Venom Snake's POV
I am back at the base. Me and Kaz are talking about my mission.
Kaz: One more thing - about the surgery that had been performed on the people in the "devil's house."
Venom Snake: Yeah?
Kaz: You said that their throats were cut open, with an acoustic tube pushed inside.
Venom Snake: Right. The tubes were hooked up to tape recorders, playing some kind of audio.
Kaz: Well, we picked up some of that audio through your radio transmissions and recorded it here. The Intel Team has been working on analyzing the communications log.
Venom Snake: What have they found?
Kaz: There's nothing tying the contents together. We've got... a report on three deaths in a car accident on the autoroute near Marseille, protests outside the Libyan embassy in London, a press conference with the former Prime Minister of Sweden, a four-month-old weather forecast for Balikpapan... and then commercials for appliances, cough syrup, and TV dinners. Assuming they're not all staged, they come off as recordings of your average public broadcasts.
Venom Snake: Public Broadcasts? Just radio and TV signals?
Kaz: Yes, and from all over the world. We're looking into whether they're genuine or not, just to be sure. What else... A speech that sounds like it was recorded out on the street, and people chatting about how this year's tomato crop did.
Venom Snake: And there's nothing they have in common?
Kaz: We're partway through the cryptanalysis. That includes checking all audio ranges, and running it backward and at different speeds. Then there's vocabulary breakdown for political suggestions, ideological common points... but I don't think it's going to get us anywhere.
Venom Snake: Where were the recordings made?
Kaz: There's nothing linking them from that angle either. Just like you reported, we've detected virtually every major language there is - French, German, Italian... Spanish, including South American accents. Then there's Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese...
Venom Snake: They're nothing if not thorough...
Kaz: Well, I don't know if they've got them all covered. Ignoring the ones that have gone extinct, supposedly over 5,000 languages exist today. Besides, English isn't one of the ones we picked up.
Venom Snake: Really? English?
Kaz: I know. Only 5% of the world's population is a native English speaker, but when you factor in those who've acquired it as a second language, nearly one-third of the people speak it. The world's dominant lingua franca. You've got to figure they had it somewhere among all the languages in that place.
Venom Snake: No English...
Kaz: Bear in mind we didn't hear everything that was played in that room. We couldn't isolate the more distant sounds due to static, and the, well, the "program" could have been set to change every day. In a nutshell, for reasons unknown, people in that room with a common medical condition were made to listen to recordings in languages from around the world. It's not clear how the growths on their chests fit into it. It could have been treatment for them, or maybe an experiment of some kind.
Venom Snake: I'm guessing one person knows.
Kaz: Yeah - Skull Face. He was there. The only thing we can say for sure is that he's involved.