The Archivist
A message in the static.
PHOENIX SKY HARBOR INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT(PHX): TERMINAL B-12
“You should have seen this moron earlier. The guy claimed to be from some place called Taured. Legit looking passport and all. I ran the global directory, cross-referenced historical records, and checked every database available. There is no such place. Taured does not exist… never has.”
“I heard about him,” the second agent replied, not looking up from his display. “Probably just another agitator attempting to bypass standard security protocols with a fabricated identity.”
“The unverifiable credential flagged him as a high-risk security threat, so they pulled him for secondary processing. Cuffed him, tried to strong-arm him. He didn’t even react. He just stood there like he was waiting for a freakin’ bus. He’s not gonna enjoy his time in secondary processing.”
“Yep! Those guys can make a mute talk.”
In a room that reeks of industrial cleaner and stale sweat, a man sits in what would seem to an observer as “quiet contemplation.” He sits, hands folded in his lap, while his mind replays the violence that he has experienced firsthand—the violence he fought his way to this iteration to try and stop. The ID, the intentional flag, was his way of getting inside the system, hoping to be able to warn them before it was too late.
The silence in the room is broken by the abrupt slamming back of the steel door—
Miles away, at a desolate rest stop in New Mexico, an author, a rogue chronicler of unexplained phenomena, stares at his laptop, the battery icon flashing a terminal red. He isn’t typing. He’s listening… to an impossible conversation.
As he goes to close the laptop and begin his quest to locate a place to charge it, something stops him—a sudden, biting shock of static electricity that jumps from the edge of the screen, freezing his hand in place. Then, the glitch strikes: his screen flickers a violent purple, and terminal windows begin to open in a cascade across his desktop. Encrypted data directories unzip in rapid succession.
“What the fuck?”
TRANSCRIPT: CASE FILE 882-NULL
LOCATION: TRANSPORTATION DETENTION FACILITY - SECTOR 4 INTERROGATING OFFICERS: D. MILLER (PRIMARY), O. HINES
SUBJECT: UNIDENTIFIED DETAINEE (CREDENTIALED AS: ARTHUR VANE) / ALIAS: ‘THE ARCHIVIST’
INTERROGATION LOG // OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT // **EYES ONLY**
MILLER: Let’s try this again, you piece of shit. We all know there is no such place as fucking, ‘Taured!’ You are not leaving this room until you tell me where you are really from, and what these space-age toys you’re carrying are. Let’s start with these?
(Detective Miller presents a plastic bag containing several metallic discs exhibiting chromic shifting between gold and violet.)
[DETAINEE exhibits no response]
MILLER: Not talking, eh? You know what I think? I think you’re a wannabe terrorist with a high-budget prop kit.
MILLER: [unintelligible whispering]
HINES: Sir, command thinks he’s got some sort of mental illness. Says we can’t… um, “use all the methods at our disposal” until the Doc checks him out.
MILLER: I don’t care if he’s the President of the goddamed US of A, or a circus clown that spent a fortune at some high-end prop shop. Without a verifiable ID… He’s not a citizen.
MILLER: You get that, buddy? You’re a ghost. And we don’t like ghosts.
DETAINEE: My name is Arthur Vane.
HINES: We get that… ‘Vane’. That’s what your fake credentials say, but we need you to tell us who you really are.
DETAINEE: My name is Arthur Vane. But in the circles I have traveled to reach this cycle, I am known as the Archivist.
MILLER: The Archivist? Holy Jesus! That’s some real cloak and dagger shit. What’s next? You gonna tell me you know Jason Bourne? You’re a mothefucking worthless ghost! I will find out who you really are, If I have to-
DETAINEE: Beat it out of me?
MILLER: Fuck you!
DETAINEE: I am no ghost. I am the warning you are currently choosing to ignore.
HINES: [Indicating his laptop] It says here that the “True Citizen” militant groups call their cell leaders Archivists. They consider them philosopher-kings.
MILLER: I see. So you’re one of those Nazi types. Think if you wear a suit and play the mysterious traveler, we won’t notice you’re just another parasite trying to destabilize the country. We are going to find out who you are! You are going to tell us where the rest of your cell is, and we’ll take them out, too!
DETAINEE: I don’t belong to a cell. I belong to the next iteration. I have seen the cycle reach its apex. I have seen the way it eats the atmosphere when it resets. If you look at the device you took from me—the one you call a “space-age toy”—the one your colleagues are trying to force open—you will discover it is far from a toy. It contains a ledger of every planet we planned to colonize to escape the collapse. Every one of them is empty now, because we weren’t fast enough.
MILLER: I don’t give a damn about your colonist fantasies, ‘Archivist.’ You look like the kind of self-important academic elitist who thinks the rest of us are beneath him. You come in here with your fancy suit and your ‘globalist’ nonsense, thinking you’re smarter than real, hard-working people because you can hallucinate a fake country and babble about ‘cycles.’ You’re just another radical progressive trying to rewrite reality to fit your utopian garbage, and believe me—this country is finished with people like you.
DETAINEE: The system isn’t designed to purge. It’s designed to recycle.
MILLER: FUCK THIS! Lock this shitbag up until he finds his tongue!
MILLER: Maybe a few days in a hot cell will loosen you up a bit? Eh, ‘Vane’?
SYSTEM NOTE: SUBJECT TRANSFERRED TO SPECIAL PROCESSING // END LOG
In the cold cab of the author’s truck, the stream ends—the terminal windows close as quickly as they appeared—but the connection hasn’t dropped. Instead, a strange, rhythmic static begins to bleed into the author’s mind—a series of precise, oscillating pulses.
“Good God. He was trying to warn us.”
The author doesn’t know it, but he’s no longer just an observer. The static isn’t white noise; it’s a broadcast. He is tuned to the exact frequency Vane is projecting, a signal vibrating through the grid's infrastructure.
In the detention facility, the Archivist rests. He closes his eyes, exhaling a long, slow breath as if preparing to dissolve. He is holding the memory of a violet sky in his mind—the sky of Taured before it was archived—projecting it outward, trying to tether it to the only mind currently open enough to receive it.
Write the next chapter, Vane thinks, the thought bleeding through the digital feedback loop.
In the desert, the author feels the hum in his own teeth. He watches the words
Connection Re-established
flicker momentarily onto his screen, a mocking, artificial promise—just as the laptop fades to black.
He realizes the static isn’t a malfunction.
It’s a message.
Wowww, it's amazing, especially the transcript of the interrogation!
ooo I like the addition of transcripts in this piece! It really adds so much!