Three months into her research, Dr. Amira Khoury stopped using past tense.
Her colleagues noticed it first in departmental meetings. Where she once said “the fragments revealed,” she began saying “the fragments reveal.” When asked about yesterday’s analysis, she’d respond as if it were happening now. Her final journal entry, dated three weeks before she disappeared, contains this line: “I dream without sequence. Events don’t follow each other anymore.”
The fragments she’d been studying came from a medieval monastery in Armenia. Forty-seven pieces of parchment, covered in symbols that don’t match any known script. What made them interesting wasn’t their age. It was their complete lack of causal structure.
Every language we know builds causality into its grammar. Verbs show when things happen. Conjunctions link cause to effect. Even the word order suggests that A leads to B. These fragments don’t.
Which raises an uncomfortable question… What happens to a mind that learns to think without cause and effect?
The idea of “cause and effect” simply means that one thing leads to another. I push a glass, it falls. I say something, you respond. Most of our thinking works this way.
The Grammar Problem
Dr. Sarah Chen, a linguist from Cambridge, spent six months trying to decode the fragments before Khoury took over. “It’s not that they’re in an unknown language,” Chen told us. “They’re using an unknown type of language.”
Normal scripts encode sequence. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. This happened, then that happened. Even languages that handle time differently still maintain some form of ordering. The Armenian fragments don’t.
Chen found symbols that seemed to represent relationships, but not time-based ones. “Imagine trying to write a sentence where nothing comes first or second,” she explained. “Where every element is somehow simultaneous with every other element.”
The closest parallel might be mathematical equations. 2 + 2 = 4 doesn’t unfold in time; it simply is. But mathematics isn’t meant for describing events in the world. These fragments were.
What Happened to Khoury
Khoury’s research notes show a gradual change. Early entries read normally: “Examined fragment 23 today. Symbol cluster suggests…” But by month two, her language began shifting: “Fragment 23 examination occurring. Symbol cluster suggesting…”
Her assistant, Marcus Webb, kept detailed records of their conversations. “She’d answer questions about things that hadn’t happened yet,” he said. “I’d ask about next week’s conference, and she’d talk about it like it had already occurred. But when next week came, everything happened exactly as she’d described.”
The most unsettling part? Her predictions were always accurate.
Webb documented 47 instances where Khoury described future events during their conversations. Laboratory accidents, funding decisions, even personal conversations between colleagues. She was right every time.
“It wasn’t like she was predicting,” Webb explained. “It was like she was remembering.”
Three Theories
Webb has his own explanation.
“She learned to think in their language. Whatever the Armenians discovered, it changed how her brain processed time. Maybe she didn’t disappear. Maybe she just moved to a part of time we can’t see.”
Chen is less charitable.
“Khoury was brilliant, but she was also under enormous pressure. The department was considering cutting her funding. Sometimes brilliant people break in brilliant ways.”
The university’s official position is that Dr. Khoury suffered a mental health crisis and left voluntarily. They’ve sealed her research and removed the fragments from public access.
But here’s what they can’t explain: how did she know what she knew?
Webb kept copies of everything, 17 specific predictions about events that occurred after her disappearance. Budget meetings, personnel changes, even a fire in the chemistry building. All described in her notes before they happened.
“If she was just having a breakdown,” Webb asks, “how did she remember the future?”
The Larger Question
The Armenian monastery was destroyed centuries ago, along with most of its records. What little we know comes from later chroniclers who called it “the place where monks learned to read tomorrow.”
Local legends speak of monastics who moved backwards through their days, who knew their deaths before their births. The fragments might be all that remains of whatever they discovered.
But assuming they’re genuine, they raise a profound question… is causality real, or just a habit of thought?
We naturally assume that A causes B because that’s how language teaches us to think. One thing, then another thing. This, then that. But languages are human constructions. They reflect how we see the world, not necessarily how the world actually works.
Quantum physicists already know that reality gets strange at the edges. Particles that affect each other instantly across vast distances (something Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”). Events without clear causes. Time that behaves differently than we expect.
Maybe the Armenian monks found a way to think about reality without imposing our causal assumptions on it. Perhaps they developed a language that reflected the world as it is, rather than as we need it to be.
The real question isn’t whether such a language could exist. It’s whether a human mind could learn it without losing itself entirely.
What Comes Next
The university won’t discuss the case. Chen has moved on to safer research. Webb left academia entirely. He now works in IT support and won’t talk about symbols anymore.
But Khoury’s final journal entry contains one more line, written in English below that cryptic symbol: “The words you’re reading now are ones I haven’t written yet. To speak outside sequence is to become the connection, not the connected. Time isn’t a line. It’s a field, and some minds can learn to navigate it.”
Below that, in what appears to be her handwriting: “Marcus will read this on Thursday.”
Webb found the journal on a Wednesday.
We’ve reached out to the Armenian Orthodox Church for comment on the monastery’s history. They haven’t responded. The British Museum, which briefly examined the fragments in 2019, will only say they’ve been “returned to their country of origin.”
As for the symbol Khoury drew on her whiteboard, it’s still there. The university tried to erase it three times, but it keeps reappearing. Security shows the room empty when it manifests.
Maybe some ideas, once released, can’t be contained. Maybe learning to think without causality creates effects that ripple backwards through time.
Or we’re just seeing patterns where none exist, because that’s what humans do when faced with things we can’t explain.
The truth is probably simpler than any of these theories. But simplicity doesn’t explain how Khoury knew what she knew, or where she went, or why her final symbol keeps rewriting itself on a clean whiteboard.
Some questions resist easy answers. This appears to be one of them.
Sources
Sources include: David Hume’s “Treatise of Human Nature” on the problem of causation and constant conjunction; Buddhist philosophical texts on Pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination); Alfred North Whitehead’s “Process and Reality” on process philosophy; linguistic relativity research including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and studies on Guugu Yimithirr spatial cognition; Bell’s theorem and experimental confirmations of quantum entanglement (Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 to Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger); Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on causation, quantum mechanics, and backward causation; studies on narrative comprehension and cognitive processing of causal sequences; research on altered states of consciousness and time perception; and historical records of Armenian monastic traditions.
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