The hum of the Archive never stopped. It lived in the walls, in the steel floor, even in Nero's bones. Most people said you stop noticing it after a few months, that it became unnoticeable noise. Nero never had. The sound made him feel as though the entire facility was breathing like a normal human, as the Archive was living.
He passed through the security gate, the security scanner flashing cold light across his eyes. The glass doors slid open, and the world inside swallowed him whole rows of humming servers, green, red and white indicators blinking like a thousand of tiny stars in the night sky. The air inside smelled faintly of solid and dustless metal.
This was the Archive: the city's most sacred system, a machine that kept record of everything. Every second of human history, every possible branch of time and space, stored somewhere in these endless racks. The thought still made him small.
He straightened the ID on his jacket—Nero Vale, Junior Archivist, Temporal Storage Division—and made his way to his assigned station. Routine was full of comfort. Cataloguing fragments of timelines wasn't glorious or enjoyable work, but it was quiet, predictable and safe.
He inspected in his access code. The screen filled with diagnostics: threads, stability values, timestamps and many more of complicated things. Everything read normal—except for one red light, pulsing faintly at the edge of the hall.
"Sector Nine?" he murmured. Neither he was tasked to check that area nor it was a day for maintenance there.
He walked toward the anomaly. Each step echoed down the corridor, loud enough to make him regret the silence. The rest of the room seemed to shrink away, until only that single red monitor existed in front of him.
"Run diagnostics," he commanded.
Nothing appeared or happened.
Suddenly the screen blinked once, twice, then poured symbols across its surface—numbers, letters, fragments of code twisting too fast to read with normal eye. Nero leaned closer, trying to catch even one pattern or code that could help him to know about the problem.
The flickering stopped.
A single word remained:
UNLIVED
Nero frowned. "That's… not a valid tag." He never saw a tag like that in his working life . He typed a query, but the system refused input.
More text appeared beneath it.
SUBJECT : NERO _VALE [ TYPE: CLASSIFIED]
His throat dried. The air around him felt heavier, charged. He wasn't dreaming. He hadn't seen anything like this in the Archive before. His name shouldn't exist in system memory; personal files were kept on a separate, sealed network. The Archive was supposed to record events, not people.
He tried again "Access override". Still nothing. His fingers trembled against the keys. He was confused, why was his name in the record in ARCHIVE.
The red light grew brighter, pulsing like a warning beacon. The hum of the Archive deepened until he could feel it under his skin. For a moment, he thought the floor started to move.
Then the image on the screen switched.
A face flickered on the screen —a boy, young maybe twelve, dark-haired, pale-eyed.His own eyes.
Nero froze. He couldn't breathe.
The boy tilted his head slightly, curious. The motion was slow, deliberate, like watching a recording out of sync. The boy leaned forward.
"Hello, Nero," a young voice said through the speakers—calm, detached, unmistakably real.
Nero stumbled back, catching his balance on the edge of a console. A sudden spark popped, and a panel fell down, narrowly missing his foot. His heart pounded like a drum.. "Who are you?"
"I'm the one who should have been you," the boy said. The words sent a chill down Nero's spine. "And you… you are in my way.
"You got the world. I got the Archive". The tone carried no anger, only a sense of hate.
The words hit harder than they should have. "That doesn't seems po....—"
"You're living my timeline," the boy said.
The screen went black.
The humming sound died with it.
Since Nero had started working in Archive, it was for the first time that the Archive was silent. The absence of sound felt wrong, like standing in the pause before an earthquake. He glared at the dark monitor, waiting for the noise to return, for anything to prove the world hadn't just folded around him.
A faint pulse began behind his eyes. Pressure built in his skull, electric, almost musical. A whisper surfaced at the back of his consciousness, not in any language that he knew and a word originated in his mind
Veyra.
He grabbed the edge of the console. The air rippled; lights dimmed and brightened as if the room took a breath. His heart beat out of rhythm with everything else. Then, as quickly as it began, it stopped.
The Archive hummed again—normal, mechanical, indifferent making its usual sound
The terminal he had been using was blacked out. No power. No log files. No trace of the conversation was left. He checked his hand; a thin cut traced his palm, already drying. He didn't remember touching anything sharp that could have hurt him.
He laughed under his breath, in a lower voice. "No one's going to believe this."
He turned to leave, but something appeared on the polished surface of a nearby server. A reflection—too small, too far away to be his own.
He looked closer.
A boy stood behind him in the mirrored panel, the same eyes, the same half-smile.
Nero turned around to check but the corridor was empty.
He stood motionless, listening. The archives hum (mechanical sound) returned, steady as ever, but now it carried something new—an uneven rise and fall, like breath caught between exhale and inhale.
He didn't realize he was backing away until his shoulder hit the wall.
The Archive was still working as usual.Only now, it sounded alive.
And in that moment, Nero knew his life won't remain same after what he saw.
Everything he thought and understood was about to change forever...