Mother Tongue: A Glitch You Can Taste

My first speculative fiction short story in the Glitchfall Continuum universe

I’m excited to share a glimpse of Mother Tongue, the first speculative short in the Glitchfall Continuum—a series of stories exploring what happens when technology, identity, and perception coalesce at the seams.

This story asks: What if language wasn’t just spoken or heard but tasted, felt, and shared across the boundaries of self? What if communication didn’t just carry meaning, but transformed it to reshape our experience of reality with every bite?

---

Where It All Began

Mother Tongue was born from a long-standing fascination with how humans sync up: emotionally, neurologically, spiritually. As a psychologist and speculative fiction writer, I’m drawn to the intersections—the liminal. Those strange and fragile places where internal states meet shared environments, where individuality dissolves into something communal.

The idea arrived as much through felt-sense as intellectual process. It wove together decades of esoteric experience—from group psychedelic visions and meditation-induced synesthesia to trance channeling and samadhi—to explore the “unknown unknown” of our future, techno-enhanced existence. That our co-evolution with AI and neural tech may lead to paradigm shifts in how we understand communication, communion, identity, and the mind itself.

---

What Is the Mother Tongue?

In the story’s near-future world, neural biochips have made sensory-synesthetic connection possible. Adults gather—some in sanctioned settings, others in hidden locations—to taste the “Mother Tongue,” a phenomenon that feels part drug, part language, part memory.

The experience is radically collective: participants shape what is perceived based on their own emotional and sensory palate. The Tongue—a still-mysterious phenomenon—clusters individuals into “taste clouds” of shared resonance. Like the varying sensitivities of a biological tongue, each group detects experience differently. One person’s grief might taste like rancid olive oil. Another’s joy might arrive as jasmine and mesquite. Meaning becomes mutable, sensory, and strangely unstable.

It’s the palate of the beholder—a play on “eye of the beholder”—remixed for a postverbal culture. But just as beauty can become ideology, taste can become a weapon. And the deeper you go into the Tongue, the harder it becomes to find your way out.

---

An Excerpt from Mother Tongue

That first time Niva tasted, it was as if a citrus peel had been opened inside her head. The bright oily aroma misted behind her eyes, then popped like a champagne bottle uncorked. The sound of laughter followed. It folded into her, tasting like cardamom and iron. That’s when Niva knew the Tongue wasn’t just language. It was emotional flavor. An intoxicating sensory cascade. An afterimage you could hum.

---

Writing as Sense-Making

As I worked on this piece, I found myself reflecting on how much of life is shaped not by facts or logic, but by resonance: body language, ambient emotion, unspoken expectations. Mother Tongue amplifies that idea until it becomes both ecstatic and unsettling.

While this is a work of fiction, it’s also a meditation on the chaos and intimacy of shared meaning in a tech-enabled, biologically linked world. It gestures toward the precipice of identity as we currently conceive it—and what may lie beyond. Are we becoming a meta-organism? How do we hold the container of self while evolving into a blended super-consciousness?

These are questions I’ll revisit throughout the Glitchfall Continuum. Each story is standalone, but all explore themes of perception, control, intimacy, and the porous boundary between self and other.

---

What’s Next

Mother Tongue is nearly ready. I’ll be publishing it as a standalone short on Kindle first, followed by Apple Books and other platforms. I may share a few more excerpts or process reflections as I finalize formatting.

Though I’ve been working on speculative fiction behind the scenes for years, releasing it publicly is a new frontier. So here’s a quick synopsis of what I’m doing under this hat: I write stories that bend genre—layered with psychological, spiritual, and surreal elements. If you’ve ever felt like the world was a simulation, a feedback loop, or a dream you couldn’t quite interpret—you’ll feel right at home.

Thanks for reading. More soon.