The city throbbed like a living circuit board; rivers of light through steel arteries, pulsing neon veins carrying coded current. Each tower was a terminal, each road a conduit, each man a memory node in the perpetual flow of memory transmission.
Kael Arden walked through it all as if he were impervious to its rhythm, his pace tranquil and mechanical, the rest of the world blurring before him in strobe-light blinding flashes. His mind was elsewhere, already classifying the hundreds of files he'd be sifting through before the day was done. Memory archiving was not glamorous work, but it was reliable; something that was unlike most careers in a world centered on making money on what one knew rather than on one's work.
His archive was tucked away in a neglected corner of the city's lower ward, a crumbling brick and rusty iron building that seemed a lot older than it was. Unlike the flashy vaults of corporate conglomerates, Kael's archive was charming or dilapidated, depending on your perspective. The individuals who visited here were generally in search of discretion, not display.
A thick scent of decades, aged servers hung in the air, along with the antiseptic smell of synaptic gel packs pressed hard against the walls. Holo screens pulsed in the darkness, each a bright rectangle of changing color. To the unprotected eye, they were no more than irrelevant flashes. To Kael, they were lives; condensed histories boiled down to patterns of changing information, delicate shards to be treated carefully.
His day was methodical. Every day, he calibrated his neural interface bands to sync the frequency harmonics to the city grid. He walked through the decryption modules, reloaded the checksum filters, then accessed the containment vault where memories were kept as if in rare books. And then he brewed his coffee; black, bitter, earthy. Without it, the day ran too smoothly to the next. Without it, there was no differentiation between the days.
The day had commenced no differently. Kael sat down in the chair, fastened the thin elastic band around his temples, and pedaled up the archive. Light descended across his desktop as files stacked up in even rows; names, dates, and transaction codes. He did not judge; he simply saved. Memories arrived in from the customers; purchased, sold, lost, or left. He labeled them, coded them, and filed them where they could be redeemed.
But he knew the truth: memories were not files. Memories were selves. Selling a piece of one wasn't selling a painting or a volume; it was releasing a piece of yourself into the world and hoping you wouldn't regret it. The market pretended it was a trade. Kael did understand.
When the first files began to trickle in, Kael leaned forward, his fingers on the haptic console. Blue flare; a Venice honeymoon. He confirmed it, erased the artifacts from it, and filed it. Then a string of gray static; a raised fight segment, maybe from an illegal match. He stripped the nose, grafted in sections, and filed it in cold storage. Another: a gentle drop of amber light, and children's laughter salvaged from a neural implant. He filed it carefully, aware how delicate it was in comparison to the others.
The hours passed in this way. He toiled alone save for the hum of cooling fans or the hiss of his coffee maker. The world beyond could be going up in flames, and Kael would not even be aware of it. That was his preference.
Until the anomaly emerged.
The file had been marked as a low-priority download from an unknown source. The batch had been marked as stolen by its external checksum, probably stolen from a black-market exchange. Kael would have processed it automatically, another ghost memory. But as soon as the file started to load, something locked his attention.
First it looked corrupted with its imagery spinning by in disorderly fashion. Fuzzy corridor, drips in the water, then abrupt static. But beneath the static, a beat which was neither visual not auditory. A repetitive pattern hidden in the programming.
Kael furrowed his brow and cinched his band. He probed the waveform, looking for forms he knew. He'd worked with enough anomalies; infinite loops that never ended, twisted stacks joined together. But that wasn't this. That wasn't noise. That was deliberate.
A sequence
The sequence repeated repeatedly at precise intervals, like it was done electronically.
Kael hit the console to seal the fragment. A series of digits appeared on the display: 14-22-7-9-3. And again. And again. A code disguised as memory corruption.
He sat back, his heart racing. Someone had hidden information in a memory file. That wasn't out of the ordinary because smugglers used to hide contraband information in memory shells. But it wasn't a smuggler's trick. This was older. Designed.
And the strange thing; when he looked at it closely, the pattern wasn't simply saved in the file. The pattern was recreating itself, overwriting sections of other data around it in order to rebuild itself. As if the memory wanted to be perceived.
Kael closed down the transfer queue. His fingers floated over the console. The right thing to do was the easy one: erase the file, sanitize the system, and be gone. He had. Far too many archivists lost their licenses, sometimes worse for messing with the wrong bits.
But something in the echo code irritated him, something like a voice planted at the back of his head.
Another layer he shattered. The design continued to evolve, reconfiguring itself in fresh arrangements. Letters emerged not on the page, but suggested, as by the silhouette of the shadow of the code structure itself. PROJECT OBLIVION.
Kael brist
The name elicited weak recognition, as if it were something in a forgotten dream he could not remember. He could not trace it; his own memory stopped and turned to obscurity. That upset him more than did the code. Keepers of archives cherished discrete recollection. For him to forget was to confirm either it had not existed there and he believed it might have or it had been erased.
He leaned back, breathing deeply. His archive seemed diminished and dark, as though unseen eyes had moved towards him.
For the remainder of the day, he worked by rote; indexing, cataloging, and clearing out. The anomaly hung at the periphery of his mind, throbbing like an itch he could not scratch. By night, Kael had copied the piece to a hidden drive, in spite of every fiber of his being urging him not to do so.
Out there in the evening, the city pulsed in neon light, but Kael didn't quite even notice that. He sat in his flat above the archive, walls shelved in stacks of old books; actual books, remnants of a day when memory kept no digital record. He sipped his coffee, eyeing the anomaly run its course again and again.
Each time, the pattern varied slightly, shifting as if it knew that it was noticed. PROJECT OBLIVION. The words were clearer, pushing against the interior of his head.
And then something unexpected did occur.
As he half-slept, his own memories divided. Flashback images to events he did not remember living through cold white rooms, the cold pressure of a neural band across his temples, voices in the dark. None were his memories. But they felt real.
He sat bolt-straight, his body glistening with sweat. His hands trembled as he gazed at the hidden drive. He knew the danger. Archivists who meddled in such matters disappeared—licenses revoked, archives seized, sometimes their own names removed.
But the hint in the code remained.
Not chance. Not a coincidence.
An echo without any follow-through. And for the first time in years, Kael's precisely regimented daily routine was disrupted. The solitary existence of an archivist was at an end, and something far darker had begun to replace it.
Curiosity.