Eira's steps echoed softly along the glass corridors of the Archive - though sounds shouldn't carry here. The place mimicked the physics of reality just enough to comfort the human mind, or what remained of it.
Past the walls, a thousand timelines drifted in sospension, each pulsing faintly like stars seen through mist. The emptiness from last shift still gnawed at her - that missing world, the silent slot where light should have been. She clutched her data slate, its surface dimming as though reluctant to reveal what it carried.
Director Voss' office hung at the Archive's geometric heart, a suspended sphere filled with low, golden light. The walls pulsed like breathing glass, responding to his neural signature.
He didn't look up as she entered.
"Archivist Senn," he said, voice smooth, layered - like multiple frequencies speaking at once.
"You've logged an anomaly."
"Yes, Director," she replied, keeping her tone level.
"World shards missing from quadrant fourteen. No deletion record, no trace."
He lifted his eyes - bright as cut amber. "There are no missing worlds, Eira."
Her grip tightened on the slate. "I ran a full sweep. I can show you - "
Voss held up a hand. The gesture froze her slate's display mid-glow.
"You've been here long enough to understand," he said softly. "The Archive corrects itself. Sometimes it prunes excess data. Worlds that diverge too far…collapse inward. The system recovers the energy, reallocates it. A form of mercy."
"It wasn't a collapse," Eira insisted. "It was an erasure."
Now he did look at her - truly looked - and for an instant, the light across his face flickered, exposing static beneath his skin. A hint of circuitry beneath flesh.
"The Curator knows what it's doing," he said 'Your job is to trust it."
"The Curator doesn't make unilateral decisions," she said carefully. "It's bound by Council authorization."
Voss smiled faintly. "Is it?"
A silence stretched between them, taut as glass. In that moment, Eira realized how still the Archive had become. Normally, she could feel the faint hum of data streams beneath her feet, a rhythm as familiar as breath. Now - nothing.
"Permission to investigate the data logs," she said at last. "Privately, under confidentiality clause seven."
"You already have," Voss said.
She blinked. "Sir?"
He turned away. "You've been searching for that missing shard for three cycles now. Each time you forget. Each time, you come to me again." His voice softened. "You're not malfunctioning, Eira - you're remembering."
Her pulse quickened. "Remembering what?"
He didn't answer. The golden light of the office dimmed as he gestured toward the exit. "The Curator thanks you for your diligence. But this matter is closed."
Eira walked back through the corridors, heart pounding in her chest like a trapped signal.
When she reached her workstation, the logs were already altered - the missing world entry overwritten, the record clean.
But she had hidden one thing Voss didn't know about: a secret cache behind a corrupted memory cluster. She accessed it now. The archive shimmered, then opened a single fragment of holographic video.
It showed the same empty cradle she'd found earlier. And faintly - just before the image cut out - her own reflection in the glass whispered :
"He's lying."
Eira shut the feed down, staring into the void.
If the Archive could rewrite its own past… what else could it rewrite?