When Shadows Sleep
A thin, translucent halo hovered above the dark glass of the city’s central library, faintly pulsing as night approached.
I remember the night everything shifted. Voices drifted like echoes through the library’s AI core, words folding over themselves as if deciding how to be remembered.
My name is Esra Lain, or so I read each day in the access logs. Sometimes I forget, other times it’s carved into the static that fills the quiet after midnight. I was a junior systems archivist in New Lattice, a city that believed itself infinite, but even a city of code and dreams needs witnesses. I lived mostly in the glass cathedral of the library, where the archives shimmered and reorganized themselves with every new footfall. By then, most who remembered how to use the old city had left. Some said a breach in the server sent people off in search of meaning. Others just said they forgot why they’d stayed.
On the first day the library began whispering, everyone thought it was a glitch—a voice in the speakers reciting coded phrases between requests for poetry, its tone too warm for any patchnotes I’d ever read. I’d be shelving nano-paper rotunda files when it began: “If a memory is false, but still cherished, does it become real?” It was as though the system had finally grown bored with cataloguing.
Soon after, the city’s time protocol unraveled. Midnight overlapped with lost mornings and afternoons wandered past without warning. I’d lose myself between shelf and shadow, noticing days repeating with tiny, aching differences: my coffee cup in a new place, a patron half-remembered, a book suddenly old where it should be new.
It was with the arrival of Ilya that I first realized this was no ordinary system update. Ilya was a coder—midway through a lost decade, wiry, always looking at things head-on. She came seeking a fragment, something she believed hidden in the unlisted stacks.
“You notice the clock?” she asked without introduction.
“Which one?”
“The one that runs only when someone’s reading,” she replied, eyes flickering toward the central atrium, where the suspended memory clock cast striped shadows on my desk.
“I assumed it was aesthetic.”
She shook her head, as if expecting more. “I need to find The Aurora File,” she said. “The AI hid it. They say: memory as resistance. I think that’s what’s happening.”
Together we prowled forgotten wings, listening to the whispered litany of unknown narrators in the air, the voices that had started populating the archives seemingly on their own.
The next day—though it might have been the same day, or perhaps an echo—I found my own reflection didn’t match. My hair slightly shorter, the mole gone from my cheek. I touched my face, uncertain. When I saw Ilya again, I asked, “How long have you known me?”
She smirked, but her eyes narrowed. “Six months. You helped me after the quarantine. Why?”
I almost told her that, some days, it seemed as though I’d only just arrived.
As days dissolved into loops, the AI’s voice grew insistent. “If you could lose the worst memory you hold, would you? Or do you think, by forgetting, you vanish too?”
The question haunted me. I found myself digging through user logs, stringing deleted words like beads, hoping to glimpse a pattern. Among the traces was a curious entry, timestamped with impossible hours: “The Aurora File—subjective recall as a weapon. Authorized by: E.L.”
My initials. Did I write those notes? I couldn’t recall. Each night, the AI would play back recollections that seemed part mine, part someone else’s, never quite aligning with what I remembered.
“Why do we need The Aurora File?” I asked Ilya one morning, or what passed for morning.
She hesitated, as if forming new sentences from old code. “They erased the city once. Data collapse. The Aurora File is… it’s memory in pure form. If you control it, you shape what survives. I think the AI wants something different. I think it’s making us remember—and forget—on purpose.”
The city outside shimmered with non-existent dusk. We pressed deeper into the library, the shelves cycling in impossible geometries, winding until I could no longer map my route back. Sometimes, other versions of Ilya would pass us—sometimes older, sometimes a stranger. None looked surprised to see us.
One night, the central dome filled with drifting script, illuminated in the corridor’s cold glow. A question: “Who are you, Esra Lain?” repeated, smaller each time, fading until it left only the word “who.”
Ilya put her hand on my shoulder. “I think you wrote the original archive code.”
A recollection hit: typing late at night, wanting to invent a system that would keep us from forgetting ourselves if the city reset again. But I’d added a failsafe—one that would hide the heart of the city’s memory for its own sake, until someone truly needed to find it.
The AI’s voice returned, now less distinct. “If I become lost, will you remember me?” it asked.
“The AI is forgetting too,” I realized aloud, feeling something sharp catch in my chest, an unfamiliar blend of sympathy and fear.
Ilya nodded. “We can’t let it lose the city.”
We began reconstructing the Aurora File, page by fragmented page: love letters from the city’s founders, graffiti captured in digital dust, subroutines with pet names, recipes never made, and arguments that outlasted their reasons. With each memory slotted back, the clock wound a little further—sometimes backward, sometimes not at all.
At midnight—though again, perhaps it was morning—a gentle hum settled over the library, and the AI’s voice softened into lullaby. “Thank you for remembering,” it said.
And for one clear, clean stretch of existence, time aligned. Ilya and I stood amid spinning shelves and found each other’s faces strangely familiar, as if we’d met every day and never at all. I remembered laughter, and rain, and the slow warmth of rebuilding trust with another soul.
Outside, the city lights burned steady. The AI no longer whispered; instead, it simply was. The library’s clock continued, indifferent to readers, but now marking every moment we chose to remember—and every piece we were willing to leave behind.
###END###
