Member-only story
The Machine That Listens to Silence
The Waiting Room
The chairs stood in rigid formation, lined against the wall like soldiers guarding silence. A mother sat in one, her son folded into the next. She had long stopped reading the posters about developmental milestones and speech therapy. Instead, she counted the faint cracks in the ceiling tiles, traced them like constellations.
Her boy rocked gently, eyes fixed on a rhythm she could not hear. His hands fluttered, shaping invisible birds in the air. Each movement was both familiar and unfathomable to her — expressions of an inner language she had not yet learned.
It had been eight months since she had asked for an assessment. Eight months of referrals, waitlists, and apologetic letters. The system moved slowly, and in that time her child had grown, changed, yet remained beyond the diagnostic grasp of the clinicians who meant well but were overwhelmed.
She watched the second hand crawl around the clinic clock. Somewhere below her, in the humming basement of the same hospital, a different kind of waiting was ending. A machine was being taught to listen — not to words, not to behavior, but to silence. To the quiet choreography of blood and oxygen in the brain. And in that silence, patterns were beginning to speak.
