WPC Sheila Bromley had been about to say something but the phrase eluded her. She’d handed the laptop back to the young couple sitting on the bench. Neither of them had said thank you or made eye contact with her. “Anyway,” Shelia continued, “this is classed as robbery.” She gestured to the gang of louts who were sauntering towards the park gates,“and I can’t do anything unless you agree to press charges.”

Silence.

Sheila tried another approach .” There's a special school on Park Road. Those kids get bullied by these yobs on their way home. I’m the Community Officer, that’s why I was waiting here. Will you help me?”

"A unit of Lower Spectrum children from the school alerted Central Command to the problem . We are dealing with it.“ The young man replied

“I don’t understand,”Shelia said.

“We held an international online emergency meeting , we’ve decided to modify Homo-sapiens. The global countdown’s scheduled in forty eight hours." Said the young man."This is how evolution works,we're not doing anything wrong,” he added.

Okaay, these guys had to be from the adult sheltered housing project,Shelia thought. “So what were you going to do exactly?”

“We’ve hacked you.”

“Computers ?”

The girl spoke rapidly . “No, we’re field officers from respective combat units . We’ve re-engineered your linguistic-cognitive structures. We discovered Language-thought is four dimensional. Ling-Com determined a universal deep structure and self replicating pattern, so in this respect Language-Thought behaves like DNA but structurally it's remarkably similar to the Penrose Rhomb. It was the relationship between Arabic Ruba'i quatrains and fifteenth century Islamic tiling that helped us develop the approach. The rest was straightforward, like overwriting your biogrammer. Homo Sap's didn’t notice the transition, hence you are not aware of it . We can now linguistically reprogramme you to do, or believe whatever we want.”

The young man hugged his laptop and picked up the thread. “ I’m from Web-Com . We introduced the modified L-T structures onto strategic sites, like high volume pornography sites and and chat rooms. When it went viral standard human language-thought only took seventy eight hours to globally reconfigure. Isolated pockets remain but nothing significant.”


Engender trust, thought sheila, extending her hand. “Come on, I’ll walk you back home ”


“Constable we have already dealt with those yobs. You take it for-granted you are L-Ting in English right now because you comprehend. You are not,and would it surprise you to know this conversation actually took place five minutes ago and those louts never really walked away?

The young girl said something like “uraduck." For the second time Shelia felt like she was searching for an intangible word or phrase and she paused again in her train of thought.

In front of her eyes the couple vanished.

There was a loud quacking noise behind Shelia. When she spun around she saw the gang of bullying louts bobbing their heads out of the scummy pond water , their mouths open as if asking for bread.