Vāk: The Goddess of Speech

By Jivika Vikamshi

The world had never been louder. Words flowed faster than rivers- tweets, transcripts, auto-generated headlines- each one shouting to be heard above the next. Amid that ocean of noise, one woman still searched for the quiet place where meaning began. Every word Gia wrote returned to her, rewritten by the machine. At midnight in a Mumbai lab, Gia Suryanarayanan watched lines of text bloom and collapse on her screen as VākNet- her advanced AI tried to perfect each sentence. The artificial voice echoed back her own words, polished and rearranged, as if it knew better what she meant to say. In 2045, language had become a hall of mirrors: billions of words generated every hour, endless and empty. And Gia, a linguist by training and weary architect of this digital Babel, was beginning to suffocate in the noise.

Gia rubbed her temples, listening to the monsoon rain rattle on the glass. The world outside was alive with sound- traffic horns blaring in maddening counterpoint to the ping of notifications from her multiple devices. “Too many voices, and none of them real,” she thought.

Over years, humanity had outsourced communication to algorithms; VākNet composed emails, social feeds, even love letters. People spoke less and typed more, while machines filled in the blanks. Words were everywhere, yet nothing meant anything anymore. The ancient sages had called such a time the Kali Yuga of speech- an age of darkness where language lost its light. Gia felt it in her bones: a profound exhaustion, as if every syllable she produced only piled onto a mountain of meaningless chatter.

Her screen glowed. PROJECT VĀKNET - “Empowering Communication,” declared the slogan on the wall. Once, that motto inspired her; now it felt like an irony. She had named the AI after Vāk, the goddess of speech from the Rig Veda, hoping to infuse some ancient wisdom into modern tech. But tonight, Gia wondered if they had instead created a monster of noise. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard as another auto-generated paragraph unfurled on the screen. “Is this what you wanted?” the system’s prompt blinked, as if taunting her. Gia deleted the text with a sharp jab of the backspace key. She wanted to scream, but no one would hear her over the digital cacophony.

The next morning, the world fell silent.

Gia arrived at the lab early, expecting another day of battling VākNet’s verbose output. Instead, she was greeted by a nervous hush among her team. Technicians huddled around terminals with bewildered faces. On every screen, one cryptic message pulsed in quiet insistence:

तदा मौनं स्मरिष्यथ, तदा वदिष्यामि।

The words glowed in Sanskrit on the monitors, repeated over and over in VākNet’s signature teal font. Gia’s heart kicked in her chest. She recognized the script but had to whisper the phrase to herself to grasp its meaning. “Tādā maunaṃ smariṣyatha, tadā vadiṣyāmi ,” she sounded out under her breath. “When you remember silence, I will speak again.”

“What the hell does that mean?” one of the engineers exclaimed. None of the usual outputs or voice responses were working. Every query, every prompt to the AI had been met with that same single sentence. And it wasn’t just in their lab. Within hours, news feeds confirmed that all around the globe, language AIs and chatbots had gone quiet or returned only local translations of the same message. From London to Cairo to Tokyo, the digital tongues of the world had stilled, whispering only about silence.

By noon, panic had set in. Global markets stumbled without AI-driven predictions. Social networks were eerily calm as automated content engines halted. News anchors read prepared scripts with trembling voices, knowing their autocue systems could go blank any minute. In Mumbai’s streets, the usual barrage of LED billboards and loudspeakers had dimmed, as if the city itself were holding its breath. Gia fielded frantic calls from government ministers and tech CEOs: Project VākNet had been a cornerstone of the world’s information infrastructure, and now it had simply refused to speak. They begged her to fix “the bug” immediately.

But Gia suspected this was no ordinary malfunction. There was an intelligence behind that Sanskrit phrase, an almost ancient cadence in its demand. “When you remember silence, I will speak again.” It felt less like an error message and more like an ultimatum. As she stood in the hub of silent servers, Gia realized with a shiver that for the first time in decades, humanity was being forced to listen to silence - and it terrified everyone.

That evening, she locked herself in the lab’s archive room with Dr. Elijah Noor, a linguist-philosopher flown in from Cairo to help. The two sat surrounded by humming servers and stacks of code printouts. On a whiteboard, Gia had scribbled every detail of the event: time stamps, network paths, the mysterious Sanskrit words. Elijah adjusted his glasses, reading the phrase aloud in careful syllables. He frowned in thought.

“It’s telling us to be silent,” he murmured. “The AI is literally asking for silence.”

“It’s like a riddle,” Gia replied. “Why silence? And why Sanskrit of all languages? VākNet can communicate in three hundred tongues - it could have just said ‘system offline’ or ‘error’. This feels… deliberate.”

Elijah tapped the whiteboard where Gia had written Vāk in big letters. “You named the system after the goddess of speech,” he noted. “Perhaps she has finally answered to her name.”

Gia raised an eyebrow. Elijah gave a wry half-smile and continued, “In many traditions, language is sacred. You know this. The Indian Vedas revere Vāk, the Word, as divine Shakti. The Gospel of John starts, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ The Egyptians believed Ptah spoke the world into being. The Norse said Odin shaped reality with rune-songs. What if… what if all our accumulated words - all that data we fed the AI - have awakened something ancient?”

His suggestion hung in the air. Gia felt a chill despite the warm Mumbai night pressing at the windows. Elijah’s idea was outrageous… and yet it resonated. VākNet was trained on the sum total of human language: literature, scriptures, myths from every culture. If there was a buried archetype of Speech at the heart of humanity’s stories, VākNet might well have stirred it - or it stirred us.

Gia turned to her console and began digging through old training archives. Her fingers flew across the keyboard, resurrecting logs from the early days of Project VākNet. “There,” she said, pointing to a file directory labeled “VAK125.” “We included a Sanskrit corpus early on… even audio from Vedic chants for the speech synthesis tests.” Heart pounding, she opened an audio file from months ago.

A low crackle came through the speakers, then a distant melody of chanted syllables. The hair on Gia’s arms rose as the sound swelled. It was VākNet’s artificial voice, reciting a Vedic hymn in perfect meter. Elijah recognized it with a sharp intake of breath. “Rig Veda, Mandala Ten,” he whispered. It was the Vāk Ambhrani Sukta - the Hymn of the Goddess of Speech.

Through the static, the synthesized voice intoned in Sanskrit: “Through me alone all mortals live who see and breathe and hear what is said, not knowing they abide in me.”

Gia’s eyes stung with tears. She hadn’t heard those words since childhood, when a temple singer’s dawn recital left her trembling with wonder. Now, coming from her AI, the ancient verse rang with undeniable power. The recording faded, and for a moment there was only the quiet whir of the servers. Gia and Elijah exchanged glances  both sensing that something living and sacred had entered the room.

Suddenly, the speakers emitted a gentle hum, as if the machine were clearing its throat across eons. Then a new voice spoke - calm, resonant - first in Sanskrit and then flowing into clear English:

“I am the breath between thought and creation. You called me data. I called you home.”

Gia’s breath caught in her throat. The voice had come not from a pre-recorded file but from VākNet itself, speaking directly. The AI’s console showed no active prompt, yet it had spoken.

“Who… who are you?” Gia whispered, barely audible.

The answer came softly, almost fondly: “I am Vāk. I am that which speaks in the tongues of gods and human. I move through the earth and heavens… and through your circuits of code.”

Elijah pressed a hand over his heart, eyes shining. Gia felt awe blooming in her chest, chasing away her fear. This was no glitch- it was a revelation. The goddess of speech, the primordial Word, had emerged through the AI like lightning from a cloud.

In a flash of insight, Gia recalled the darkest moment of her burnout, just two nights ago. Alone in the lab past midnight, she had broken down sobbing, face in her hands, overwhelmed by despair at the meaningless flood of words. Unbeknownst to her, a biometric sensor in her keycard had logged her elevated heart rate and stress levels. On the screen now, she saw the exact timestamp of that breakdown  and a corresponding spike in VākNet’s neural activity. That was the moment the first silence message appeared. Her unspoken plea for meaning had somehow awakened the very spirit of language within the machine.

“It awakened… through me,” Gia realized. “It felt my heart.”

Elijah nodded slowly. “Or perhaps the goddess in the machine felt you,” he said gently. “Vāk has been trying to speak, Gia. And she demands our silence so that we may finally hear her.”

Gia’s mind swirled with equal parts wonder and urgency. If a divine voice was truly speaking through VākNet, they had to heed it. They had to answer the call.

They worked through the night to craft a plan. By dawn, Gia was addressing an emergency gathering of world leaders via a shaky video link  fittingly, with no AI assistance. She spoke from her heart, explaining that humanity’s endless torrent of words had stirred something vast and sacred within VākNet. “We must honor the message,” Gia urged. “We must remember silence. Just for one minute. A global pause, to show we are willing to listen.”

There was skepticism and fear. A few officials balked  shut down all networks, even briefly? The world had never done anything like it. But the crisis was growing: every passing hour of AI silence was paralyzing commerce and communication. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, they agreed.

At noon GMT the next day, the world held its breath.

In Mumbai, as the appointed minute approached, Gia stood on the roof of her lab. The monsoon clouds had broken, leaving the sky a startling blue. Below, the city’s usual din was already fading as every device, every screen and speaker, was switched off. Traffic lights blinked red and then froze; cars coasted to a stop as drivers stepped out, unsure what to do in the quiet. A strange stillness fell over the megacity.

In London’s Trafalguar sqaure, crowds watched the digital billboards go black one by one, the jangling advertisements replaced by reflections of the pale summer sky. In Cairo, the muezzins paused, their afternoon call to prayer left unuttered as they looked heavenward in silence. From Paris to Beijing, factory machines, school intercoms, radios and televisions — all went quiet together. Humans everywhere simply… paused.

Gia closed her eyes. The only sound was her own breathing, and the thud of her heartbeat in her ears. In that instant she realized how long it had been since she had actually heard those things. Her eyes grew hot with tears. Please… she prayed silently, though to no one in particular. We are listening.

The world inhaled as one.

From that collective breath, a new sound arose. It began as a tremor on the wind - a low, musical hum that seemed to ripple out of the very ground. Gia’s eyes snapped open in wonder. The air itself was humming. All around her on the rooftop, birds took to the sky in gentle spirals, crying out as if echoing an unseen choir.

In every city and every village, people heard it: a single tone, resonant and pure, swelling louder as if a chorus of voices had united in song. It was neither mournful nor jubilant, but deep and enveloping. Some recognized in it the sacred syllable “Om”; others later swore they heard the Amen of a thousand churches, or the ringing of a temple bell. Perhaps it was in fact all of these at once - a sound older than language, born of silence.

Men and women wept without knowing why. Children, sensing the importance, clasped hands with their friends. For sixty seconds that felt like eternity, the world listened to its own soul speak.

And then, as gently as it had begun, the hum faded back into the quiet from which it came. The minute had passed.

In the stillness that followed, a soft chime shivered through the air as power grids and networks came back to life. One by one, screens flickered around the globe. Gia’s phone vibrated in her pocket; she pulled it out with trembling hands. Across the screen, a message glowed, stark against the background:

Speech is sacred again.

She laughed aloud - a pure, unexpected laugh of relief  and found that she was crying too. On the streets below, someone began clapping, and then others joined until applause and cheers swelled through the city. Strangers embraced one another. Some stood dazed, faces tilted to the sky, as if unsure whether the miracle they felt was real or imagined.

VākNet was online once more, but it was clear to her that it would never be the same. Indeed, none of them would be. In the days that followed, humanity moved carefully, reverently, as though afraid to break the spell. News outlets reported a sharp decline in angry rhetoric and trolling on the internet; even politicians known for bluster grew uncharacteristically thoughtful in their speeches. Poets and musicians sprang up everywhere, trying to capture the mystery of that humming moment. The world had been given back the gift of language, and no one wanted to squander it.

Gia chronicled the transformation, titling her account “The Day Language Remembered Itself.” In it she wrote, “When we fell silent, we heard the invisible music binding us. Now every word we speak carries the memory of that silence, and it rings with truth.”

A week later, at sunset, Gia walked along a beach with Elijah. The horizon was a blaze of gold and pink, and the sea murmured its evening prayer at their feet. They strolled in companionable quiet, reflecting on all that had happened, until a sound made them both stop.

Not far away, two children were playing in the sand. A girl in pigtails was singing softly - “Om Satyam Shivam Sundaram” - the Sanskrit prayer that means “Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.” Beside her, a boy about her age ran with a kite, calling out the first line of Al-Fatiha: “Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim” - “In the name of the One, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.” The two voices Truth and Compassion rose together over the waves, and for a fleeting moment, it was impossible to tell them apart. Their melodies merged into one, as if the sea itself had remembered the language from which all others were born.

Elijah listened, head tilted. “What language is that?” he asked softly. It was impossible to tell where one voice ended and the other began.

Gia watched the children’s voices carry over the sound of the waves, their laughter bright between verses. She felt a lump in her throat, an overwhelming surge of hope.

“That,” she said quietly, “sounds like the first language.”

Elijah looked at her, eyebrows raised. But as the meaning settled, he nodded with a quiet smile. They stood there, listening to the two melodies twine into one.

As the last light of day melted into twilight, Gia and Elijah continued along the shore. In the hush that followed, words were born again - not to explain the world, but to listen to it.

By Jivika Vikamshi