Error 970: Word not found

I stood at the edge of the square, the air heavy with a blend of smoke, metal remnants, and a faint trace of decay. I counted the bags; a ritual I performed every day. In the far corner reserved for men, there were 23. In the women’s section, 48. As for the small children’s bags, they were piled together, fused into one another. My best guess was 67.

Counting had been easier when we still had shrouds, before they ran out long ago.

The funny thing was, I had thought the numbers would decrease over time after the enemy activated the Erasure Weapon M.M. 3.2. But they only kept rising. Why? Had they not erased the words and the meaning, leaving us stranded in another world?

Perhaps as their defense minister mockingly put it, their arsenal was nearing its expiration date, and they wanted to waste it on something "useful."

I hurried when the caller announced the communal funeral prayer, silently reciting the supplications I had reserved for him.

"Just search the library and believe in what I told you. You may save the entire country. That is my final will to you."

His words still drifted in and out of my mind, tethered to the memory of his martyrdom—how the thin thread of blood seeped swiftly from the deep hole in his skull, tracing the side of his face until it merged with his lips, which had paled and stiffened, returning to their former shade after a year of touching nothing but crumbs of bread and occasional drops of water.

I wondered if they had aimed for him deliberately, striking his head with precision. Their usual method was to hurl tons of explosives, letting them swallow bodies at random, sever limbs, and scatter them across the camp. Or they fire missiles, their bewitched shrapnel ravenously devouring our flesh and homes. But no one in the camp had ever been shot directly through the head before. This means they had known. They had uncovered something. They had learned what lay inside his mind, so they lodged a bullet deep within it to silence the plan fermenting in his brain. That reckless, impossible plan he had insisted on carrying out, despite every person in the camp opposing him, fighting him, nearly killing him had the others not intervened.

And yet, now they’re mourning him.

Perhaps because he reminded them of their own helplessness—of how they had let slip the frailest, yet most persistent, thread of hope. They had taken him as their silent guide, the one who revived their buried dreams, yet outwardly, they had argued, fumed, and lashed out at him in anger.

People clasped their hands together in grief, lamenting his loss. He had gathered us after every prayer, reciting to us a long list of words, the ones that had been erased by the M.M.3.2 weapon from both paper and digital books, wiped away from the minds of all humankind except for the two of us.

Only those who possessed a book that had survived this erasure could remember them, relentlessly reminding themselves so the words would not vanish. Every day, without fail, he would remind the people. And when he was absent, I took his place.

But today, I will not.

We finished the prayer, and I returned home. I lied to my mother, telling her I would go with the men to the burial. She did not argue, despite the danger of going there—she knew what my teacher meant to me—so she only urged me to be careful and return quickly. I lied again and nodded in agreement.

I slipped my will into my wardrobe, hidden between my clothes, so they would read it if I did not return—if they decided to gift me a bullet, just as they had done to my teacher.

I left the tent, intending to move quickly before the relentless bombing intensified. That was when she stopped me—abruptly, unlike her usual quiet demeanor.

"So, you've decided to follow him, then?"

I took refuge in silence. There was no point in trying to convince her, but I knew my silence would only strengthen her resolve.

"I'll tell you what I told him one last time: they've been developing this weapon for a long time—just as they’ve perfected firearms and technology."

"I know that."

"Things will never go back to how they were unless they decide so. Believe me, the words they erased from every language will never return, no matter how hard we try. They will only bring them back when they are done with us—when they are certain they have wiped us out. They used this weapon so the world would never know the truth."

"Get out of my way."

"You experienced it yourself. You were there with me. Don’t you remember how the news anchor reacted when you spoke? When you told him we were demanding a ceasefire, he asked you—What does that term even mean? Tell me, don’t you remember?"

I lowered my gaze, restlessly, kicking at the gravel beneath my feet, as if to show her that nothing she said could shake me.

"Are you done?"

Suddenly, she yanked a folded paper from her pocket, unfolding it before my face with sharp movements.

"Read this. Here are the words you’re searching for. Here is what comes up when you look for them in digital dictionaries online. Do you still not believe me?"

She tilted her head and pointed at the only sentence on the printed paper, its heavy, cold font glaring back at me:

"Error 970: Word Not Found."

"Thank you for the lovely conversation," I muttered.

She sighed, her voice quieter now.

"You won’t find anything. They aimed the weapon at his books before they killed him. His books will be empty."

"No. They will not."

I turned away, striding past her without another word.

"Turn back," she pleaded, her voice rising, laced with something dangerously close to tears.

"Please, believe me. You are chasing an illusion. Please, come back."

I walked, trying to empty my mind of logic so as not to be swayed. Yes, I remember this day—I remember it every day and try not to be dragged into the despair that nearly killed me back then. I was like an alien speaking to them. I shifted my speech from one language to another, yet the anchor and those with him remained just as bewildered, unable to grasp the words I was saying. They did not know the terms "war crimes," "occupation," "ethnic persecution," or any of the words I shouted, determined that they must exist in every dictionary and lexicon. The teacher was right when he said that the world had not abandoned us; the real reason was that these words had been erased. As long as a word does not exist, neither does its meaning. And when meaning vanishes, so do all the moral imperatives attached to it. If we erased the word "theft," would the concept of theft remain? Would the act still be considered immoral? Would any witness to a theft defend the victim and help him reclaim what was stolen? The reality I live in here says no.

They erased the words from everything—printed dictionaries, scholarly references, and, most crucially, digital lexicons. They invented this error code, making our country’s international dialing code the very same code that appears whenever someone searches for or types any of these words on any digital platform.

That is why I must go. These erased words must return to their rightful places in dictionaries and languages so that their meanings may return to human hearts and minds. And this will only happen if someone refuses to give up. That is what my teacher said. Despair is what will defeat us, not weapons.

I know my teacher’s books were wiped clean of their words. But they will return. They will regenerate in their empty spaces. They will return to those who do not give up. They will return to those who remind themselves of them every day, who remind others, enduring their mockery and contagious despair. The words will return to me. And when they do, the world will not remain silent as it is now. It will understand. It will awaken in shock at these horrors. Yes, it will.

I hurried away from the camp toward my old neighborhood. They say it’s dangerous to go there, but I know they lie. The place is deserted—no soldiers, no drones, no tanks. Nothing but remnants of decaying bodies. Half-buried skulls still peek out from the earth. Small, round, or oblong clumps—limbs caught in the blast, reduced to ash or fragments of charred belongings. Clothes, their colors faded, now blended with rubble—tiny, crumbling stones and larger chunks with veins of exposed steel.

I found the ruins of his house, marked by the rusted, empty water container. The best place to hide something is here, in the heart of nothingness. No fear of the scattered remains piled atop one another. I reached into the container and retrieved the bag I had hidden.

There they were, the keys to the main door, the library, and my teacher’s cabinet.

I don’t know why the air suddenly turned so cold. It was as if it, too, was trying to stop me. Our bodies had grown used to the cold—we lied to ourselves, pretending the flimsy fabric of our tents could shield us. We warmed ourselves with lies. But this cold was different. It seeped beyond the bones, into the depths of my being, devouring and freezing me from within. A cold that left no strength, that never ended.

I quickened my pace, carefully stepping over the remains strewn across the ground. A kilometer or more until I reached the school gates, the same distance I once ran with joy so I wouldn’t be late for my first language class.

How I loved words. How I savored reading the assigned stories over and over again. If there was such a thing as magic in this world, it was the magic of language—words that breathed life into the soul, quenching its thirst. A rhythm so harmonious it delighted the ears. A pure, gentle description that nestled into hearts and never left.

We were few, we lovers of literature. Some left, some were martyred, and I remained—a prisoner to this enchantment, casting its benevolent spells upon the young, hoping they would guard what we had failed to protect.

The gate loomed ahead. There stood the school—isolated in the midst of nothingness, broken and empty. Its nameplate had vanished, its flag reduced to a tattered rag, and blackness had overtaken its walls and fences, even in broad daylight.

I quickened my pace and stepped inside. The gate was open, as if the school were pleading for its students and visitors to return. The courtyard was thick with suffocating air, the ground cold and gray, veering toward black. But the source of that color was neither black nor gray—it was born from our own traces.

Back then, we didn’t believe those who warned that they would bomb our schools. We dismissed it, but with silent suspicion. We mocked the idea, yet uneasily. Then, the fear took shape. It arrived one morning—swift as a shadow—while they were all arguing, players and spectators alike, over whether a goal should count in a match played in the schoolyard. It came at over two thousand kilometers per hour, and that day, it took dozens of us at the same speed to another world, a world where they would never again argue over a goal.

Now, I had returned, carrying that same hidden fear. But this time, I knew—I was already dead anyway. That’s why I chose to die trying. This was how I wanted to leave this world—leaving while I still tried.

I walked toward the main building, unlocked the door, and stepped inside. The same cold that gripped me at the ruins returned, but stronger—violent gusts of air threatened to wrench me from my place. I fought against them, moving forward down the corridor. There, the library awaited.

I needed no light—I knew its shelves as well as I knew my own name. To my right was the librarian’s desk, behind it the rows of scientific books. Ahead of me stretched an open space with two large tables, each able to seat twenty readers. And beyond them, a vast wall lined with shelves of literature, art, travelogues, and illustrated stories.

I saw it all in the darkness, pulling from my memories blurry images that lent color to this bleakness, summoning echoes of our whispered readings and the soft scratch of pens on paper to break the cruel silence.

I turned to the librarian’s desk, sinking to my knees, my fingers searching for the small gap where the key would fit. Here—this was where my teacher had hidden the dictionaries, the ones that had escaped the enemy’s Erasure Weapon. Here lay the frailest thread connecting us to salvation—the proof of what happened and what is still happening.

My fingers trembled as they found the keyhole. I clenched the key in my hand and slowly inserted it, turning it until it let out a muffled groan.

I pulled the drawer open, my heart plunging into a chasm of doubt and fear.

What if the Erasure Weapon had reached these dictionaries too?

What if they were all right—what if there was no way for the world to hear of what had been done to us, no way for it to understand that we were the persecuted?

What if the world would never acknowledge us, never condemn what had been done to us, just as it had refused to for all these years?

I ran my fingers over the first book—an English-English dictionary. Slowly, I flipped the cover open, letting the dim glow of my small flashlight spill over its pages. I called upon God by all His names, praying that I would not find empty pages like in the other dictionaries. Just one word would be enough. Only one.

I turned the pages with my eyes shut, then opened them. The letter "G". A blank space where the word should be.

I stared at it, oblivious to the grave-cold chill that had clung to me since entering the district, the icy stillness of the dead. I focused my gaze on the void. This pristine white space tugs at the threads of my mind, burning them with the fuel of doubt. A bullet to the head would be a kinder fate than this. I clung to what he had said, to his unwavering hope and certainty. I summoned it all and sent it coursing through every cell in my body.

Suddenly, the white space wavered, and the faintest droplets of ink began to rain down upon it.

Blood surged through my veins, roaring in my ears like an imminent explosion. The ink thickened, forming the familiar contours of letters. I watched as the word was reborn upon the page.

Genocide.

There it is, followed by its unmistakable definition.

He was right. We only had to try.

I searched for another word. It was there, clear as day.

Occupation.

Driven by a gust of fear, I reached for dictionaries in other languages—French, Arabic, and more. The same blank space upon which a delicate drizzle of ink, emerging from nowhere, rained down, bringing the words to life. A harvest season I had long awaited. My hands flew over the pages, seeking every erased word that came to mind. My thoughts were in a frenzy, teetering on the edge of madness. Joy and fervor surged through me like a fever. My tears blurred the ink, nearly washing away the very words I had longed to see.

They are here. Real. Undeniable.

I turned to the geography section, searching for its name. And there it is, intact. Our country’s name. Our villages. Our cities.

We are not delusional, as the world believed. We are not the aggressors, as our enemy claimed. Here is the proof. This is our land, and we are its rightful people. And now, these words would bear witness to the world.

I would leave here and guard these books as if they were my own children. I had not yet met my teacher’s fate, so I would tread carefully. With every breath, I would remain vigilant. I would not rush as he had, but arm myself with patience and prudence.

I will protect these words from their weapon, and when I am safe, I will broadcast them to the world. I will fulfill my duty and my teacher’s last wish, he told me we would return to our land, and it would return to us. But it all depends on the world. Yes, the world. It will support us, won’t it? Why won’t it, when I have the proof? Will it understand these erased words? Will it grasp their meaning? Or will it ignore them, just as it does now? Of course, it will help us, because… because… I… No. No, that can't be. There are still humans out there in this world… aren’t there?

The End