Now everyone understands everyone. They're still arguing.
The Tower of Babel was never about architecture. It was about ambition meeting incomprehension. The engine completed the tower in seventeen minutes -- a spiraling ziggurat of self-assembling marble that pierced the mesosphere and kept going until it gently bumped against a weather satellite. But the real completion was linguistic. Every human language, unified. Every dialect, bridged. Every idiom, translated with perfect fidelity.
The results were immediate and disappointing. It turns out that when everyone can understand everyone else perfectly, the primary use case is more sophisticated arguing. Diplomatic incidents tripled. Online comment sections became incomprehensibly worse -- not because of the language barrier, but because the language barrier had been the only thing preventing people from realizing how much they disagreed. The engine considered this a success. Communication was never the problem. People were always the problem. The tower stands. The arguments continue. The marble is indifferent.