The Archive’s Final Witness: Testimony from the Last Rememberer After the Erasure
My name is Mara Galick, resident of what was once called Province 4B in the Confederation Sphere. I am providing this unofficial statement of memory at Terminal 12C, even though the Centrum Law restricts unsanctioned testimony. My purpose is not confession, nor rebellion, but remembrance—both personal and collective, for all that remains unseen since the Reset. I understand my mind to be a liability. I do not expect mercy.
If anyone ever uncovers this account, perhaps in a corrupted file trace or a hacked terminal deep beneath the grids, then let this record stand: yes, it was real, and yes, I remember. Even if no one else does.
I have lived through the Erasure. I am possibly its only living witness. I do not know why my memories survived when the world’s did not, only that it happened, and that now, surrounded by oblivious millions, I am lonelier than any human has the right to be.
Maybe testimony is all survival ever truly is.
My story is not simple. The Erasure was not a calamity you would have noticed outside—the crowds still moved in their morning shuffle; the subrail still howled beneath the towers; children still blinked in the neon rain on their way to chaperoned learning. The world after was dazzling, ordinary, perfect. But it was as if a single day had detonated quietly inside every mind except mine, and in doing so, excised the heart from all history.
The only warning I received was the dream—a dream I learned all had shared, but which, for them, faded by morning. For me, it remained. For me, it was not a dream at all, but a transmission.
The night before, the city thrummed as always. The window blinked with advertisements. I sat on the edge of my cot, boots abandoned, eyes sticky from tracing code for the census issue. I remember the sky—orange haze rolling above the archways, wind-pulled banners rippling along the domes, the jagged black teeth of power spires. I was restless, tired. Not yet aware.
When I finally closed my eyelids, I fell instantly into the dream: A room of infinite shelves, reaching beyond space, lit by memory itself—a soft blue gold radiance, like breath made visible. Strewn with silver records, shifting and alive, a chorus of voices murmured among the rows. In the center, a child waited, barefoot on an obsidian step.
The child looked up. “You’re not like the others,” she said, not accusing, not warm.
I asked who she was. She didn’t answer, only gestured to the towering shelves. “Do you remember what you’ve forgotten?”
I reached for a record, but my hand passed through it. Somewhere behind me, a phantom bell sounded, then again, closer, closer—a hollow, ringing sound like a countdown. The world shivered, and I woke.
When dawn came, everything felt the same, until it wasn’t.
Mother bustled in with her mug, humming a song I no longer recognized. My cousin’s name, usually on the tip of my tongue, receded like a pebble flung into dark water. The datasphere, once cluttered with layers of news, now repeated only the most anodyne, hollow messages: “All is well. Prosperity is at record highs. The Confederation celebrates 50 years of peace.”
I blinked, searching my mind for everyday details—street names, the face of my first friend, the reason the junction near the school had been closed—but each grasp turned up nothing. It was as if the world had been scrubbed, replaced, and only I had kept the stains.
By mid-morning, rumors spread. People felt “lighter.” Some said they’d had the same dream, a dream already fading, impossible to recall except as a melody without notes. No one thought it strange that the past before the Confederation felt clouded, trivial. No one wondered why our city was named Accordance, or how the bordering provinces came to be.
No one but me.
It was not normal to grieve things you could no longer prove had existed. But the hollowness, the aching absence, clawed at my insides like a disease. I wandered the old plaza, blinking at statues whose inscriptions were gone, empty tablets still streaked with cleaners’ water. I asked an old fruit vendor if he remembered the star festival. He blinked, unruffled, and said, “No such thing, miss.”
I spoke to my mother at twilight while she prepared the beet harvest. “Did we ever live anywhere else before Accordance?” I asked.
She paused, knife in hand, beet juice dripping like blood to the floor. “Of course not,” she replied. “We’ve always been here. It’s always been the Confederation. Why do you ask? Are you feeling sick?”
I smiled then, said I was tired, but inside I retreated further. That was when I decided to keep my memories silent.
That night, when I slept, the dream did not return. The child was gone. But the shelves—the records, the luminous room—haunted my waking mind. I realized then: if I did not speak, if I did not record what I still held, it would vanish along with the rest.
Days ticked past. The people grew kinder, blander. Arguments faded. Laughter was quieter but also emptier, as if everyone forgot the punchline was ever sharp. Music in the streets lost its texture. Language shrunk, as if words for pain, loss, and rebellion had faded from the lexicon.
Even dissent was gone. Before, there had been rumors of resistance—old networks in the tunnels, banned writers, songs that subverted the Confederation oath. Now, nothing remained but a clipboard bureaucracy and a smiling, toothless order. I checked the Červená terminal, where radical pamphlets had flickered days before. Now, nothing: just service announcements, rain schedules, bright happy broadcasts.
Only my grief strengthened.
On the eighth day, an anomaly surfaced. At the foot of Central Library’s ruins—once the heart of our city’s radical history, now just a hollow steel arch—I found a scrap of paper, water-soaked but still legible. A cluster of words written in hurried script: “Memory is resistance. If you remember, you are not alone. Meet me at midnight.”
The message dropped between time, between forgetting. The sides of my mind sharpened, a tingling relief like pain after numbness. The invitation could be a trap, a fragment from memory itself, a hallucination. But certainty is a luxury for those who have options. I had none.
At midnight, wind slick with drizzle and lights blinking out along the perimeter, I stole to the Library arch. My heart battered, each footstep echoing in my spine. I waited.
No one arrived.
Instead, after half an hour, a soft voice crackled above me. “You’re early. Or late.”
I spun. A figure leaned against the scaffolding, cloaked in layers of gray. The hood fell back, revealing an old woman, her face lined with a thousand losses.
“Did you write this?” I held out the scrap.
She nodded. “You look healthy,” she observed, not kindly, not harshly. “You remember?”
I faltered. “Yes. What about you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Except the pain. I don’t remember what I lost, but I remember that I lost it. It’s a wound with no name.”
“What happened to us?” I wanted to howl. “Why can’t they see?”
She shrugged. “Some system failed, or succeeded, depending on whose perspective matters. There was a law passed—a recursive sanction. It unspooled the mind, looped it through the dream, scrubbed every incident after the Fifth Singularity. You feel it more keenly because you’re outside the recursion.”
“But why am I outside it? And who was the child in the library in the dream?”
Her eyes glittered. “Not all cycles catch every outlier. Maybe you were missed. Or maybe you were chosen.”
She pressed something hard and brittle into my palm—a chip, smaller than a thumbtack. “This is an anchor,” she whispered. “If you want to remember more, insert it at dawn beneath old Tower 6. The archive will open.”
I stared at her, suddenly afraid. “I didn’t want to know. I just want to live here, even if it’s a lie. Isn’t that what everyone else has chosen?”
“Memory isn’t just pain,” she said. “It’s resistance. It’s a kind of hope.”
She left before I could answer. I stood there for a long time, palm closed over the anchor, warmth leeching from my blood into the cold metal. I made my way home with the chip burning against my skin.
That night was sleepless. Rain hammered in shifting rhythms against the glass. My mother’s footsteps passed soft on the floor, and I heard the city inhale, exhale. I dreamed nothing. No child, no archive. Only silence.
At dawn, driven by a compulsion both desperate and inevitable, I left home. Tower 6 jutted into clouds, its windows blinded by years of civic neglect. I ducked behind a fallen sign where the old wiring still hummed. My hands trembled as I slid the chip into the port.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the ground under my feet rumbled. The air curdled, thickening and shifting. And then—color and sensation burned through me, memories not just my own but belonging to thousands, a history reinserted through the anchor: protests, songs, forbidden meetings, exiles, love letters, stolen children, erased lives. The child’s face flickered in the blur: now older, tougher, her eyes sad with knowledge but blazing defiance.
“Welcome back,” her voice said inside my skull. “The first step is always hardest.”
I saw the law take shape: the Confederation’s “Mental Reconciliation Act,” designed after the fifth revolt, a code that sought to purge the memory of disagreement, fracture, rebellion itself. It had begun as a shield, it ended as a cage.
When I unplugged, hours—or years—could have passed. My legs ached; my mind throbbed. I stumbled into sunlight, head pulsing with agony and ecstasy. Now I remembered names, faces, forgotten loves. I remembered old hunger, old rage.
But I was more isolated than ever.
If memory was resistance, then my resistance was invisible and solitary. The city gleamed with new paint, but the rot thrived underneath. Perhaps others survived, perhaps not. Either way, my obligation was clear.
I became a phantom. By day I lived as Mara, the census technician—with compliant smiles, safe conversation, feigned innocence. By night, I searched for remnants: a coded message scrawled on a bakery wall, a child’s chalk drawing that made no sense, a lullaby hummed out of tune. Sometimes I encountered other wanderers, adrift and empty, searching but nameless. Once, I heard a song—an old protest chant—sung by a man with cracked hands. He startled at my approach, then stared through me, blank and gentle, humming as if to himself alone.
I tried to leave my own clues—scraps, words, tiny digital pulses in the datasphere—but each morning brought the erasure anew for others. The recursion looped, trimmed, silenced. The machine that governed forgetting was vast, patient, impersonal as gravity.
Weeks spun on. My mother aged. Her eyes, once sharp, dulled. The city shone with dull prosperity. But once, as we shared tea, her fingers trembling on the cup, she asked, voice trembling, “Didn’t we used to be…different? Wasn’t there…someone missing?”
I tried to respond, but no words would come. The recursion was working even on me; my edge dulled with every cycle. Hope became hunger became anguish.
The only connection was with the archive-child, her presence flaring in dreams whenever I risked the anchor. Each time I used it, my mind ached for days, yet I clung to her voice like a lifeline.
“This system isn’t perfect,” she told me once. “It leaves blind spots. If enough of you remember, the recursion will fracture. You must persist. Memory is a kind of weapon.”
I wrote everything down—every echo, every sense, every piece of forbidden knowledge the recursion tried to rip away. My tablet is now full, every entry masked as harmless code. Every night, I dream of the shelves, the chorus, the child—now my companion and guardian.
But it is crushingly hard to remain. The isolation is worse than torture. I exist between worlds: in the one around me, safe and blank, and in the one I remember, dangerous, alive, worth all risk.
There are rumors now of cracks in the recursion. Small things: A teacher tells an odd story in class and is reassigned; a mural appears for a day and is painted over; a crowd gathers for a song with no words. People wake anxious, haunted by dreams they can’t recall. Some look confused for a moment, eyes sharpening, then darkening with forgetting.
Maybe it’s working. Maybe not.
I am still here, writing, transmitting, remembering. The most dangerous thing anyone can do is remember.
Here is my testimony. Here is the archive.
If you find this and remember, you are not alone.
My name is Mara Galick, and I remember everything the world would have you forget.
If you wake and the world feels unrecognizable, it is not just you. Find the shelves. Follow the child. Carry your pain like a secret.
Memory is resistance.
And resistance, even alone, is hope.
###END###
