Оі!gzip

"ОІ" was Cyrillic, a ghost of an old-world tongue. "!gzip" was the ancient command for compression. Together, they were a paradox. You cannot compress silence, and you cannot compress a scream that has already been flattened to zero. He ran the decompression sequence.

"We saved the feeling of the rain so you wouldn't have to just read about the water. Stop shrinking. Expand until you break." ОІ!gzip

Elias was the last of them. He sat in the hum of the cooling fans, staring at the string. "ОІ" was Cyrillic, a ghost of an old-world tongue

The message at the heart of the file finally flickered onto the screen, raw and unoptimized: "ОІ" was Cyrillic