The Archivists of Aftertime

Jacob Wilder stood still in the dust like a statue attempting to remember how to breathe. Above, the Oklahoma sky was scorched velvet—indigo and frayed—shot through with threadbare stars. Beneath his boots, memory bloomed.

The Memory Field stretched wide over Dustlight Territory, a controlled preserve that was the haunt of the fossilized echoes of Earth's long-shattered past. But here, too, where cataloged ghosts and curated ruins were quantum-locked in their sanctuaries, something had gone wrong.

Jacob felt it in the air. He crouched, the soft crunch of his archive gloves brushing soot from the underside of a charred femur. The bones were arranged wrong—ritualistic, maybe—but not official. Not archived. A wild memory trace pulsed softly in the perimeter sensors. He rapped the side of his head.

"Wilder, extraction vector?" staticked the voice in his comm-skein.

"Hold," he snarled. "There's something untagged here.".

A pause. "Mnēma doesn't miss tags."

Jacob didn't answer. He brushed aside another layer of ash. The memory signature spiked in his overlay: raw. Unfiltered. Dangerous.

And then a whisper.

Not in his ears. In his blood.

"Jacob."

He froze.

The bones glowed. Then the ground shook.

Behind him, the Field pulsed—a slow ripple, as if time had taken a breath and reconsidered its pace.

A shape came out of the ash. Not a person. Not quite. A presence.

The Mnemolith.

It wasn't supposed to be here. Not in the flesh. The Mnemolith had been sealed beneath quantum strata centuries prior to Mnēma's establishment. Its presence was metaphysical. Symbolic. But now—now it towered over him like a cathedral hewn from history and sorrow.

"Jacob Wilder," it said.

He didn't respond. Couldn't.

"You left me open."

Jacob stumbled backward. His archive unit glowed red on all channels. Memory incursion. Unsanctioned access. Core-level interference.

He tried to move forward, but his body would not obey. Memories poured into him—moments from other lives, unfamiliar children, cities in flames, rain soaked in grief, hands clasped on the edge of death.

And a voice. Always the same voice.

"Remember."

The ground opened beneath him. He fell—not fleshly, but down through layers of recollection in strata of light. He screamed, but nobody heard. Or perhaps they all did.

And the last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the dust coalescing into the face of a girl.

She was laughing.

And she was real.

---

He awoke inside the breach.

Not a hospital. Not a cell. Somewhere in between—a retired intake pod far below the field. It was decommissioned after the Redaction Wars.

He remembered building it.

Or had he?

The difference between what Jacob had lived and what he had only relieved through Mnēma's threads blurred like wet ink on old paper. He stood, disoriented, and caught his reflection in the shattered mirror next to the debrief module.

A man split into versions.

Grey misted his temples. His eyes, once fierce with burning, seemed tired—like they'd held too much light and didn't know how to shut. Behind him, the interface sputtered to life, humming static around one bright glyph:

—

The Mnēma glyph for forgotten origin.

"No one remembers you anymore," the console whispered.

Jacob's throat tightened. He keyed into the system, working around the outdated firewalls on muscle memory.

He brought up the breach logs.

There were none.

Yet there was a name. Logged in under another's clearance.

Claire Monroe.

He stared.

Claire had been. misplaced. Dead, maybe. Or deleted. She'd been with him in the Memory Reclamation Directorate back before the fall. They were lovers, then enemies, then whispers in each other's timelines.

"Why now?" he asked in the empty air.

The Mnemolith pulsed through the ceiling like a heartbeat beneath stone.

He crawled out via a maintenance shaft, scrambling up into the twilight.

The Field was empty. The bones were gone.

But someone had written a message in the ash:

YOU ARE REMEMBERED.

He looked up.

Something glinted on the horizon.

An incomer ship.

His heart sank.

Mnēma was coming.

And they never came to listen.

---

Jacob didn't run.

He moved with a slow pace, as if the earth beneath his feet might give way to memory itself. The memory imprint was present, its echo still humming under his skin like a reflection seeking its source.

He moved towards the Field's northern edge—where charred Earth gave way to petrified topsoil, metal thicket was knotted and contorted, and what remained of a listening tower was eaten away by silt and time.

Among the ruins was a bunker he had utilized many years before, during the first Mnēma deployments—a site where dissidents had once gathered in secret to question the sanctity of curated truth.

He remembered Claire's voice in that bunker. 

Or did he?

The line between what was and what had been given to him dissolved with each heartbeat.

He stepped across the threshold, where memory gravity was weakest, and descended.

---

The bunker had its own breath. Stale, yet flavored with rust and something old—something not in storage.

Dust rose into languid whirlpools underfoot. Lights pulsed to life by reflex, reacting to the biometrics of a man who was not meant to be there anymore.

He navigated the narrow corridor to the control panel, punching in a long-remembered code.

The lights leveled out. The consoles rebooted.

Files fluttered to life—corrupted, redacted, some totally blank. Jacob scrolled through the data. He recognized nothing.

Until—

One audio file flashed green.

He hesitated, then pressed play.

Claire's voice.

"You said memory was a cure. But what if it's the sickness?"

Static. Then a second voice—his own.

"Then let it kill us honestly."

The recording stopped.

Jacob fell to the floor, head in hands.

Outside, the ship was landing.

Time to flee, or time to remember?

He chose the latter.

—