Chapter 41: The Tower of Babel

Chapter 41:
The Tower of Babel

 

AFTER BRINGING the badly wounded Toji to the medical staff in Rogachevo on the southern side of the island, Hikari flew back to the battlefield. As she approached, she saw a tall, four-sided, pyramidal tower reaching up through the clouds that had collected above the battlefield. The four walls glistened like soap bubbles and met at a point at the very top.

“What is that?”

She descended below the clouds, where a confused battle raged.

The enemy had done the allies the favor of bunching together, but the Euro and Russian forces were failing to implement a cohesive strategy. The soldiers were scattered and moved without coordination.

What happened here?

Hikari pulled up the timetable and deployment map on the secondary display screen to try to get a read of the situation, but the text was garbled and unintelligible, and the map only showed a jumble of shapes.

Hikari wondered if some of her systems were malfunctioning. Steeling herself to be chewed out for temporarily abandoning the battlefield, she turned to her control plane for help.

“Heurtebise to Kommandobrücke, this is Hikari! Lieutenant Colonel Clausewitz, are you there?”

His familiar voice came over her hydrospeaker, but she couldn’t understand a word he said. Confused, she tested every kind of transmission coding through her Eva’s senses. She thought that maybe the language support system of the Eva’s onboard AI might have glitched out, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

No one on the island could talk to each other. The most they could do was attempt to convey their emotions through noise.

“No one understands each other’s language,” Hikari said to herself.

Judging from the state of her display screen, written words or symbols couldn’t communicate any thoughts, either. She had a feeling that even a basic diagram would have the same jumbled result. It was like everyone had forgotten any knowledge of language, in all forms, that they’d acquired over their lives.

Still in flight, Heurtebise suddenly listed off-balance, and Hikari quickly increased the power from her N2 reactors. She spread her senses into the Eva’s systems, where nonsense characters flooded the command line, continuously changing the settings.

“It’s even effecting the control system?”

The ability to communicate, whether through word, radio signal, or electrical impulse, had been drastically reduced.

The exact opposite of what was happening inside the tower was happening in the outside world.