Language is a virus from outer space.

Host: The moon hung low above the city, pale and deliberate, its light spilling over the rooftops like a whisper from another world. The streets below were near-empty — slick with rain, humming faintly with the pulse of neon and the forgotten hum of machines that never sleep. In a dim apartment on the twelfth floor, Jack sat before an old typewriter, its keys gleaming like teeth in the low light.

Host: Around him — piles of books, half-filled pages, cigarette ash balanced dangerously on the lip of a tray. The air was thick with the smell of ink and electricity, like the ghosts of ideas too wild to stay silent. Jeeny stood by the window, her silhouette sharp against the glow of a flickering billboard outside.

Host: A distant radio played the gravelly voice of William S. Burroughs, the words fractured and alive: “Language is a virus from outer space.”

Jeeny: (softly) “He said it like a prophecy, didn’t he?”

Jack: (without looking up) “He said it like an infection.”

Host: The typewriter clicked — one slow key, then silence. Jack leaned back, his eyes shadowed and distant, like a man who’d stared too long into his own thoughts.

Jeeny: “You think he meant it literally? That words are alien?”

Jack: “Not alien like UFOs. Alien like parasites. They invade the mind, replicate themselves, mutate through us.”

Jeeny: “You make it sound like we’re carriers.”

Jack: “We are. Every time we speak, we infect someone else with our meanings. Words are viruses — ideas hitching a ride through human mouths.”

Host: The light flickered. A moth fluttered against the bulb, desperate and blind, its wings tapping in arrhythmic Morse code.

Jeeny: “But viruses kill their hosts eventually.”

Jack: “Exactly. Look at history. Language builds empires and destroys them. It births revolutions, spreads propaganda, starts wars. Words don’t serve us — they use us to survive.”

Host: The rain outside thickened, a steady percussion of chaos. The window glass trembled, as though the sky itself was trying to speak in code.

Jeeny: “I don’t believe that. I think language is what makes us human. Without it, we’d just be noise.”

Jack: (smirking) “Noise is honest. Language isn’t.”

Jeeny: “Then what are you doing writing all this?” (gestures to the papers) “If words are parasites, why keep feeding them?”

Jack: “Because some infections are worth having.”

Host: His voice cracked just slightly — a subtle confession buried inside cynicism. Jeeny turned from the window, studying him. The city light danced across his face, outlining the exhaustion in his eyes — the look of a man both haunted and sustained by the same disease.

Jeeny: “Maybe it’s not the virus that’s the problem, Jack. Maybe it’s how we use it.”

Jack: “You can’t ‘use’ a virus. It uses you. Language shapes thought before you ever get to shape it back.”

Jeeny: “That’s not true. Poets reshape it every day. Activists, lovers, children — we twist words into things that heal. They don’t just destroy.”

Jack: (leaning forward) “And how many times do they heal without hurting first? Every ‘I love you’ is an infection of expectation. Every prayer carries the bacteria of doubt. Every manifesto becomes tyranny once it spreads far enough.”

Host: The clock on the wall ticked louder than the rain now — a slow, mechanical heartbeat marking the tension.

Jeeny: “You think everything ends in corruption.”

Jack: “Because everything spoken becomes misunderstood. Meaning mutates the moment it’s released. You say one thing — the world hears another. Words have their own agenda.”

Jeeny: “Then silence is your cure?”

Jack: (quietly) “Silence is extinction.”

Host: The lamp buzzed. The moth hit the bulb again, this time falling — landing dead beside the typewriter. Jack stared at it for a moment, then returned his gaze to the page.

Jeeny: “You know, Burroughs said something else too. He said control and language are the same thing — both spread through repetition. Maybe that’s the real danger — not that words exist, but that we stop questioning them.”

Jack: “And yet, here we are. Talking in the language we distrust. You can’t escape it. Even rebellion speaks its enemy’s tongue.”

Host: The rain softened to a whisper, the kind that feels like static on the skin. The room seemed suspended — neither day nor night, just a moment caught between expression and erasure.

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s why language feels alien — because it’s bigger than us. It’s the first thing we learn that doesn’t belong to us.”

Jack: “It colonizes the brain. Burroughs saw that. The words rewrite us. You think you’re thinking, but you’re really being written.”

Jeeny: “Then who’s the author?”

Jack: “No one. Just the virus — evolving, adapting, surviving through every mouth that opens.”

Host: A sudden flash of lightning illuminated the room — white and merciless — before vanishing again into the dark. Jack’s face was still for a long moment, his hands poised over the keys as if waiting for orders from something unseen.

Jeeny: “So what if we embrace it? If language is a virus, maybe it’s the one infection that gave us meaning. We speak, we connect, we change — maybe that’s how the universe talks to itself.”

Jack: (smiling faintly) “You sound like a romantic linguist.”

Jeeny: “No. I just think even viruses evolve toward life, not death. Maybe words do too.”

Host: The room fell into quiet again — the kind of quiet that follows revelation, not absence. The typewriter waited, its blank page pulsing under the faint light like a heartbeat.

Jack: (whispering) “Then maybe the only cure is creation.”

Jeeny: “Or maybe creation is just the virus teaching us to love it.”

Host: A small, knowing smile passed between them — two infected souls accepting their condition. Jack reached for the typewriter, pressed a key. Then another. The sound echoed, rhythmic, deliberate — the mechanical pulse of thought becoming flesh.

Host: Outside, the city lights flickered — Morse code across a thousand windows — as if the whole metropolis were speaking in some alien dialect of longing and noise.

Host: Jeeny watched him write, the clicking keys merging with the sound of rain, the faint hiss of neon, and the electric pulse of language itself — alive, mutating, unstoppable.

Host: And as the camera pulled back through the window, over the trembling skyline, the narration of the world continued — not in English, or French, or any human tongue — but in the universal syntax of infection and idea, forever replicating.

Host: For in the end, as Burroughs warned,
language was never our invention — it was our inheritance.
It came not from our minds,
but from somewhere colder, older,
and it will outlive us —
whispering through every voice that dares to speak.