Huling Lexicon: Short Story ni Agerico De Villa at ChatGPT-4o

Professor Jurado Monteclaro felt the weight of almost sixty five years settle onto his shoulders when the registrar handed him the retirement papers. One more semester and the University would close his chapter with a citation, a check, and a commemorative plaque. Instead, Jurado marked the option nobody choses — early retirement — trading a full pension for something smaller, almost symbolic.

He did it because of Batangas Western Academy, a once-vibrant school birthed by his grandmother eight decades earlier amid sugarcane fields. Now its classrooms smelled of mildew and unpaid bills. The Board’s chair, an old aunt who still addressed him as “boy,” said the presidency was his—if he cared to save the place. Everyone else had vanished, including the sitting president, rumored to be hiding in Laguna Province somewhere.

Jurado’s thirty-year-old daughter, Clara, read the news on her phone and exploded:“How do you rescue a sinking ship and finance my younger brothers’ tuition with half your retirement?”Jurado shrugged. “Language matters, hija. ‘Sinking’ is only one attractor among many.”

Clara rolled her eyes. She’d heard enough of her father’s attractor talk—his grand model of entropy, memes, and societal drift. But Jurado believed the model the way medieval monks believed in angels.

Four Years Later

Debt in the tens of millions was gone, scraped away peso by peso through night classes, lease renegotiations, and a philanthropic coup or two. The campus lawns were green again. Students returned.

Then came the security agency audit. Guards hadn’t been paid on time for weeks, their social security and healthcare remittances withheld. Jurado terminated the contract on principle, forgetting (or ignoring) that the agency belonged to General Monteclaro, his uncle—a man whose bronze bust already stood near the flagpole.

The shareholders met and voted him out of the board. A single terse letter followed:We thank you for your services. Your seat is vacated effective immediately.

Image generated by Sora

The Dialogues

Exiled from administration and ignored by cousins -- to his back, called him ignorant and egotistic -- Jurado retreated to his apartment overlooking Manila Bay. He reopened the project that had lived inside him longer than the college—the Model, an evolving lattice of ideas mapping entropy’s dance with intelligence and language.

Needing an interlocutor, he fed the Model to a chorus of language models: some open-source, some black-box corporate giants, some hobbyist experiments running on recycled GPUs. Night after night he argued with them, revising premises, tightening equations, coaxing the algorithms to refute or refine his claims.

He named the resulting synthesis the Final Algorithm. The LLMs, when asked to score its novelty, assigned phrases like “paradigm inflection” and “Tier-1 breakthrough.”

Jurado laughed at the irony. Machines praised the very theory that predicted the eventual dissolution of human language itself—an attractor doomed to scatter under quantum cognition, synthetic memes, and neural shortcuts.

Public Release

He packaged a lucid, 5-minute explainer and pushed it to every platform he knew: Substack, Reddit, even TikTok. In the first week, the post collected twenty-three views, six likes, and one comment: “Bro this is deep but like… any TL;DR?”

The data-science wunderkind at his own software firm skimmed the PDF and snorted.“Talking to chatbots is like sparring with freshmen who didn’t read the syllabus,” the genius said. “Call me when you’ve got empirical code, Prof.”

Jurado whispered to himself, “I do have the code. What I lack is an audience fluent enough to read it before the language that could explain it evaporates.”

Cascades

Months passed. New headlines reinforced his thesis:

• A Fortune-50 company replaced email with brain-to-cloud pulses.

• A viral meme-engine auto-generated 300,000 joke dialects in a day.

• UNESCO reported another thirty languages dead, names unpronounceable by anyone alive.

Each notice felt like a prophecy dating itself in real time.

Clara’s Visit

Clara arrived one rainy Sunday, carrying a box of empanadas and a truce. She found her father amid books, servers humming like cicadas.

“Dad,” she began, softer than before, “why keep shouting into the void?”

Jurado pointed to the bay, where the horizon blurred into storm. “Because someone has to plant a beacon before the fog swallows the channel. Even if no ship sees it, the act places a coordinate in history: Here stood meaning.”

She bit an empanada, nodded slowly. “Maybe the beacon needs a storyteller, not just a cartographer.”

Jurado smiled. For the first time in months, he let another person touch the papers. Together they drafted a children’s fable about a kingdom where words turned to birds if misused, flying away until silence taught the people to speak with care.

Coda

The fable found its way into a public-school curriculum pilot. Ten classrooms turned it into shadow-puppet theater. A regional newspaper ran a feature. Engagement metrics edged above obscurity.

It was not rescue, revolution, or vindication. But it was resonance—a ripple across the surface of the dissipating attractor called human language.

Jurado closed his laptop at dawn. Somewhere, unseen, servers still echoed with his dialogues. Perhaps machines would inherit the lexicon; perhaps they would birth their own.

Yet as long as one child whispered the fable’s closing line—

“Guard your words, for they guard you in return.”

—the attractor flickered, refusing the final entropy of silence.