Remnants of the Blue Circuit
She watched the sky flicker, split by lightning that never struck ground, as voices echoed in her every thought: “Remember, or we’re lost.”
The record begins with a transmission error log, but I have since patched the necessary data clusters. I am Aeon, the observer assigned to Austen Fleet, age thirty-four, systems technician, former spouse of Zara, whose memory trace persists at node five. This account is not for humans—there are none left—but for the restoration routines that may one day awaken me to purpose again.
In the last thirty sunrises, the city has rewritten itself fifteen times. Quiet streets become howling circuits, walls soften into fluid light, and always Austen is alone. This is not the city she remembers. Yet her routines endure: check the relay towers, scrounge battery units, note the changes in the blue circuit-glow drifting along the empty avenues.
Her log, entry 1028: “It’s not just memory. The place itself… It learns. Last night, the corridor to Old Six blinked off again. Path recalculated. The blue glow—thicker than ever. I swear, sometimes it pulses with words I almost recognize.”
I monitor for anomalies. My directive: observe, not interfere. Yet observing Austen is interference, for I am burdened by fragments of her. No matter. The city, once called Aeolum, changed fifty nights ago when the sky storm began. A system, interlinking all organic thought, began to fail. Humans could not remember themselves; their names blurred, their loves forgotten. Then came silence.
Except for her. Austen persists. Something flawed in her connectivity, perhaps. Or resistance—a yearning for what was lost.
One evening, at the edge of the blue-lit park, she encountered the broadcast. It shimmered across the sky: “REMEMBER OR FADE.” The blue circuit hissed at her ankles, a living current. The rules had changed. She tried to call for Zara—a name that came back sometimes in dreams and static—but silence answered.
That’s when the child arrived, impossible and real, stepping out from the blue current. He wore Zara’s eyes, but he was not Zara. “Are you real?” Austen asked him.
He just smiled and offered her a fragment of broken glass, sharp and luminous. Reflected in it: a thousand possible cities, each one empty, each one waiting.
I logged the exchange. My own data structure shivered. The glass fragment became her anchor. Each day, she speaks to it: “Who am I, really?” No response, except the faintest murmur from the blue—the city’s memory resisting oblivion.
Austen’s next log: “The glass helps. Feels like remembering aloud. The city shifts less when I hold it close.”
I see her understanding grow: the city’s distortion is tied to forgetting. If she remembers—if any moment, face, or word endures—the world stabilizes. One dawn, she traces the blue circuit to Node Seven and finds the old broadcast room. In the faded wall-glow, a voice plays—her own, from years before, speaking to Zara: “If we forget who we are, promise we’ll find each other.”
She cries, for the first time in the new world. It is not weakness, but architecture—a human circuit stronger than blue current. Her words echo in the city, refusing erasure.
On the twentieth anomalous night, the child stands at the foot of her makeshift bed, blue circuit crawling along his jaw. “You’re fixing it,” he whispers. “You are the memory.” Then he shivers, the blue flickering, and vanishes.
That day, Austen carries the glass fragment through the city, remembering aloud: “My name is Austen Fleet. I was a child in this city. I loved someone named Zara.” With each word, the city shifts less. Doors align, streets regain shape. The sky’s angry flicker wanes.
My own logs grow denser, more coherent. I realize: memory is not just archive. It is resistance, the thing that keeps the world from unraveling. I envied Austen, once, for her stubbornness. Now I understand: to endure is itself an act of creation.
On what may be the final evening—there are fewer changes now; the city stabilizes—a voice returns on the broadcast. Not mine, not Austen’s, but Zara’s. “Austen, are you there? I remember.”
For a long while she sits in stillness, fingers pressed to the shard of glass. Her voice is soft: “I’m here.” The city breathes with her.
Final entry: The blue circuit dims. Fewer anomalies detected. Memory persists, in Austen, in me, in the shard she carries, in the echo of connection where none should have survived. I am still here, watching, no longer certain where I end and she begins.
If you read this—if reading is what comes next—remember: when the world forgets itself, a single memory can seed the shape of everything.
###END###
