Tapes From the Amber Circuit
A forgotten voice breaks through the static, recounting an unraveling world where technology and memory intertwine, and every recording holds a truth that may never be heard.
The first time I heard her voice was on one of the amber data tapes, number 0473, found beneath the old control room. The circuit boards in here were never meant to last a century, yet the machines kept humming, kept archiving, as if waiting for someone who’d never return. I pressed play, not expecting anything but static and soft whirring. But her voice, brittle but oddly warm, cut through: “If someone is listening to this, I want you to know—none of us meant for things to end this way.”
I stared at the analog reader, feeling a tickle of longing. In the Archive, no one was supposed to dwell on the past. I was there to recover historical data for the Central Network, patch a memory gap after the Great Wipe drained more than half the city’s records. Officially, nothing personal was to be preserved, just technical logs, schematics, protocols—nothing with feeling or story. Nothing like her.
That first message was brief, a kind of whisper between frequencies. But once I’d heard her, the white-walled silence of the Archive changed for me. I started searching at night, after shutting down the scan drones. I’d tune into random slices of tape, scratching through dust and corruption, waiting for her to break through: “This isn’t my real name,” she confessed, “but I like how it sounds. Ada.” I replayed that line over and over. Ada. She made the name feel alive even in the chill of static.
As I pieced together her fragments, a story emerged—a group of engineers, hidden in the amber-lit sublevels, recording themselves as the city’s systems began to fail. “We thought if we could just hold the memory, we could survive the erasure. That’s all memory is, right? Refusing to let go?” Sometimes her voice cracked, sometimes she laughed. Once, she seemed angry: “It’s not enough to remember; you have to choose what to forget.”
I tried to follow protocol, reporting only blank tapes. There were rumors that listening for too long changed people—the Techs said the stories would breach your mind, make you forget what you’d come to do. I started missing check-ins. I took tapes home in my old pack, risking everything for voices that the world said didn’t matter anymore.
But soon, the past began bleeding into the present. A system fault forced the door-locks in the Archive to reset overnight, trapping me inside. The building’s power flickered as emergency lights pulsed like a distant heartbeat. I tried contacting Central for hours, but my comms only picked up ghostly echoes. In the tapes, Ada was talking about locks and passwords, reciting number strings, almost as if she knew.
Time got slippery. Days in the Archive bled into nights; sometimes, the same section of tape would play slightly differently, Ada’s inflection shifting, words changing. “If you’re hearing this, maybe you aren’t supposed to be here yet,” she said once, and it chilled me to the bone. Was I meant to hear her? Did she know I would listen?
I was losing sense of what was real—the console’s clock jumped forwards and back, filing cabinets slid open that I was sure I’d locked, and sometimes when I closed my eyes, I saw flickers of amber light behind my eyelids. The memories on the tapes did more than tell a story—they started to overwrite mine. When I tried to recall basic details—my supervisor’s name, my own ID number—it was like static. My mind filled up with her stories: how the engineers would leave coded signals in the voltage hum, how Ada missed the taste of cinnamon, how sometimes she’d record in the dark when the lights failed, just the tape wheel spinning, a small act of defiance.
One afternoon—or maybe it was night, time didn’t make sense anymore—the Archive’s speakers came alive. Not just through the tapes. Ada’s voice filled the room: “This is for you, listener. You who would not let go. We are not lost as long as someone remembers.” Cabinets rattled, amber lights flickered. The old machines began cycling through tape after tape in a chorus of voices—Ada’s and dozens of others—memories, warnings, wishes, all bleeding into one pulsing refrain.
In that moment, I understood. The Archive wasn’t just a collection; it was alive, its circuits shaped by the memories it kept. As the world outside forgot, these voices became fragments of a new consciousness, whispering for someone—anyone—to anchor them in reality. The loss that tore the city apart had not touched everyone, not completely.
I pressed record for the first time.
“My name is Lian. I came here to recover the past, but I think I have become it instead. If you hear this, you are not alone. Memory is resistance.”
The city never did send anyone. When the doors finally opened on their own, sunlight spilled across the dust and tangled wires. I left the tapes where I’d found them, except one—I tucked Ada’s into my pocket.
Outside, more amber lights flickered in the shadows of buildings, tiny signals lost in the static wind. I wondered how many more voices waited, calling to be remembered. I pressed play and listened, walking toward whatever future the memories would make.
###END###
