me.

“They’re wrong, you know.”

I groaned inwardly. We’d had the knocking talk, but she was still so bad at respecting boundaries. “Nirali, what did we say about knocking?”

“Oh,” she said, and sounded genuinely surprised. “I didn’t think about the door.”

“What?” I frowned and spun my chair around to look at her.

My room was empty.

Wait, empty?

I looked around briefly before rubbing my eyes, wondering when I’d slept last and already writing the conversation off as an auditory hallucination. Shaking my head, I started to turn back to my computer when I heard her giggle.

“Alright, jerkhole. Where are you?”

“Right here,” she giggled, her voice coming from directly in front of me.

The

Science of Not Being There

“What the, how? Did you hide the speakers again?” I stood up, taking a moment to really look around the room. She’d pulled a prank like this before, hiding a complex set of speakers she’d modified to create a confluence of sound she could manipulate. It would sound like someone was anywhere in the room she specified. She’d even made it sound like she was moving around. It was really impressive, especially since she’d only been ten at the time.

This time, though, she’d either gotten much better at hiding the speakers or something else was going on.

She giggled again. “No speakers! Just me!”

“Okay, ‘Just Me’. But how?” I folded my arms, looking in the direction of her disembodied voice.

“That’s going to be hard to explain.”

That was Nirali for “you won’t get it”.

“Try me,” I said, because I’m stubborn.

She did, though, and I didn’t. I had the beginnings of a migraine chewing on my right eye by the time she was done. Almost none of it made sense. There was something about atomic frequencies, and post-dimensional drift, superliminal desynchronization, and something she’d dubbed the “Planck Supratemporal Parallel”. It was all way over my head.

“Okay,” I said, rubbing my temple as I tried to digest it all. “But how did you get here.”

“I walked.”

Infuriating.

“I mean, how did you get *in

• here?” I gestured widely to the door, which was closed, and the walls around us.

“Oh.” I could hear the shrug in her voice. “I just walked where the walls weren’t.”

I squinted at the spot I thought she was standing.

“You… what?”

She sighed. It was a special sigh. It was the kind of sigh that told you someone much smarter than you was put out at having to dumb something down enough for you to understand. An embarrassed heat flooded my cheeks. I knew she was smarter than me, smarter than all of us, but it still made me feel like I’d failed simple math in front of Neil DeGrasse Tyson and a puppy, and they were both disappointed.

“I walked where the walls weren’t. The walls aren’t everywhere, Divya. In fact, in most places, like… realities? The walls aren’t there at all. So I just walked in those places.”

I wanted to see the proofs of this statement, though I knew she wouldn’t have bothered writing them down except in scraps and incomplete snippets that only made sense to her. I also knew the proofs wouldn’t make any more sense than her original explanation. Even so, it bothered me that I only understood what she meant in the vaguest, most conceptual way. It wasn’t natural for me. That abstractness of thought warred with the linear way of my brain making actual understanding impossible and I hated it.

Sana would have understood. Her brain worked that way. But not mine.

A New

Kind of Language

I must have looked like I was struggling with it (and I was), because she continued on.

“Where I am, or technically when and how, everything is a Schrödinger’s puzzle of Is and Isn’t. All I have to do is observe the places where the state of something Isn’t and go there.”

This wasn’t helping. I mean, it was, I got the basic concept of what she was saying, but in terms of the practical application of physics it was a mess of meaningless sciencey buzz words. Nothing she said had any foundation in known science. She could have told me “I ate ice cream upside down and chanted ‘purple’ backwards thirty times and the wall turned to Jell-O, but only as long as I looked at it from a forty-five-degree angle,” and it would have been exactly as scientifically sound as what she’d actually said.

Yet she was the one who was invisible, so the limits of my understanding and science itself had no bearing on her corporeal existence.

“Do you still have a body? I mean, can you see you?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, her voice pitched higher in excitement. “I look like a hundred versions of me laid on top of each other. Looking at my hands and stuff is kinda trippy, but I’m here.”

Cool. I had no idea what to do with this information.

She started giggling again.

“What now?”

“I can’t believe you haven’t noticed yet.”

“Noticed what?” I couldn’t keep the flash of irritation out of my voice. It wasn’t easy to accept the premise that she’d managed to trick physics into letting her pass through matter while being imperceptible to the human eye, but I’d had just about all the *How Much Dumber Than Nirali Are You

• I could take for one day.

“What language am I speaking?”

I had to blink at that and think a moment. “It’s English, isn’t it?”

She giggled again.

“Say something,” I ordered in my most authoritative Big Sister voice.

“Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure…”

If I concentrated, I could tell the words I she was saying didn’t quite match what I was apparently translating in my head, but I couldn’t hear them for what they were. Except…

“Wait, is that the ‘lorem ipsum’ translation from De finibus bonorum et malorum?”

She giggled again. “Yep! Want me to try something in Hindi?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little stunned and more than a little curious. “Go for it.”

“May He in whose lap shines forth the Daughter of the mountain king, who carries the celestial stream on His head, on whose brow rests the crescent moon, whose throat holds poison and whose breast is support of a huge serpent, and who is adorned by the ashes on His body, may that chief of gods, the Lord of all, the Destroyer of the universe, the omnipresent Śhiva, the moon-like Śańkara, ever protect me.”

I frowned, torn between focusing on the words and trying to identify what she was quoting. I started mouthing some of the words as my mind ran back over them, and gawped a little as recognition settled in. “Did you just quote the Ramcharitmanas’ Ayodhyā Kāṇḍ invocation?”

Another giggle.

“But… how? That didn’t sound like Hindi at all!”

“Fascinating,” she said. “It didn’t feel like Hindi when I said it, but I was thinking the Hindi words. What did it sound like to you?”

“English, I guess. I mean, it didn’t *sound

• like anything, but I understood you in English.”

“That’s so cool. Can you actually hear something other than English?”

“Kinda. I mean, almost. If I try I can tell the sounds you’re making don’t match the meaning of the words I’m… not hearing, but understanding? But the meaning overrides everything else so I can’t actually identify individual sounds or phrases.”

“Do you think you could identify the physical linguistics if we went word by word? It may be the processing of complete phrases prevents the identification of individual phonemes.”

“Maybe,” I said, shrugging, still trapped in awe of this aspect of her discovery. “We could try it.”

Cataloging the Unknown

She had me run her through some general object identification to give me a chance to listen for the sounds she was making and how they differed from the words I knew, the words I was “hearing”, but I only ever caught the ghosts of divergent beginnings and ends.

She thought this was hilarious.

I thought it was magical.

She started making regular trips to my room in this state, usually after lights out or when our parents were at work. I didn’t blame her for sneaking. Sana wasn’t into the science stuff, and if our parents knew what we’d been up to we’d have been grounded for life, especially since Nirali had already been banned from experimental projects at home. (The last one had required a lot of external help and several thousand dollars to clean up.) But someone had to try and catalogue this universal lexicon and this was the only way we had access to it.

A Sudden Chill

One night, as we lay awake on the floor naming objects (we’d tried making individual sounds before, but without the intent of meaning behind them there was no divergence), Nirali froze. I couldn’t see her, of course, but something changed. She stilled to the point I worried she’d maybe phased through the floor or something and left me alone. But somehow I still felt her presence along with something sharp and alien I couldn’t identify.

“Nirali?” I whispered, cold unease settling on me like snow.

“Shh.” It was her, but so quiet I almost missed it. I felt the urgency behind it, though, and hushed to wait in the silence with her.

As the seconds ticked by a prickling dread crawled across the room. It started at the edges where the shadows were thickest and spread outward, tainting everything it touched including me. My pulse quickened as a primal paranoia sank in. I knew it was just Nirali and me, but it felt like a predator was stalking the shadows, searching for us, and it was only our silence that kept it from pouncing.

To keep the paranoia at bay, I focused on the warm red readout of the clock above my desk. The slowly changing numbers were soothing and hypnotic. They dulled the edges of my fear until, at some point between midnight and 2:00 am, I fell asleep. I only realized this when Nirali finally whispered my name, pulling me back to reality.

“Divya, wake up…”

“Hm?” I swam back to consciousness slowly, shaking off the half-formed discomfort of a dream I couldn’t remember.

“It’s gone now.”

“What’s gone?” I rubbed the sleep still clogging my vision and blinked at the clock above my desk. So late… had we really been laying on the floor for two hours?

Nirali didn’t answer. Not for a long time. Long enough that I thought she’d maybe phased out again. But this time, it was different. The air felt heavy, charged with a static that made my teeth ache. And then, slowly, deliberately, I heard it. Not English, not Hindi, not anything I could place. It was a series of clicks, whistles, and guttural sounds that made my skin crawl. It was the sound of the thing I’d felt in the room, the predator.

The Silence Since

“Nirali?” I whispered again, my voice trembling. “What was that?”

This time, she answered. But her voice wasn’t her own. It was a dry, rasping sound, like sand being dragged over stone. It was the language from before. And she was speaking it to me.

“It was… here. It listened. It took.”

My blood ran cold. “Took what? Nirali, what did it take?”

Her voice, that horrifying new voice, came again. “My… voice. My words. My… understanding.”

And then, silence. Not the charged, waiting silence from before, but an empty, final silence. I scrambled to my feet, calling her name, demanding to know what was happening. But there was no answer. The room was empty. The oppressive presence was gone. And so was Nirali’s voice, replaced by that alien, chilling sound.

That was the last time Nirali ever spoke. She can still communicate, in a way. She uses gestures, writes notes, her eyes convey a universe of emotion. But the words, the ability to speak and to use that universal language she discovered, that’s gone. She hasn't uttered a single coherent sound in her own voice since that night in

2003. We never figured out what Nirali actually did to herself, or what might have been listening in those shadows. The physics of it remains a mystery, a terrifying reminder that some doors, once opened, can never be closed, and some discoveries come with a price too high to pay.