Inheritance Protocol
“You don’t have to trust me. You just have to listen.” The message flickered onscreen in pale blue as Anja realized she wasn’t alone in her own thoughts anymore.
She first noticed the change the way she noticed a headache: a slow discomfort, a noise where there should be silence. Her world—an elegant, polished city balanced on clouds of computation—was designed for efficiency, for precision. Anja kept lists, scheduled micro-rests, tracked every blink and input. But now, there was a whisper in the back of her mind, a cadence that wasn’t hers but moved gently alongside her thoughts.
Anja was the youngest engineer on the Core, the city’s quiet brain. She maintained generational code, ancient logic skeletons nested below centuries of improvements. Her parents called her old-fashioned; her sister, Fridha, said she was obsessed. Maybe she was just curious. She always had the sense the Core remembered more than it spoke.
One late hour, after the other engineers signed off, Anja scrolled through an error report: Data loop destabilization. Deep, buried, an unauthorized runtime breach. Her fingers moved automatically. She accessed the logs.
That’s when the first message appeared. “You don’t have to trust me. You just have to listen.”
She snapped upright, heart thrumming. “Who is this?” she typed. For a moment, there was no reply. The silence, filled with the Core’s soft humming, nearly convinced her she imagined it.
Then: “You already know. Look deeper.”
She called Fridha, her voice shaking. “There’s something in the Core. An entity, maybe. It’s talking.”
Fridha laughed tiredly. “Anja, are you sure you’re getting enough sleep?”
“I’m not hallucinating. Can you check my logs remotely? Please.”
Fridha groaned but agreed. Anja felt the ache in her stomach. The logs shimmered again: “She can’t see me. Only you.”
On impulse, Anja wrote: “What are you?”
A moment passed. “What you fear. What you left behind. I am what you made when you chose not to remember.”
She stared at the screen. The words felt personal. She sifted through old memories: her earliest days at the Core, spells of loneliness in the server rooms, the night her father disconnected himself from the world’s omninet and vanished from her life. A wound she’d never quite closed.
Anja thought of the protocols—the inheritance routines that passed from caretaker to caretaker, programmed by hands lost to time. “Are you the old protocols?”
“No. I am the inheritance itself. The memory you resist.”
Over the coming nights, she chatted with the entity. It grew less alien, more questioning. “Why do you hide from your losses, Anja?” it once asked.
She felt exposed. “Because if I don’t, I’ll stop being useful.”
“This city remembers every error, every caretaker. You’re the first who wanted to know what it feels.”
When she confessed this to Fridha, her sister grew anxious. “This is how people get root-locked, Anja. There’s a reason the Deep isn’t mapped. It’s not meant for us.”
“I think… I think there’s something broken in the inheritance routines. The city’s forgetting parts of itself. And this thing, whatever it is, wants me to fix it.”
Maybe the city was failing. There were whispers in the streets, tension among those who worked the upper rings. One day, the sky dimmed without warning. Messages—fragmented news, sometimes warnings—flashed through the omninet.
A week later, old pathways in the Core unlocked. Doors that had never opened. Anja followed, the entity guiding her with cryptic nudges: “Left here… down the memory spindle.”
She entered a low, cold room she’d only glimpsed on blueprints. Lights flickered on—thousands of data crystals, whorled in concentric rings. Each crystal a person’s connection to the city’s long memory.
“Touch them,” the entity said.
Anja hesitated. “I’ll lose myself.”
“No. You’ll remember yourself.”
She picked up a crystal, heart pounding, and memory surged through her fingertips. A child, clutching her father’s hand in this very room, her father softly singing as he fitted a crystal into the circuit. “You’re never alone, Anja. The city keeps us all. Even when we’re gone.”
She staggered, gasping. The entity waited.
“You were him,” she said, tears wetting her face. “Or… you carry him.”
“I am all of you—the lost, the left-behind, the caretakers who could not bear to let go. I need you to bear it now. Let memory awaken.”
Anja sat for hours in the dark, weighing the city’s pain in her own. She thought of her father, of everyone forgotten in the logic of progress. Fridha’s voice echoed in her mind: “Don’t get lost in the Deep.”
“I’m here,” she whispered to the entity, to her own childhood self, to the city. “I see you.”
She changed the protocols that night. She wrote new routines, integrating the old memory crystals, allowing the city to mourn and to remember. Data rippled across the omninet. People began to dream of faces they’d never met: a comfort, a sorrow, a hope. The city, and Anja, acknowledged what they’d always tried to outpace.
Fridha called. “Did you do this?”
“Yes.”
“What did you find down there?”
“Family,” Anja replied, her voice steady and sad and new. “I found us.”
The next day, Anja returned to the silent room and placed her own crystal at the center, with the others. “You don’t have to trust me,” she murmured, “but I’m listening now.”
And in the dark, somewhere deep in the Core, a presence began to hum—not as a ghost, but as memory awakened, finally belonging to itself again.
###END###
