Sound Bites

Sound Bites is a story about a precocious boy, Joseph, who grows up with a fascination for words. They pop up unannounced and unrequested in his head. He enrols in the faculty of Engineering but discovers the only thing he likes about it is Asa, a girl he meets in class one day. He decides to drop out and finds a job with her friend Jason who runs an acoustic engineering firm that specializes in improving the sound quality in buildings.
One of Joseph's first jobs is in a church he often attended with his mother when he was a child. There, he and Asa identify an unexpected acoustic anomaly coming from a stone wall right behind where he used to sit. Asa thinks it is a speech pattern and suggests they make a copy of it to show to her acoustics professor, Dr. Boot. He is puzzled but interested and agrees to investigate. Boot eventually thinks he has identified the content of the acoustic pattern, but despite his excitement with the results, he fails to tell Asa.
After his death in an accident there is no evidence of the solution in his papers so Asa and Joseph end up joining forces with Jason to continue the investigation. But Joseph begins to change after Boot's death and withdraws more and more from the other two and subsequently requires hospitalization and surgery. When he dies during the surgery, we discover that Asa and Jason are now unaware that a person named Joseph ever existed and we are left to reconsider Joseph's world and wonder, like them, if he ever did.