The Archive That Dreams of Its Archivist
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
In the Memory Gardens, she found the file that grew thorns. It was labeled with her own name, timestamped fifteen years into a future that hadn't happened yet. That stood in front of her.
The file herself couldn't have made up, couldn't even think of, much less build. The future had to be a different one. Others, from whom it could have been told, had to survive her death for her living self to learn it. They had told her, by cryptic diary or email, or they had sent files for her to receive years into the future when she came back. In them she learnt how she had died.
All the same, she couldn't believe it. It had to be fake. All the time, it had to be fake. She was still here, in the Diaries Room, and she had no thorns. No one had informed the staff about the firing of their time travel warranty. Nothing was different. Everyone was still alive.
"You don't believe me?" RowGan had asked her, in that second that she had stayed. "Tell me, do you believe in time travel?"
"You don't know where you're going." The wall said, standing tall and erect. RowGan raised the wall up into her line of sight, then tore down the file, rendering it into thin, red threads that smelled like mist.
"Then I must prove it to you," said RowGan, applying tech to her walls. "You believe the end is still an end, don't you? You believe that everything ends in great failure, and everyone is gone come to earth, and you are but a variable that can only disappear?"
"The world is already that."
"All wrong," said RowGan, treating the wall like a kieselguhr beaker. "I am the variable. I exist now because of something that hasn't come to pass yet."
"Then stop pre-post-hocing this foolishness."
"It's foolhardy." the wall said, turning into puddles of orange-red. "You are event triangulating too late in a spacetime that doesn't exist. You needtoseebeforeitstoo late. From there you'll see all events as connected, otherwise you would not exist, or the possible events that cause your cessation."
"I would not," RowGan said, materializing the file with the title "DO NOT READ THIS" in a TOO-LATE holo glyph that might have been an apt reply to the wall's derision. She selected, and sand-skipped to its "No label assigned".
And she fell. She watched the whole of her memories skip like this, all the detail and the richness disappearing from her. She fell into a .txt file, and never saw where she fell. She never knew where she was going next.
When she woke up, there was a new fact in her diary:
"I do not believe in love."
Current Music: Fight or Flight - In the Woods◆ About the ending
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