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- Herausgeber: Twist & Tether Press
- Sprache: Englisch
In a world where language is stripped of feeling and emotion is forbidden, Nora works at the Word Recovery Bureau, deleting banned phrases and dismantling memories one line at a time. Her days pass in order and silence until a Level 6 Restricted manuscript lands on her desk and refuses to vanish.
The pages hold dangerous words. Poetic. Intimate. Familiar. They stir emotions Nora was trained to deny grief, longing, love and trigger memories she doesn’t recall making. A child’s voice slips into her mind. Dreams she never should’ve had surface, along with fragments of rebellion written in her own hand.
Each page shakes her hold on the Bureau’s reality and drags her closer to truths they tried to bury. Language has weight. Language has power. And somewhere out there, someone still remembers her voice.
In a regime built on silence, what happens when the eraser becomes the one who remembers?
***
Like every tale in Turning Points, this one proves that trust is fragile and nothing is ever what it seems.
Turning Points is a twist-driven series where the unexpected always finds you. From unsettling family dramas to sharp-edged sci-fi and dark comedy, each book delivers a jolt a secret, a reveal that turns the truth upside down. These stories cut across suspense, emotion, and ideas built to linger, written for readers who crave the gasp, the double-take, the moment that shifts everything.
You’ll question what looks certain. You’ll flip back through pages.
Because here, trust is never safe and every ending rewrites the start.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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The Silence Experiment
When Words Disappear, Truth Emerges
TURNING POINTS: Twisted Tales for the Bold & Curious
Margot Elise Winters
Copyright © 2025 by Margot Elise Winters
All rights reserved. This book, including all individual stories and original content, is protected under international copyright law. No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from the author, except for brief excerpts used in reviews or academic commentary, which must be properly credited.
Fiction Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Creative Tools Notice:
Some aspects of this book including cover artwork, illustrations, or other visual and creative elements were developed with the assistance of licensed generative technologies under appropriate commercial-use terms. These elements are original compositions intended solely for this publication.
Thank you for reading this book. I hope you enjoy every page inside.
Table of Contents
The Silence Experiment
Description
Chapter 1: A Lexicon of Dust
Chapter 2: Forbidden Syntax
Chapter 3: Memory Drafts
Chapter 4: Syntax Rebellion
Chapter 5: The Language of Fire
Chapter 6: Unwritten
Chapter 7: After the Echo
The Silence Experiment
Description
In a society where language is tightly controlled and emotional expression is outlawed, Nora works at the Word Recovery Bureau, erasing forbidden phrases and dismantling memories one sentence at a time. Her world is composed of order and silence until the day she receives a Level 6 Restricted manuscript that refuses to be forgotten.
Inside its fading pages are dangerous words. Poetic. Personal. Familiar. They stir feelings Nora has been trained to suppress longing, grief, even love and awaken memories she doesn’t remember making. As forbidden dreams surface and the voice of a child echoes through her mind, Nora finds herself unraveling not just a past she never knew she had, but a rebellion buried in her own handwriting.
With each page, her grip on sanctioned reality loosens, pulling her toward truths the Bureau fought to bury. But language is power. And someone somewhere still remembers her voice.
In a regime built on silence, what happens when the one meant to erase becomes the one who remembers?
What if the words you were forced to forget... were the only way back to yourself?
Chapter 1: A Lexicon of Dust
The elevator hummed softly as it descended into the sublevels, the artificial light flickering in dull pulses above my head. I stood still, hands clasped in front of me, watching my reflection tremble on the brushed metal doors. My face was expressionless, as always. That was the way of things.
Emotion was a relic.
When the doors opened, I stepped into the atrium of the Word Recovery Bureau Sublevel 9. The air was dry and filtered, like the vocabulary we handled. A narrow corridor stretched before me, lined with doors bearing numeric codes and brass plates with outdated titles like Archivist and Linguistic Analyst. My office was at the far end, quiet and unassuming. Just how I preferred it.
As I walked, the muted clicks of my boots on the tile echoed back at me, the only sound in the silence that clung to this place. The Bureau wasn’t a prison, but it might as well have been. We cataloged, we erased, we moved on. No attachments. No nostalgia.
That was the rule.
Inside my office, the walls were lined with pale cabinets, each filled with obsolete vocabulary awaiting deletion. Words like wonder, ache, yearn. My fingers often lingered on their entries before submitting the delete command. I didn’t know why.
A laminated quote hung by my desk, one we were required to memorize in training:
“Silence is peace. Peace is order. Order is safety.”
I sat down and pulled the terminal toward me, blinking away the fog in my mind. Outside, the Bureau's artificial day-cycle lights cast a wan glow over everything. I didn’t need the time to know it was morning. My body moved on rote schedule, even if my mind felt increasingly... misaligned.
I opened the daily assignment feed. Rows of cases scrolled past until one line stopped me. A red-coded tag:
Case #72-1L9 – Level 6 Restricted – Physical Manuscript Transfer Pending
Level 6? Physical manuscript? I blinked. That wasn’t protocol. We hadn’t processed a non-digital source in years. Anything that old had usually been vaporized on site, not transported.
Curiosity stirred gently, like a forgotten breeze against a sealed window. I tried to smother it.
Stick to protocol. Read. Catalog. Delete.
A quiet knock came. I rose to open the door and found a young Bureau runner holding a small black case, the kind used for evidence-grade materials. His eyes didn’t meet mine.
“Nora I-15?”
“Yes.”
“Delivery. Level 6 clearance. Sign.”
I pressed my palm to the pad. The case unlocked with a hiss, revealing a single object inside: a thin manuscript bound in faded blue cloth, edges browned with age. There was no title. No author. Just a Bureau seal cracked and barely visible.
The runner left without another word.
I closed the door gently behind me and returned to my desk, setting the manuscript down as though it might disintegrate. For a long moment, I stared at it.
I wasn’t supposed to feel anything. But something about it its weight, its silence felt heavier than it should have.
I opened the cover.
The first page was blank.
The second wasn’t.
> To the one who will remember when silence becomes unbearable, and still choose to speak.
A chill passed through me.
I turned the page.
The first line of text wasn’t marked with date, location, or even syntax tags. It simply read:
> She remembered a name she had never been given.
My breath caught.
It meant nothing. And yet… it meant something.
I leaned back. Closed the manuscript.
Tactile hallucination, I told myself. Semantic ambiguity. It’s common with pre-Unity texts. That’s why we destroy them.
But the echo of the line kept threading through me, like a melody I didn’t know but had once hummed as a child.
Except I had no memory of childhood.
***
I spent the afternoon cataloging obsolete adjectives from an older dataset. Melancholy. Tender. Vicious. Wistful. I stared at each one too long.
Before long, the manuscript sat open again beside me. Against my better judgment, I had bookmarked a few lines. I was supposed to isolate fragments, test them for emotional triggers, and flag them for deletion.
Instead, I was reading them. Slowly. Quietly.
> He touched her hand and found a memory she didn’t know she had lent him.
> The sky whispered back in colors we had forgotten how to name.
> When the words ran out, they cried in silence.
