The World’s White Noise

french

Dr. J. placed the apple on his desk. It was a Granny Smith, bought from the morning market. He was about to bite into it when he noticed an irregularity in the green skin. Not a bruise, not a blemish. Something else.

A pattern. Minute, at first. A repetitive structure etched into the fruit’s epidermis, invisible to the naked eye yet perceptible to the touch, as if a microscopic hand had incised characters into the very cellulose. He brought a magnifying glass closer. The grooves formed signs. Not letters. Not numbers. An anterior script.

He bit into the apple. The taste did not come. Instead, a sensation of vertigo, a lateral displacement of consciousness. He saw—no, he read—within his own mouth, the fruit’s flesh decomposing into strata of meaning. Every molecule bore an inscription. The fructose whispered formulas. The malic acid declined chemical litanies. But it was not science. It was older. A grammar of which human equations were but a degraded echo.

He spat the fruit out. His hands were trembling.

In the clinic’s waiting room, Dr. J. observed his patients with a new attention. The woman sitting across from him said nothing, yet her body spoke. Not metaphorically. Literally. The folds of her skin were forming sentences in a language he did not know but was beginning to decipher. Her veins drew diagrams. Her hair fell in rhythmic sequences.

He closed his eyes. Mistake. Behind his closed lids, the patterns persisted, intensifying. They were not projected by his retina. They were already there, inscribed in the very blackness, waiting to be read.

Dr. J. understood then that the world was not becoming text. The world had always been text. Humanity had lived in the comfortable illusion of matter, color, and flavor, but these sensations were merely a veil—a crude translation for minds incapable of enduring the truth : everything, from the beginning, was language. A non-human language, a cosmic script predating all consciousness.

He sought silence in the old quarters, where the stones had remained untouched for centuries. He found a damp alleyway, touched the wall. The stone was cold. But beneath the cold, there was something else. A vibration. A semantic pulse. The mosses, the lichens, the fissures—all of it formed a text in the process of being drafted. The wall did not just exist : it was writing itself, in a tongue older than limestone.

He withdrew his hand as if burned. But it was too late. The contamination—no, the revelation—was irreversible. Once one had seen the cosmic script, it could not be unlearned.

In his apartment that night, Dr. J. sat before his mirror. His face returned his reflection, but that reflection bore, etched into the cornea, the capillaries, the very structure of the iris, signs he had never noticed. His body had always been a manuscript. He had never been its author, only its medium.

He took a notebook, attempted to write down what he saw. But the words he traced on the paper warped, arranging themselves into configurations he had not intended. The pen no longer obeyed. It completed sentences in a foreign syntax. He was writing, but it was not he who wrote. It was the writing that made use of him.

The White Noise, as he had named it in his notes—his last legible notes—was not a system failure. It was the background voice of the universe. A voice that had always spoken beneath the human clamor, waiting for the moment when someone would be mad enough, or lucid enough, to hear it.

Dr. J. did not close his eyes. He left them open, fixed upon the mirror, as his own face transformed into a page. He saw his skin cover itself in glyphs, his lips articulate impossible phonemes, his pupils dilate until they became wells of black ink.

He did not vanish. He was read to the very end. Absorbed into the cosmic library, shelved among the billions of other living texts that had, for a moment, believed themselves to be beings.

When his body was found three days later, it was intact. No trace of violence. However, upon his retina, the coroners noticed an anomaly : a series of micro-incisions forming a regular pattern. They photographed the phenomenon, archived it, and spoke of it no more.

But the photograph itself continued to speak.