Echoes in the Spiral Archive
Every evening, I listen again to the voices no one not in this body can remember. They call me to piece together what I lost—a self made of fragments, hidden in digital static.
The first time I heard the archive breathing, I mistook it for a malfunction in the cooling system. By our third year on the Ternary Layers, odd things hardly caught my attention. I’d trained myself to ignore the mechanical sighs and pixelated ghosts that flitted through the audio streams of Archive Tower 9. But on this night, the sigh sounded like my name, stitched from static: “Lio.”
I pulled off my headset and ran a check on the logs, praying it wasn’t my mind doing tricks again. After the dissolution of the Haven Collective, nobody else but me accessed this level of the Spiral Archive. Data fell like snow in the silent hallways, each fleck illuminated by deep blue status lights. Alone, I cataloged the last memory feeds, hoping I’d keep my own together long enough to finish the transfer.
But that night, I heard the breathing again. It quickened as I approached the DATAVORE terminals, hands slick with sweat. “Lio,” it repeated, weaving in and out of my thoughts. I thought: This is what loneliness does. Then, more quietly: This is what being forgotten feels like.
Outside, the city was shattering. There was talk of perception rot sweeping over the outer boroughs, neighbors exchanging faces and voices like it was nothing, days looping, memories overlapping. Inside the Archive, the effect was stranger. Sometimes, my logging interface showed me entry dates from weeks I’d never lived, voices that claimed to be my own, describing things I’d never done. Sometimes rooms turned left when I meant to go right, and I’d find myself standing before the one door I always locked.
Every story file here was delivered in fragments—a whispered conversation, a tear-stained confession, a warning delivered too late. I was supposed to reconstruct them and send the complete memories up the chain. But hundreds of memories were collected under my name. I could not remember matching any of these eyes to a face in the mirror.
Tonight, I thumbed through another set of entries tagged LIOMARCO 2177. A young man’s voice, haggard and full of longing, journaled into the darkness: “If you remember this, you’re not alone. Meet me under the spiral clock at midnight.” Then a breath, a click, and silence.
I scrolled further. Entry: LIOMARCO 2177, recurring at irregular intervals—from March, April, then inexplicably December. Always the same request, but the clock’s hands described impossible shapes and times. I tried to speak aloud, just to confirm myself to myself. The Archive responded in whispers: “If you remember this…you’re not alone.”
I left the workroom and walked the winding helix staircase toward the old spiral clock, a relic that only ever struck midnight when no two watches agreed. Shadows lined the steps, cast into wrong angles by the failing light-grid. When the clock’s heavy pendulum finally stilled, I found a second figure seated on the landing. Their posture was too familiar; I knew then and there I was seeing something that should not be.
They turned to face me, eyes bright and haunted. “Are you here for the Archive?” they asked, their voice a match for the one in the recordings.
“Who are you?” I heard myself say.
They smiled sadly, hands folding into their lap, fingers twitching as if sorting phantom files. “We’re Lio. Or we were, before they began dividing the minds for redundancy. Something was lost. We are the fragment. You—” They gestured to me, “—are the echo.”
A rush of clarity and fear mixed in my chest. The city was not the only thing afflicted by perception rot. The Archive had split my memories into parallel threads, overlapping but discrete. My sense of self had been copied, cropped, rerouted, until ‘I’ was a contingent—part but not whole.
“We’re not alone,” I stammered, echoing the refrain.
The other Lio regarded me with gentle frustration. “If we’re not alone, why do we forget every time we ascend the stairs? Why does the Archive offer us different memories, incompatible truths?”
My legs almost gave out. “I can remember you now,” I whispered. “But in the morning, I’ll wake up in the workroom again and only know your voice. Not your face.”
They reached forward, gripping my hand. The contact felt electrical—I flinched, and in that brief instant, a thousand images flickered behind my eyes. Days unlived, friends lost, streets the city no longer held. Then only static, and dark.
“Come with me,” they urged. “Descend, not ascend. The Archive loops the way out. The higher you go, the more you forget. Downward, memories return.” Their palm pressed a glass marble into mine—a clear sphere, swirling with digital shimmer. An object left as a hint, a key.
“Will it work?” I asked. My voice sounded muffled, uncertain, like it belonged to someone else entirely.
“Only if you believe we belong together.”
I tightened my fingers around the marble. Across the hall, doors flickered in and out of sight. I stepped forward, breathing in the sterile, ionized air—a smell that always signified endings.
We descended, spiraling faster and deeper. Corridors flickered from archive stacks to childhood corridors to streets whose names I never learned. As we slipped downward, my minds—each version of Lio—sang in chorus the same refrain: “If you remember this, you’re not alone.”
Finally, at the lowest level, light broke through the gloom where a server door stood open. Cables grew upward, swaying like seaweed, all whispering with old memories. I held the marble high; it pulsed, drawing all the ghosted voices to it. My other self smiled, dissolving into shimmer, merging with the veil of recollections that hammered now at my skull.
The pain was blinding—a storm of sensation, every memory from every thread, all at once. I screamed and did not hear my own voice; I was many, I was none. Then silence.
When I woke, the Archive was quiet, and I was alone. But for the first time, when I faced the mirrored door, it showed my face, not as a fragment, but as a whole.
Outside, the city had stopped fracturing. The perception rot had stilled. In my palm, the marble was cold and gray, emptied of light. I placed it on the desk beside the last recording—a warning and a solace, my voice clear, singular, resilient:
“If you remember this, you’re not alone. I was many, but now I am whole. The Archive keeps us if we keep each other.”
Each evening, I listen to the voices that remain. Some are mine; some are not. But in their echoes, I am not forgotten.
###END###
