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Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz.

I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long time reporter and an on-air contributor

to CNBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going.

They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your

colleagues, and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your

podcasts.

Hello, I'm Wilkins Stoyz all the time.

Glad you are here.

Let's get into it.

It's 2 a.m. in the municipal records building, where the corridor is brewed under a sickly

web of flickering fluorescent tubes.

I pace these holes alone, my shoes scuff and dull terraces of tiles buff flat by decades

of feet that now only exist in the margins of yellowed lookbooks.

The air is heavy, faintly sweet with the ghosts of age and paper and some persistent thread

of ozone that rides the ventilation.

When I walk, a hush is never perfect.

Ventscoff to life overhate low and reptilian.

Somewhere a wheeled cart groans a sound that doesn't belong, but would repeat enough to

be familiar.

Far behind me, ancient pipes paying in shutter, settling scores with a midnight shell.

Usually I find comfort in this abandoned cacophony the reminders of the living world above

an assistant big enough to go on without any single watcher.

Tonight though, the patterns have shifted.

My rounds take me past the regular chipmunks, the security console of the supply closet of

old copper toner, the personnel lockers.

This is the hallway that runs along the boundary of the Elder Swing, where the paint is patched

like it's hiding root, rot and the war clocks all tile slightly different lies.

It leads inevitably to file room 7.

On the maps, file room 7 is a dead end, a box shits since 1979.

It's never on any duty log, never mentioned on theft reports.

The story among the day shift clerks, when they recall it at all, goes that it was condemned

first bestest, then sealed and left to settle into mythology.

But tonight, my past annual corridor reveals more than it ever should.

A draft sneaks under the solid fire door, not the usual stifing warmth of the stacks

but something fresh and cold.

The brass plaque file room 7 is clean of dust.

Through the upper window of grime-rolled glass, a strange silver light pulses against

a dull yellow buzz cast by the emergency bulb overhead.

My pulse thumps against my clipboard.

I jack almost ritualistically the lock.

It's the original mortise kind, tough as the building's jodder.

My universal key never worked on it before.

But tonight, with a cautious twist, the bolt withdraws smoothly.

The door swings open on oil, silent hinges, and as step across the threshold, I should

never have been able to breach.

The air inside tastes desolate, oddly sweet.

This neither cold nor warm, but left in a perpetual pre-dorn harsh, less a room than

stage perfectly set.

Every object in this office is crisp with unused intent about a desk lamp floods everything

with a calm white glow, the circle of brightness throwing the rest of the room into an ambiguity

of shudder.

The battered oak desk looks like it was buffed at morning, a legal pad sits dead center,

covered in dense writing names, underlined and marked missing.

The top file is rubber stamped in scarlet ink, received, 1974, but the last entry is

dated next Tuesday, and the event notation references a property on Mercer avenue that's

two for demolition in two weeks.

This is stack of other folders, though tabbed meticulously labeled with the names of vanished

residents people are recognised from the more recent digital side of the city archive.

None of this makes any sense, but the strangest detail echoes me more than the paper with

the dustless floor.

On the far corner of the desk sits a bone china mark, the kind that went out of fashion

before the city's first high rise chipped along the rim.

This piece of steam rise from the tea, a tangible sign that the room is more alive now than

it has any right to be.

The centbook and cream reminds me for a moment of breakfast with my grandmother before

the world ever carried this kind of haunted weight.

A chair, a pole stood and button backed stands pushed out as if someone rose just before

I entered and will return any moment.

Strune notes pinned to an old court board list names I saw uploaded just last month fresh

entries for missing persons, furnishing with a nearing speed from digital and physical

logs alike.

Most of correspondence lay beneath glass where paper weights speak of city council deliberations

that never made a past a proposal phase.

My phone buzzes weakly in my back pocket.

I try to unlock it only to watch the screen flicker, go static and then unsettlingly display

the clock frozen at 2.18.

The signal strength bars pulse but nothing loads.

I pocket it an edge closer to the desk hard in my throat.

There's a metallic climb from somewhere behind in a wall, not far or no isn't connected

to any schedule, like a file cut pushed too hard against concrete or maybe something

more deliberate.

I reach for the top folder intent on nabbing proof.

At that moment they overhead light start as fractions of darkness and light trading places

in frigid rhythm.

The chair seems to slide a half inch though I didn't touch it.

I step back, suddenly served and am not alone.

My own reflection in the small window of the in a door seems slightly out of sync as

movement to beat behind mine.

Every instinct screams at me to run to slam the door and unlock every remembered boundary.

Instead I force myself to scan the names in the legal part again.

There a recent Helen Court, George Mendez, Stefan has persons marked missing in just

a last three weeks.

Below their names, rendered in a careful old fashioned hand, a note, all records must

reconcile before the shiffer sets double check for anomalies.

My hands tremble as I stuffed the top folder under my jacket for once wishing for daylight

to a hum of other lives.

But the building refuses comfort.

Something deeper than procedural air hums here a gap in her time and memory are supposed

to arrange themselves.

As I close the door, locking it with the mildest pressure, the metallic clam resumes farther

away as if what moves behind these walls has noticed much respite.

The file under my jacket feels uncomfortably warm as I walk away, it's impossible paper

were quispering hidden edicts against the marrow of the city itself.

I didn't always fear this place.

The municipal archive had, for all these years, served as a haven of sorts a place to disappear

without the mess of business of running away.

When I took the night clerk job, it was less out of ambition and necessity, it shows

off from complications waiting in my daytime life.

I'd never meant to become indispensable or even particularly involved.

My reasons were practical at first.

The building itself is a monolith of municipal intention, new deal air brick determined

to repress both weather and memory.

Six floors, all pack of boxed deeds, centres rolls, scattered property manifests, binders

of brutal police logs, and city council minutes so dense with small betrayals that you'd

think even time would get bored and look elsewhere.

The security office kicks out a tableau of garish CCTV screens, the kind with bulbous

black and white display tubes that weaves when they warm up.

Every iron, I make my perimeter circuit, lugging by hand as the system requires.

This comfort and the repetition of feeling I can stitch my eyes together into a routine

quilt, the pattern set and immune to disruption.

Most nights, my only company is the hum of ancient heating ducts and the occasional

chuck of a cleaning cart always just out of sight goes in polyester uniforms.

Mrs. Crick, the janitor, sometimes waves as she disappears down the service stair, her

face a patchwork of dim light and fatigue.

As a record's assistant might be finishing up after I was on another level, but it's

rare anyone else works as late as I do.

Staffing's been paired back for years.

Even the security company, all ups and minded day shift bullies, rarely swing by after ten.

My taths are rote check each door.

Sign off on every fire exit.

Compare electronic entry logs to handwritten tellers of policy left over from a ransomware

scare in 2007.

The main record rooms tend to all hold the city's most vital evidence of existence.

Taths.

Transferers of blame and title, fortunes amassed or lost one address at a time.

But barely 1% of those boxes are ever requested.

There's a vast mythology of Traviyade stretching in every direction between here and at E-91.

My desk is tucked behind the central lobby, come a fast among the tangle of filing cabinets

and out of dip phone directories.

That's where I fill out the daily antique chuts, tax slits for missing on Missalv Ricos,

and chase the endless tide of forms with mute resignation.

Sometimes I read off old council minutes, and detaining myself with tales of zoning

amendments decided by Acrimony and $10 bribes.

Sometimes I just let my mind run flat, watching the second hand chase itself along the

coaxialad face.

The staff, such as we are, has always allowed a polite distance.

The daytime crowd treats the place with a mixture of reverence and frustration.

All of Mr. Paley, the senior archivist, likes to complain that the building remembers

too much.

I keep to my alcove careful about office gossip the incident with the lost property records

from the 9th is taught me to avoid the leftover animosteys, fam civil, fissioned, cosmically

unamarkable by design.

Some co-workers act as if the archivists evolved against the city's mace, others treated

as a mothelium.

Either way, it treats all equally with indifference and dust.

Why hang on here at then, years after intended?

Maybe out of habit.

Maybe because my father's Parkinson's keeps me local, or because the night shift shelters

me from distractions I've rather not faced thickening debts, ruined prospects, the

perpetual leak of a marriage that never started.

Time, in these stacks, moves as it pleases.

The solitude is honest.

This size, it's easy to tell myself that what happens outside of meadows, bankruptcies,

this appearance isn't really my concern when I'm god dogging their pay-per-foot prints

in the small isles.

Yet the building resists true familiarity.

No matter how harmless the blueprints insisted is, odd spaces appear between the wall's gaps

and alcoves that don't match any documented renovation.

There are isles in certain stacks that shift, as if two rows of shelves had one too many

columns between them.

Shadows slip across to far end of your vision, diverging by a step or two before snapping

back as the light catches up.

At least three times, a caught flashes of motion in corners where no person could stand.

Once, wheeling up the fire stares, a smell-bound ozone, sharp and a mistakeable the nearest

thing to an electrical fire, except there was none.

Some records boxes, I would swear, change their shelf overnight, row 27 gains an extra

container with a mismatched lid, a previously full slot tensile benty in the morning, the

labors called by a hand I don't recognise.

My first few weeks, I blamed it on absent-minded cleaning crews.

Later I stopped mentioning it all together.

One night, closing up, I heard whispering funneling down the eduk's actual words lost, but tones

urgent heard.

By the time I got with the near shot, it tapered off into nothing but the groan of a vent

fan.

Still, alone to where it all was part of the job the half perceived, the unaccountable.

Over time, I got good at ignoring gentle discomfort.

After all, if every file, every whisper, ever chill meant something, no one would last

a week here.

In the last month's until tonight, when the rules bent far enough to snap.

The eye was after my first breach of file room seven pass and crawling increments, every

routine check coloured now by sharp edges of anxiety.

I keep returning to the folder I found it's paper-heavy, slightly tacky with warmth,

something that persists longer than it should.

I slipped back into the circuit of night rounds.

It's supposed to be muscle memory, flick the corner light, peer into dock and dock

oaves, note the hum of the water heater.

But the car was shattered, there are things I should not have seen.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz, I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a long time reporter

and an on-air contributor to CMBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going, to come from places

like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your

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At 312, I pull a request to locate the file of one Danish harman listed as a missing

person.

A paperwork should be in record room 4, box 311.

Across reference the location on the catalogue and find the tap color has switched from the

annotated active city case open to the yellow to retired slash permanent archive.

The corresponding slot on the shelving chart though is blank.

I check downstairs searching the overflow locker.

The record is gone.

I swing back to the front desk, running my finger along the night log.

Three other requests came in over the last week for missing persons records and none of

those files are in the proper locations either.

I pull each night's log.

The register of the files is checked out after Iroes, often between 2, 15 and 2, 30 and

by staff credentials that seem unfamiliar.

The clerk reference ID for last night matches no current worker.

Curious, I scroll down the previous week, the names come up again but with first initials

reversed as I've twisted through some careless code.

Perredecold demands files move nowhere without two signatures.

But these entries have been slipped in with forged sign-offs in the neat and teak script

I saw earlier in file room 7.

The dates are wrong to not in a simple way, but off by exactly four decades for Sam or

by barely a day for others.

As I page back through last year's digital looks, I notice something even stranger, the

same files have been declared checked out and pending review multiple times and sequences

that defy the order of events listed in their own contents.

Parano prickles up my back.

I scan for physical evidence, even walking the full perimeter from lobby to basement.

Those sections are always sealed at night as a fire code demands.

Yet, standing outside the door to file room 7, I find it locked tight once more at the

glowing bar of light gone.

When I dare to risk my hand against the brass nut, I warmth pulses through the metal

unmistakable as if someone just fixated the space within.

Knocking softly, I met only with the slab muted thud of my own touch.

There's no sign of the cap or its companion papers through the Milky Glass pane.

I press my ear to the door, half expecting to catch a whisper or stifled cough.

Nothing but my own ragged breath.

I pull out my own notebook, jotting down the catalog numbers I've tracked.

They're enigmatic, ordered in a rhythm I can't name, but they set my nerve singing.

As I turn, the corridor at my back stretches longer than before a trick of perspective or

nerve, perhaps, but the ceiling lights ahead bling out the enflare, worn at a time as

if disturbed by an insane draft.

On the way back to my desk, I can't shake the sense of being observed to kind their

calls into your scalp and sits behind your eyes.

A darkened alcove seems to watch back, the next moment it's simply an anti-door way.

Every step carries more weight than the last.

My fingers, damp or sweat, smudge the pale legal pad holding my list of missing files.

If anyone else was here, I'd call for backup, but the building, like the evidence I carry,

refuses to let me ease away from its teeth.

The next day, I show up early for my shift, hoping the sun might make the anomalies less

daunting.

It fails.

The city outside feels all the remote, like a stage sit with the rom-props.

Commuters bustle, as usual, and lunchtime traffic fears away from the archives with practice

and attention.

Inside, a minister to routines cheer on his own nothing ever happens at midnight.

I spend the day time portion of my shift working with another night clerk, Hannah, who seems

preoccupied with the dreudry of a foray, and call from her toddler and doesn't notice

my jumpiness.

I try casual inquiries, whether she ever saw anything odd in room 7, whether the logs

have struck her as off lately.

Her answers are polite but confused.

Room 7, that's condemned, right, been paying to chuts since my dad played T-Ball.

She giggles apologises, and pivots back to her screen as though disinterest is a survival

mechanism.

The supervisor, Mr. Lawrenceen, asks if I can cover some over time.

His tone is friendly, but he avoids I contact a trait of all good bureaucrats, but tonight

I wonder if he knows more than he says.

Lawrenceen's own signature appears on a file which are all for a missing child's time

stamped at 2 p. 17 a.m., during a week he was supposedly on vacation.

I memorize the penmanship, which does not quite match the loops in sharp descenders he

uses in person.

A routine security check yields stranger results.

The building's camera grid logs every motion sensor trigger.

In the last month, nearly every night I precisely tune on teney, and event is registered

on the file room 7 feed, on the microfiche room below, and in stuck sea of the basement.

For the archive footage is a ruined thing sliced with static, whole minutes flickering

in staccato darkness.

They were night, the records show, the corruptions never happen outside that window.

For the sake of my freeing nerves, I tried to fag the incident facilities.

Their reply, returned with automaton cheer, minor camera malfunctions, and heritage buildings

are common during heating cycles, please place an IT request if issue persists.

I could almost laugh at how bureaucracy becomes its own shield, but none of this gives

my skin rest.

As dawn breaks, I find myself face to face with Mrs. Cricker she polishes the entry

tiles with her engine mop.

She's been here longer than I have one of those city hall fixtures who knows more than

she ever says.

When she swipes her badge at the rear entrance, she frowns in my direction as if weighing

weather to speak.

I take the chance.

Ever see anything strange by the basement stairs?

I keep my tone light.

She shakes her head half an east.

Strange how?

I thought maybe I don't know someone after Irish.

When Mrs. Cricker leans on her mop, the tire lines in her face creasing towards suspicion

and a dash of pity.

Sometimes a cat shapes men in all suits, hats, like glows out of a faded newspaper, not

your crowd, mind, but they only appear on the little TV in the cleaning room static.

If you ask me, the old flows down, they run on their own schedule.

And room seven?

She just shakes her head.

The sum doors it's better not to open again, things belong where he left them, Mr. Sam.

She glides home mop back into motion, unwilling to say more.

Her warning does little to blunt my obsession.

As night falls and the building drains of people, I become convinced something is run not just

in the records, but in the keepers.

I check my own logins.

Several recent entries show my badge-swiped-on levels I haven't visited in weeks times, even,

when I was logged out to lunch.

The handwriting in a few entries under my name is almost but not quite mine.

The angles are too sharp, the cost of rigid, stuck from imitation or rehearsal.

I dig through every file storage anomaly from the last season, cataloging serial numbers,

whilst listing checkout patterns, looping through data so precise that even my skepticism

buys in.

The missing records drift together like orphaned ripples, always tied to property seizures,

banishing tenants, and neighbourhoods in the city's oldest quarter.

Each oddity radiates outward, folding inward on itself, suggesting a mind at the centre

of fours orchestrating history not by accident or attrition, but by stealth.

What now is most, though, is the sense that my attention isn't dissipated, not resisted.

When I write a catalog number in my notebook, I find it I could in the margins of the very

files I'm searching for in cold and oily, each note ending in a colour queue I can't reproduce.

Half an hour later, the entry vanishes altogether from the digital listing.

My awareness itself feels baited.

There's only one place left to turn.

Tonight, at 2, 17 sharp, I step into the corridor again sharper, more resolved.

File room 7 is back in the internal map, pulsing as a lit note.

Striding down the lengthening hall, I clutched both master keys, the folder from last night

waged inside my darket, and a lockpick set I've never had reason to use.

The lights overhead blink and bob, there rhythm off, as if remote hands are cycling circuits

in time with my steps.

The old door yells before I even draw the key for mowing an invitation, or the last warning.

The physical lock turns and loose, obedient silence.

The air inside is colour, rich with a herbal time that's not quite tea but not quite unfamiliar.

The room has changed.

Floor tiles are polished to a lock of grey.

On the near wall, a massive city map from 1971 is birding faded, but annotated with

recent notes.

Pushpins mark at least a dozen addresses, all aligned with homes recently scheduled for

a demolition under the city's urban renewal plan.

The despair is fresh stacks of unfiled paperwork, crossing two eras brand new property

rookies mixed with police missing persons form stamped in red, there edges crispy and

immaculate.

On the far side, a battered reel to real tape recorder sits humming with the quietest,

most purposeful were.

I press plate holding my breath.

Immediately, a chorus of voices fills the chilly air of some calm, some clipped with fear.

Ascis transfer section B, update records by 1300, reconvening if witnesses persist.

Another voice, Laura, measured, no gaps, neutralize all record traces, reckons out before

the loopers set.

The voices take through formalities, never using names, while referencing a vanished bureaucratic

order of council with a forest and chill of a court verdict.

Then, quietly another voice, familiar and cadence speaks, do not admit new observers, all

files must close before the next cycle.

I freeze.

This last voice belongs to the senior archivist, Mr. Haley, whose penchant should have taken

him out of the story decades ago.

I scramble to the drawers, desperate for something tangible.

My hand closes on the stack of Polaroids dated 1975 and to five not just an ink, but faded

to the orangey haze of Old Instant Film.

Picture to three homes I've recognised from my 90 crosschecks.

Their mailboxes, caught in each frame, show names that have appeared on missing persons

files labelled open this week.

In the lower corners, someone has scrawled featured dates and blue grease penciled enters

for inspections, demolition requests still to be reviewed.

At the bottom of the pile is a legal sheep with my own full name and circled in black.

Beside it reads, next observer assigned, do not let them in.

I stare at the words until my vision pulses, the familiar threat in their simple imperative.

Then the lamp flickers, and the shadows in the room received by inches as I've called

back toward the wall.

Invisible motion tugs the edge of the desk papers, the real to real tape and spools with

a sigh.

I stagger backward the photos and confession clutch tight.

In the sudden hush.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz, I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long time reporter

and an on-air contributor to CNBC, and if you're like me, you're trying to figure out

how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going, the comfort places

like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more.

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Rising sense of intelligence is absolutely not the burden of ghosts, but of something

colder, more deliberate as if the building itself has chosen at last to defend its own

secrets.

The door slams behind me, the hall is darker, the geometry off a left turn when none should

be.

Light bends away from the window behind me.

Every instinct says across a line that observation has made me vulnerable.

In the fought glow of the corridor, the legal pad in my hand whispers a promise of violence

and recursion.

For the first time since I began trusting this job with my small safe and inimidity, I

realized the truth is not something I can set aside, the puzzle now wraps around me,

and I'm both investigator and intended exhibit.

If file room seven is meant to be sealed, it is because some histories of structure

to resist exposure.

I know whatever watches from those shuttered corridors that are writing the rules in real

time starting, most likely with me.

I stand there, barely breathing, struggling to gather up the loose sheets and poloids.

My fingers feel not meach photostocked to the next by sweat and static.

Slowly, my senses recalibrate to and now to a frequency I never meant to hear.

The whole building seems to thromb with a back-on pulse that's not quite the ancient plumbing,

not quite electrical, either more the low, insistent hum of presence just out of frame.

Outside the door, the corridor stretches longer than I remember, it slents slightly warped

as if the geometry of the archive has been gently but a mistakenly rerouted by design

or something worse.

A fluorescent bulbs overhead buzz louder when I approach, and the air tastes faintly metallic,

like the inside of a battery.

I force myself forward, unwilling to give the darkness purchase.

With every step back toward my desk, I check over my shoulder, half expecting to see the

file room door and chin open, or the tip of a shadow creeping interview.

I duck through an hour of stairwell, the walls down cool under my hand.

My usual short cut down to the main level comes out somewhere wrong adjunction of maintenance

conduits and supply crates I don't recognise as if even the maintenance staff abandoned

the space.

The only sign of recent activity is a slot on the wall where the janitors sign and sheet

is pinned, a dozen signatures trailing off into eligible squiggles.

The most recent entry, in deliberate, rounded cursive, simply says, Thursday 2, 19 a.m.

boarded in progress, all observers to log out.

I leave the maintenance hall as quickly as I can, pushing open a fire door that shouldn't

be a joy after hours.

It takes me out by the city deed's vault, not the ground floor is expected.

The silence here is even heavier.

My heart flick is in my chest with the jekkoing footstep.

Somewhere in the sacks above me, a book drops with a dull, too deliberate thud.

I freeze.

The urge to bold is powerful, but the hallway behind me is lost in shadow, the only agor

is blocked unless I retrace depth I no longer trust.

I move forward, shoes whispering on the dustless tile, and slip into one of the cloak-occoves.

Here I crutch low, papers breast-tight beneath my arm.

The arch of holds just enough light to make out the poster-chiff roster of printout already

yellowed, but annotated by hand in a series of codes and emphatic strokes.

The names haven't changed in weeks, but at the bottom a new line has been added, observer

rotation assigned pending incident review.

My name, in that same looping, at Mototand, is the only one listed.

My skin prickles with the certainty of being chosen, not merely present.

I phone up the building directory, dialing Mr. Paley's extension, though I know he retired

years ago and only returns for ceremonial things.

The line picks up on the second ring, but his only hiss in the faint, rhythmic tick of

a wall-clock in the distance.

I listen, straining, until a woman's voice when I don't recognize mudders somewhere

far from the receiver.

There's another one watching.

The click and tonal wine that follows sparks my nose into fight or flight.

Within minutes, my work phone begins to behave erratically.

Text files will not save.

Attempts scan my lizard photos across the scanner utility.

I try forwarding an email to my personal address proof of these anomalies but the message

bounces back, flared, undeliverable mailbox no longer in service.

This wifi spins and drops, then mysteriously reactivates, but only to present a log and

portal for an account system I've never seen, requiring a badge ID8 digits too long.

For a moment, I watch helplessly as digital folders and the shared drive populate with

file names that blink in and out half familiar records, then new cryptic entries, case reconciliation

cycle 3, observer memo, sambi, as press and draft fee for.

The disquiet is a living thing now.

I take the physical folder still warm and possibly serve for paper left in the silver room

and open it on my own desk under a cheap LED lamp.

The first page is a missing persons report for Dinesha Harman except it's already been

filled out for next Monday, the last scene date set in the future.

Handwriting again is near perfect script from a different era, with notations in the left

margin, schedule discrepancy, see report 7b, notify committee before demolition process.

These phrases make my skull crawl.

Underneath, pages detail property transfer histories for houses I passed on my way to work

just this week.

Deeds of stamp with both the original owner's name and smeared underneath as though

have written manually it names that are nonsense string of initials and numerals, see, axelm,

1974 slas second revision, ehm, Fordon, liepfer.

I compare these with online records, but the city's website times out, the search feels

gray out, or the pages revert to archive versions dated months in the past.

If feels, I'm mistakenly, as though the act of looking has forced the archive to rewrite

itself.

Through the glass of my desk partition, I catch the reflection of movement of figure

crossing the entry to room six just three miles down.

I hear neither a fitful nor the squeal of door hinges.

The light switch, humming briefly before snapping back to steady.

I duck lower heart hammering.

My phone buzzes with an internal notification.

No center.

The message is just a single word, reconcile.

Suddenly desperate for normalcy, I call out loud enough to traverse the empty hole.

Anyone else on site?

My voice comes back to me, not once but twice slightly delayed as if bouncing off and

seeing chambers.

The illusion of comfort is impossible to restore now.

I hear another noise distinct mundane, but still managing to terrify a desk belt the

type used at the front counter, tap shoppy once.

I wait shoulders hunched.

Nothing more.

I'm willing to just sit.

I force myself up, clutch my evidence, and stalk the corridor toward the staff lounge.

It's an effort act as if I'm only chasing coffee, not the unraveling of my own sanity.

The lounge is deserted faintly lit by the green glow of the vending machine.

The refrigerator hums, emitting the familiar sire aroma of abandoned take-out containers.

I reach for my mug.

Even here, the sense of surveillance lingers.

The window sat in the fire door affects not only my own outline, but something that lingers

just outside the line of sight a taller shape indistinct.

Stealing my nerves, I tap the workphone and attempt to video the break room view, but

the screen displays only a grey ribbon of artifacted pixels, punctuated here and there

by after images of myself in the vending machine.

I step toward the far wall, pressing my ear to the hull of metal panel separating the

space from the main archive.

A fragment of sound tickles through, an ex-observer resets in three ires and sure transfer completed.

The voices are walted by distance, as they're spoken into an oil fron, yet the cadence

is a mystical, both familiar and foreign, as if belonging to past and present simultaneously.

I back away, pumped sweating, mug forgotten behind.

Returning to the corridors, I try to shake the sense of inevitability.

I think for a moment about simply walking out, leaving the files and whatever secrets

to archive gods.

But my feet wander bay, the urge to know what weighs the urge to forget.

The compulsion that clings to this place squeezes tighter with every unanswered question.

Near the elevators, at the intersection with the oldest wing, I meet her again before

she clocks out for the evening.

She hesitates, sighing the perspiration slicking my bra.

You are right, you look like you saw ghost.

For a second, I nearly tell her everything.

My mind floats with the idea of confession, but the look in her eyes half-doubt half-concern

warns me off.

Just a glitch in the system that pulled an all-nighter by mistake, I mumble.

She offers a tired, understanding smile.

People at the paper go scared you.

This place it.

Her voice falters as she leans closer.

My old supervisor told me people used to vanish here, back before all the renovations.

He called a ghost logic you do job so many nights in a row, sometimes you wake up somewhere

you don't belong.

Her words, meant to sooth, instead drive the chill deeper.

Once she disappears into the elevator, I find myself alone again.

The circuit between my growing pile of evidence and the pulsating anxiety within these walls

tightens.

I move back toward my desk, compelled to cross reference the names I've gathered with

every available index.

A new file copy sits in my print tree while not I did not request.

It's a personal evaluation for a staff member named Samuel B. dated 1976.

The photo attached is a fuzzy black and white headshot lurid at the edges, but the shape

of the jaw, the set of the eyes, they look like mine.

The entry records observer assignment and list three prior terms each reconciled with

that incident.

I page through, shaking, and see detailed notes, time continuity preserved, memory event

logged white post cycle, recommend next observer by internal referral criteria, caution,

resilience, routine loyalty.

My signature is at the bottom, initials correct, handwriting eerily close to my own, but

with the same job mess and antique flourish that haunts every anomaly I uncover.

I clutch the sheet, mind-reeling.

Every answer splinters into new questions.

Was I always meant for this?

This there a cycle, a script tying me to this desk for loops of history I can only glimped

between the lines.

How many versions of Sam have paced these holes?

How many times have the files been adjusted just enough to erase the evidence smooth the

seams?

Push the story forward without a witness?

The realization comes soft, but it settles like cement, the archive is not just keeping

city records.

It's editing them.

And as I move from shadow to lamplight, the building leans in closer and dispainting,

correcting, looping back.

Whatever force rides the wires and stalks the corridors, it isn't passive.

Its logic is recursive.

It anticipates investigation, even as it consumes the investigator.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz.

I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long time reporter and an on-air contributor

to CNBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going.

They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your

colleagues, and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your

podcasts.

A child rafts through the lobby as I return to file to my jacket pocket.

The front doors, heavy and reinforced, rattle gently and their friends not from outside

wind but as if something inside wants out.

My reflection in the segmented glass is fragmented, split into a dozen overlapping versions,

some turning away a second before I do.

I blink and they're lying again.

The iris crawling closer to 2.19 AM, the locus of all patterns.

I know, with a linking certainty, that I am seen.

That observation is participation and in participating, I've committed to the next act.

If I still hope to escape this history, or at least record it before the looper sets,

I'll have to catch the anomaly in the act.

I'll need proof that the world outside still recognizes my face, my name, my voice.

And if not, at least my own record of this pile of papers, these trembling wears may

linger a little longer, waiting for another observer to walk the corridor, to hear the

voices, to crack the cord of the archive that always hung us for order, for reconciliation,

for forgetting.

The building, I sense, is holding its breath with me, waiting for the cycle to begin again.

There's a sensation, part terror and part resolve that pins me in my chair as the digital

clock on my desk rolls forward minute by minute.

Each digits which carries the brittle inevitability of ice cracking underfoot.

I know what I have to do.

All day, the arcus patterns timing anomalies, evidence of recourse of tampering.

Staff logs infected with someone else's hand have pulled me inexorably toward the edge.

Now staring at my stack of impossible folders and the shallow light seeping under my

office door, I recognize that moment has arrived.

I line up everything as best I can, the polaro is stamped with future dates, the legal

pad page with my name ringed in thick pen, the audio cassette I swept from room 7, and

the file bearing my own face from nearly half a century ago.

If I don't start documenting, methodically and obsessively, I'll lose control of the

story maybe even of who I am.

Just before midnight, I close all the blackout shades in my alcove and switch to my personal

laptop, working by the glow of its cheap backlit keyboard.

I furrowed to gruff everything with my cell phone, then scan each page to a hidden cloud

drive a setup in college and never bothered to close.

It feels cartoonically paranoid, but I want evidence to lose in the world, or wed against

the arc of strange, hungry recursion.

I narrate details allied as I work, forcing my voice steady for the mic.

Documenting anomalies in file room 7 are known part as using cycles and retroactive edits

to city history, possibly since 1974.

Each sentence is a desperate bid for something real and verifiable that will exist beyond

tonight.

The building groans with its midnight aches.

Whenever I take a breath and listen, I hear slight movements in near-vents shifts too

careful for any animal or normal office sitting.

Pys is spot through the glass block of my door, a passing shape.

Neither match is the broad outline or clapping heels of the cleaning shift.

No one else should be on this floor at this hour.

Around 12.58 am, my computer logs me out unexpectedly.

The decked up blanks and reboots with a flick I don't command.

A new window opens, requesting a badge number with a 1970's municipal logo.

My palm grows damp.

I try again for my phone, but every app crashes or demands credentials I don't possess.

Before I can take a screenshot, the display raises itself, returning to my home wallpaper

at pale, backdated photo of the city skyline.

The phone vibrates a system notification this time reading only, do not let them in.

No sender.

Hand it claws at me, sharp but familiar by now.

I catch myself chewing inside of my cheek, grinding myself in pain and texture.

If the archive is somehow aware if it corrects more than records I need to add before it

raises not only evidence but my ability to act at all.

Moving fast, I back up whatever I still can to an external thumb drive.

I tug the audio reel from its box and snap a series of quick, haphazard photos of every

file and log sheet in my anomaly pile, never sure which will evaporate first, the paper,

the digital backup or my own collection.

By one, Tenei-Ham, airfields charged, tinge with static and damn black and approaching

storm.

The buildings ancient ductwork sings with odd, ahithmic pings.

A subtle, metallic draft passes under my door, bearing that familiar scent of distantee

in the promise of a reality account trust.

When I risked connecting to the city network again, I met with air after air or fell not

found, access denied, user session expired.

Yet, if I glance away in back, folder names have shifted.

A set called observer reports finishes, replaced by cycle 4 maintenance.

The timestamp spin, running aires ahead before resetting to the current time once more.

I try uploading to several offside email addresses and even a wiki forum I once frequented,

but on each send, the page times out before connection.

A single test file gets through to my supervisor, Lawrenceon.

Desperate, I add, please check these records tonight, Sam.

I wait for a reply that never comes.

A clock I've never seen before ticks somewhere just out of sight, audible for the thin

partition.

With each passing second, the sense of my own time running thin presses thicker behind

my sternum.

At 134, a new surge of determination cuts through the fork.

The only way out is through.

I gather my back, pocketing everything I can't afford to lose and prepare for a direct

confrontation with file room 7, but the archive has changed its ground.

The whole wave stretches unnaturally long, the far end pinched by an angular distortion

in the fluorescent bars overhead.

The air feels thicker, braided with a scent not just of ozone, but of something more

animal skin, dust and petrature.

The city outside has vanished, lost behind the building's fortress logic.

After we've done the haul, I pause at the staff bathroom to splash cold water across

my face.

When I look up, the mirror's reflection wobbles.

My face is mine, but not hairline subtly shifted at the dark circles under my eyes deeper

than even this night should earn.

For a breath, I think I see another figure sounding behind my shoulder, Tala, suited the

face's margin glass.

I swivel around, but the space is empty.

One at the far end by the old microfiche room, the double doors are a draw.

Soft yellow lights bills out, painting shapes in the scuff tile.

I should ignore it.

Instead, edge forward pulled by morbid curiosity and a necessity to know.

Inside, the microfiche reader is running clicking through cards on its feed, even though no

hand touches the controls.

On the screen flashes the secret property survey map stated four years in the future annotated

with names I recognise from the pending removal files.

Each entry appears, warps, then banishes names erased, replaced by anonymous codes or

simply empty, white space.

The machinery winds, then jams on a card-stamped batch, cycle 3, terminate.

With a lurch, the feed stops, and the room falls dead quite.

The noise from the hallway draws me back.

Janitor is trolley wheels, rolling with slow deliberation, echo across the marble.

I peer up.

The Cess Cricks card sits abandoned in the corridor, her flask of tea steaming like the one I found

in File Room 7.

Her voice pips up from behind a wall, urgent edge with fear, Sam, that dear.

Cess Crick?

I call, but it's the echo that answers.

One half beat off.

There's a sharp clatter of the sound of her keys hitting the marble, then nothing.

Hot pounding, I approach the card.

The flask is still warm to the touch, beads forming at its mouth.

On the cards battered clipboard, a loose sheet is pinned, and note in the same tie, leaping

hand, leap free, do not forget, all observers retain perred call until transfer confirmed.

My own name is gold next to the line observer status, unresolved.

Terror, sharper now, melds with fatalistic understanding.

I'm not the first.

There have been others, leap through the same ordeal trapped, a race replaced by the next

name in a list bureaucracy would never admit to keep.

Something lumber is in the dark beyond the bend.

A catch only, the hint of movement is suit, a head turned away.

When I call out, the figure slips down into a stairwell, the sound of descending footsteps

stuttering, less like walking, more like tip and winding.

I freeze beside the cart uncertain of weather to follow.

Instead, I snatch up the observer sheet and sprint back toward the security annex, desperate

for more facts, any leverage against this enders recursion.

The security room has suffered a storm.

Havnit doors hang open, the racks of key taped half-empted, plastic real scattered leg bones.

The desktop computer sits idling, with screen flickering outlines of corrupted code.

On a sticky note fluttering by the monitor, Samuel B. Zucker observer replacement complete,

it found, resume audit.

The phone rings just once in internal extension, broken by static.

I hesitate, pick it up.

Static, then eclipsed, accented female voice, file room 7 all anomalies due by 219.

The call cuts before I can reply.

I stare at the CCTV grid.

The feeds are black, flickering with ghost images corridors looping into themselves, sheets

moving in jerked, backward motion, doors opening and closing to no one's hand.

My own office appears, then blinks out.

Luffy, labored reception 76, shows the front hall as it might have been half a century

ago, shapeless custodians moving in greeny monochrome, faces blurred beyond memory.

Frantic, I search the physical keys.

The room's logbook is open to tonight, as interest scrolled in rounds, are cavauded

to pending update.

But each entry, as I flip back, seems to shift, names replace, events are scheduled.

My own handwriting, titan comp from anxiety, blows into the archaic's grip of my shadow

predecessor.

My focus kiddos from phrase to phrase, missing, H, court transfer, 1974's last leap

two, observer status, erasure scheduled.

Something is erasing us.

Stealthy, systematic.

The more we prod, the more the citri orders is alphard at mid-only sanctioned memory.

We allergy folds downstream of the paper trail.

My hands shake.

I need to get out to break the chain, but instead the compulsion titans, I must see the

podcast.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz.

I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long time reporter and an on air contributor

to CNBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going, to come from places

like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your

colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your

podcasts.

I don't have any access for myself.

I must know who or what is orchestrating this maintenance of oblivion.

The only way forward is to catch the afters it happens.

The corridor to file room seven now sprawls, swollen by impossible angles and stretches

of shadow.

Every door I pass holes are different weights, some heavy with expectation, others with negation

as a fortweight within has already decided whether I belong.

I duck into an unused office facing room seven and wedge myself behind a rusted file

cabinet.

As day motionless and silent, the ambient freeze deepening with each tick of the thermostat.

My watch reads 2-7-A-M.

Chadows converge and fold beneath the thin for us and tube and the sense of being observed

crest at the point of suffocation.

At 2-18 on the dock, the corridor's lights wobble, bleeding color and burning too bright,

then plunging to a head ashy half dark.

The door knob to file room seven shivers and turns.

The door swings inward on noiseless hinges.

But no creature, no worker passes through.

The pressure in the hallway intensifies.

My ears pop as if pushed by a descending elevator.

In the cold, tinged with herbs, electric sweeps outward, carrying with it a drifting

flurry of loose file sheets in the distant, distorted echo of half-remembered voices.

Something displaces the air.

The stack of records atop a cart edges across the linoleum, paper shuffling and rearranging

of their own accord.

The teacup from before reappears on the desk at the threshold the curl of steam rising

as if invisibly disturbed.

In a margin of my sight there is motion, file folders, pens, disc lamps, polaroids all

shifting under their own bleak deliberation.

A shape mostly empty-suit had hovered by haloed dark distortion lens over the desk, placing

fat folders atop fragile evidence.

It tans, when they appear at all, are indistinct, blurred, unreal, the suggestion of muscle beneath

upmoded cloth.

The voices swell, a chant formed from dozens of tones.

File, reconcile, correct, forget, file, reconcile, correct, forget.

Each phrase overlaps, dissonant, collapsing into noise.

My phone, hidden under my knee, vibrates with a new notification, do not let them in,

all memory must be scheduled for review, await the observer.

Huls hammering, angle the phone to snap a photo or video or anything at all.

The moment I do, a wave of cold hits, and the camera up to solves replaced by a blank

notification screen.

I jammed the phone back in my bag and, desperate for a physical document, snatched the closest

file from the moving supply card.

As soon as the folder leaves the cart, the world royals.

The corridor warps, the architectural seems buckling in, would like the barrel of a lens

twisted by a child's hand.

Every console, every door, bends away from escape.

Exit signs spin out of place.

The floor was tilt beneath my feet.

I stagger forward, driven blind by panic and necessity, and hurl myself down the hole

the door that was 15 pieces away now 50, now 3, now 20 again.

I grip the stall and fold it to my chest, certain it's my only leash to reality.

The geometry offers no safe passage.

Every rep falls me back toward file room 7, panel shifting behind me, corridors and spooling,

and the spooling is if the building remembers not just what has happened, but what it must

soon choose to recall.

Noise erupts at the tempest of old papers for interlation roars, the distant tinkle of

a bell from reception.

In the chaos, the entity at my back lurk is forward, voice booming not from mouth of throat

but from the marrow of the walls themselves.

Represses because the others are forgotten, the record must remain clean, do not admit unregistered

observers.

The phrase is echoed by every vent, every conduit.

I crash into what I hope is the main switching junction, shoulder first, darring the folder

loose from my grip.

This lides beneath the threshold of a supply closet I no longer recognise.

A cold appraisal falls on my neck, like the weight of a public verdict.

I turn cornote exhausted out of rational strategies, standing in the intersection is a man.

Or a perfect echo of one, late fifties, severe suit, tie knotted with bureaucratic compulsion,

features distended by the same monochrome glare as the oldest file photos.

His eyes are dark and busy, scanning me with an archivist detachment.

He should not remember this, Sam, he says mildly, his mouth out of sync with the words.

The file rooms endured by process, what is unfiled as am made.

My own voice emerges as a brittle whisper.

What did you do to them to the missing people?

What are the loops?

He stood as me, and in his shadow something rise, as though a dozen faces flicker beneath

the mascages and eras all tied by the same thing chain.

There are witnesses, he intones, his voice gathering volume until it shudders the glass.

Patents that over on the space feature removal necessary for city integrity.

He steps closer.

The walls poles with invisible weight.

In my peripheral vision the box's bare new ghastly labels erase the two pending cycle

four.

Each observer draws attention to gaps, he says.

So observers become gaps, if you're wise, you'll let go and let us follow you away.

A shake struggling to keep my wits.

People live those histories don't they matter.

He gestures, and the corridor dissolves into a spinning carousel of images, so he blocks

erased and replaced, faces smeared into monotony, headlines blotted out with bureaucratic

black ink.

The matter is paperwork, and paperwork can be changed, as is he our order depends on the

wreck, we perform the reconcilations, no one remembers the alternatives.

The walls ripple with brutal efficiency.

From them, forces excite children calling from others, real estate agents declaring new

parcels, a judge is gavel beating.

In the tumult, I glanced my own image among the observers, my face ovaleid and devired

by static.

All possibilities pinched toward a single compulsion upload, broadcasts, make no somehow

let the world know if only for a second, what's being hidden.

A Korean toward the reception hall, armful of papers, and broken logic folders in tow.

The monitors throughout the building flicker.

I sign the button on the nurse into calm, voice shaking as I shout.

This is Sam B, municipal records night clerk, if you hear this, the archive is erasing people,

the files are alive, someone, anyone, please check the logs.

The entity archivist bureaucratic judge, whatever keeps the ledger shutters.

The front door's fracture, pains cracking into spider webs but holding.

I smashed the flash drive of evidence into the auxiliary USB on the main desk, uploading

uploading.

I'm Malta, voice knifing for bone and panic.

I hear doors closing all around, the archive sprinting backward in hungry, recursive loops.

For a single wicked instant, the upload is accepted to then the computer crashes, displaced

battered with fermented lines and the single phrase, reconciled.

A shadow overtakes a glass entry.

The lights blink out, replaced by oily, purple tinge darkness.

I fling myself forward, feeling space shift, the floor upending beneath my feet.

My last conscious act is to grab a printup one bearing my own name, stamped pending.

A memory rolls a new wound, pins me as I fall, if the record says you were not, you never

were.

The world roars, walls inside the archive, collapsing into a vortex, reception flickering

between its present state and some distant, sepia-toned architecture.

The last thing I see before I black out is the silhouette of the archivist watching,

arms folded, as if weighing whether I will be catalogued or perched.

When I wake, the world has lost density.

The hospital room smells sharp, a stringent and different perifin and latex.

A police officer speaks into measured tones of summon board with paperwork.

You were found in the old record wing, locked in, no sign of forced entry.

The overhead lights too bright carve into my vision, and nurse checks my wristband then

returns to her station without meeting my eyes.

When the officer tries to hand back my bag of now, I ended up everything but my phone

and wallet I catch is guarded from.

He said he worked for the city, not shift, right, but human resources didn't find your

badge number.

Might be a system issue, he says, with a holocharity of a man who's learned not to probe

deeper than necessary.

They ask questions I can't answer, not without risking dismissal as delusional.

I mention the files, the police reports, as the only paperwork found in the secure wing

was a sheaf of outdated tax forms and inventory stunt 20 years out of date.

No sign of Polaroid's tapes or the legal pad.

My thumb drive is missing.

My story, when I try to tell it bounces off the armor of procedural skepticism.

The attending psychiatrist asks polite, circular questions, concludes with a recommendation

for arrest and avoidance of stimulants.

After a day, I'm quietly released on suspension, pending further investigation.

Mr. Lawrence and his are freeing from a manual calls to say my access badge is deactivated.

He offers no words of comfort or discipline.

After a restructuring record keeping protocols, he mumbles, then hangs up.

When I check him with colleagues, their response is curdled with confusion.

Hannah's number is disconnected.

Mrs. Crick, when I stop her outside the building, looks at me as though struggling to place

a face from a forgotten dream.

He from payroll, she says, then walks away.

Eventually, even my own memory slips.

Routine becomes porous, days miss a line, facts cramble.

I prowl city forums, searching for chatter about the wreckage building, vanishings,

any sign that someone else feels the rupture.

Here and there, a post pops up, anyone know why council minutes from last year are gone,

a lost service records anyone else, my uncle's house on Mercer wasn't that block always

empty?

The replies are glued dismissive.

The information elostics up quietly and acknowledge beneath the city's ongoing present.

What's left to me is disjointed and incomplete.

My computer, a home still holds a cluster of garbled files amiss of corrupted scans,

broken images, audio hisses with only the recessional phrase, do not let them in.

When I play it back, the speaker sounds like me, but too slow too far away.

Sometimes I wonder if I truly escaped the archive or if the building simply edited

me into the new cycle, allowed a version of Sambi to wander outward, less for resolution

and fanart of tidiness.

Hi, this is Alex Cantrowitz, I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a long time reporter

and an on-air contributor to CNBC.

And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing

the business world and our lives.

So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech

and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going, to come from places

like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more.

So if you want to be smart with your wallet, your career choices, and meetings with your

colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology podcast wherever you get your

podcasts.

One night, unable to sleep, I find myself drawn back to the city's old accordor well after

midnight.

The records building looms at the end of the block, its windows blacked, entry chain

against the world.

A battered sign reads condemned, structural instability renovation scheduled.

Freshwood covers the loading docks lower windows, parked and splintered in patterns that

tinned at burns from within.

A side-long rain spits onto the street, swirling in the sodium paper halos.

Across the avenue, I wait in the shelter of a closed-up tailor shop, my cut collar

high, hands deep in my pockets.

From here, the old basement window is visible a rectangle of sits stained glass, jagged

where the putty is filled.

I watch, expecting nothing.

But at 2 a.m., a faint, impossible glow stirs behind the boards.

The lines of shadow shift, not random, but with the slow, considered deliberation of a

system hard at work.

Through the glass, I spy the desk.

The bow and china teacup stands at its edge, steam curling off the surface.

Shadows flicker on the wall-form sorting, filing, cataloging records that bear dates

not yet lived.

As I squint, the shadows grow sharper, resolving into suited figures moving with purpose,

the face is blurred, as though the glass itself refuses to admit details.

One holes a file folded in, and the low light turns a page.

A glimpsor heading at the top my own name, type bold, beneath the label's cycle-pending

removal.

The city feels thinner for a moment, every surface charged with impending absence.

It shall coast when brushes my cheek.

Instinctively, I check my watch.

The hands align 2.19 a.m.

The light in the window gutters and the shadows on the wall reach, sorting to Morris history,

already racing what will never be recorded.

The light stutters, not simply flicking as faulty wiring, would each pulse narrows the

gulf between inside and out, as though recognition is working both ways through the gloom

stained glass.

My body is rigid, shoulders pressed to the rough brick, every nerve whispering at me to

move to duck from sight, because the longer I look, the more certain I grow that someone

or something, and the sunken office can see me just as clearly as I see them.

I step back, careful to keep my weight even shoes barely brushing broken sidewalk.

The air is dead with a smell almost like scorch-farnish, tinged by faint rays of tea leaves.

As the minute hand clicks over to two, wenty, the gathering light bench hop, casting the

curve of my shadow along the edge of the bordered window.

A single figure inside a side-late, profile smeared by the walk-glass pauses, turning toward

me.

The head-telts are gesture that feels and canally deliberate, slow with the gravity it up

belongs to near the stranger nor friend.

My breath fogs with each exhale.

In the hunch silence, I strain to hear beyond the hiss of rain and distance city traffic.

Paper rustles somewhere within the walls.

In a voice disordered by distance, but subtly clear threats through the building's crack

vent grates, observer not archived, status unmasolved.

That word, observer, lances down my vertebrae.

I fight the urge to look away, afraid acknowledgement itself might draw them closer.

A hand-white-backed, old, with the least skin of forgotten time presses a file against

the glass.

For an instant, the label is legible, letters crisp despite the filth, some will be pending

cycle four.

My memory offers up its own echo, all observers become gaps.

Behind the file, more figures gather at silhouette stacking folders, feeding them through what

appears, and possibly to be both the scanner and a male slaughter hybrid contraption older

than any city tech, yet alive with digital purpose.

The files pass from hand to hand, lost as quickly as this surface, their contents sucked into

the machinery that sorts the living from the erased.

By now the cold is deep in my bones.

I press my hands together for warmth, but my palms are slick with sweat.

I reach for my phone, intending to snap a photo or a video of final cat logging, if only

for myself but as I tap the camera at the screen holes dark, the controls frozen.

If vibrates in my hand, the old notification blinking, do not let them in.

No matter my thumb's direction, the camera will not open.

Inside the figures break from routine.

One glides toward the back wall, returns with a fresh file box, and sets it down by

the window.

The box is no dust, no label but a barco, which is somehow no cannot be read by any scanner

in this city.

The suited form leans into a shaft of light, head cocked as those sniffing for the source

of my tension.

The impression is less of being watched and of being recognised or record reencountering

and entry it meant to delete.

The tension tightens.

I want to move to run, to do anything but stand fix, yet no muscle cooperates.

A flecker of memory that weighed the building's landscape shifted the night, and nearly

didn't get out crowds of sense.

A glance left, then right, worry of passes by, but the block is empty, the world contracted

to only light, rain, and these rooms neaking and are making the city.

Movement inside, the leaf figure steps away from the file box, they're back now to me.

Another replaces them.

This one's shoulders are hunched, the outline narrower, less at home in the antiquated

suit.

My skin prickles.

The slope of the neck, the tilt of the chin, is familiar in a way that settles like

I swat her in my guts.

I squint, willing the gaster is off the rest.

The figure's right hand lifts, gently, and more it could almost be a wave or a beckoning.

My fingers clenched, nails biting skin.

Reason is crumbling, but I need to no need some fracture in this pageantry of erasure

that will prove to me, even in this laid-io, that I haven't already been written

out.

A distance irons daughter's city life somewhere else, insistent, ignorable.

The light beyond the window shivers again, the suited figures inside freeze, all at once,

heads turning in unison toward the sheet of glass, as if a Q-only the hair has sounded.

For the briefest moment a face materialises my own, or the closest forximly eyes hollow,

maths set in the flat line of sleepwalking determination.

I see my reflection, overlayed those, see the possibility of becoming another anonymous

cloak stamped and filed.

Abruptly the glow from the office flares, then gutters.

All but the shadows dissolve, the window reverting to black opaque silence.

Rain gurgles in the guttering overhead, and the city resumes its Thai breathing.

My heart batters my ribs.

A release of breath I don't recall holding, stepping back into the dark awning of the

shopfront.

I let several minutes crawl by, not trusting the stillness, by dintime until the pressure

in my chest loosens.

Each second hydens the uncanny sense of having breached protocol of being observed by something

as methodical as it isn't human.

No movement returns behind the glass.

The boarded doorway, rumoured for renovation, is just plowed and walked locks once more,

yet the certainty persists inside.

The archives mechanism is not only intact but thriving, taking stock and preparing for

its next cycle.

When the edge of fear finally dills, I move away, one step, then another hands jammed deep

into pockets as if to anchor myself in a body that, for all I know, might vanish with

the next narrative added.

The city's pulse settles back into ordinariness a couple arguing in muffled tons of blockaway,

a delivery van idling by the curb, the soft bark of a dog.

The walk home passes in a fugue.

Each corner and crossing bears a residue of memory places that might have held more substance,

if not for the quiet work of the archive.

I keep seeing tiny cracks in realities façade, a street sign with no name, a storefront that

sells nothing, an apartment buzzer panel with half the buttons missing.

Each gap, I suspect, is not natural way, but deliberate maintenance holes in the tap

street to smooth over a city that can't bear to keep all its own stores.

Inside my apartment, where the odors of dust and old coffee ground me in the part of

myself that survived, I pace beneath the dim light of the kitchen.

The window looks over a narrow alley, the city's towers distant and serene.

On the table, my laptop sits where I left it, desktop icons unchanged, a handful of audio

files labeled with dates, a folder of photos no only half accessible.

When I open the first scan, one of the forms snatched from the file room, the image bleed

and reforms, texture written with each attempt.

The name Sam will be who becomes redacted, pending cycle the files creation date looped

backward then forward, finally rendering as error record not found.

The audio file won't play, not through any ordinary means.

I use an old tape deck, splicing the reel with trembling fingers.

The playback is fractured, forces stitch for static.

In new cycle, observer status unresolved to maintain record salation, race record city

integrity.

A pause.

My voice, a mistakeable, overlays the rest, as if already dubbed into the system.

If you do not let them, the sentence breaks, distorted by the same digital hunger that

is snowed at every piece of evidence.

At dawn, sleep is impossible.

I begin the slow circuit of the city's online spaces, message boards dedicated to loss and

found, local mysteries, old photographs.

I post in threads that attract only cryptic responses.

Anyone remember the old records office on fifth?

Three replies, all core, no idea, you sure you're not thinking of courthouse archives, and

then, Irish later, a user named Cyclon into nine, try room seven, but don't stay too

long after dark.

I write back, fingers flying, desperate for more who are you.

What do you know?

But the thread closes itself, post erased, user banned, my own reply marked as duplicate

content.

For the rest of the day, no further mention surfaces.

It is though even digital trails are being scrubbed, sanitized, erased.

A week pulls past and slow, oxygen starved increments.

The world is normal on the surface, male rives groceries run low, my father calls about

a plumbing leak, and yet the city around me is thinning.

Newspapers misspelled names in the community section.

A high school disappears from a map in a city tourism pamphlet.

My own neighborhood newsletter arrives in a mail, the block address shifted by a number,

as though the building itself had always been two doors down from reality.

More than once, I see a familiar figure, a suit to posture too formal for the neighborhood

watching from the far side of a busy plazo at the entrance to the subway.

The faces refuse detail, lost in the crowd, but each time I see them, my skin shrinks

tight with the certainty that the archive is ensuring the routine of forgetting.

The tension ratchets tighter as the days pass.

Sleeplessness brings odd memories to the surface, I recall a conversation with Hannah,

which I'll review could not have happened as she no longer exists in any directory.

I find a slip of paper in my jacket pocket traced in that same looping and tea-canned

cycle transfer pending, if observed, reconcile immediately.

A dusk one evening, my phone rings a number blocked, no name.

I answer.

Static, a click, and then a whisper, file room seven is open close what must be closed.

The line goes dead before I can respond.

Desperate for any sign of shared reality, I return to the municipal building the next

night, circling its perimeter as dusk stains the city grey and purple.

The sight shrouded with scaffolding and top is still dead, windows packed with dust and

memories.

Yet as I drift along the chain-link fence, the smallest window near the ground pretends

with a glimmer of phosphorescent blue.

A flick of movement flashes inside a slant shouldered suit, clothed hand fearing a folder

from one impossible shove to another.

My chest heightens hands bruck in the fence until my knuckles pale.

Without thins the air, the heavy door at street level battled and chained shifts then

settles a subtle invitation or warning.

I consider walking away, melting back to the anonymity of city life, fading into a routine

free from the regressive meddling of those inner rooms.

But the compulsion remains, weren't into whatever story the building has written into

me.

A back away, crossing the empty lot, determined this time to leave the cycle closed.

The city, I tell myself, can survive without another observer.

I make it halfway to the next block before the memory strikes the cup of tea in touch,

but ever brimming, the whisper directive do not let them in.

It's not just a prohibition, but an ongoing instruction, a warning shaped as leterogy

for the forgot.

Unable to fully let go, I try again to catalog what remains.

In my kitchen, surrounded by every half-salver's fragment of proof, I built and makeshift portfolio

printouts of faded locks, screenshots of directory listings that flicker and vanish,

handwritten notations that bleed at the edge like wet newsprint.

I narrate every step, giving voice to files and faces the city no longer remembers.

I reach out to an old friend of Darren, once a press intern at the city paper.

I avoid detail, asking instead if any rumours about lost archives or missing properties

have surfaced.

His laughter is tinny uncertain.

Everyone loses files sometimes, Sam, the digital transitions of Mass, whole neighborhood

probably vanished just because someone missed the upward folder.

But do you remember room seven?

My voice is sharp and expected.

There's a pause.

Wasn't that condemned?

They used to kid about files working out on their own, but it was probably just mulled.

You worry too much, man.

There's no point persisting.

We say goodbye a little clipped.

Another old name, another untested memory.

Resigned, I close my laptop and sit at the window as night-protrucks it's hold on the

city.

There's a moontonite, hung sharp as a pin through the hay is thin enough to cast only the

weakest shadows.

I wonder how many blocks in the city have been subtly pruned, how many names exist only

as echoes and backup servers or errant memories.

A sleep sidles up, I hear again the voice from the tape we only exist because the others

were forgotten.

I know, now, that it's true for me as much as for anyone in those files.

One restless doll and I find myself pen in hand, writing my own name on the last page

of my notebook.

The act feels less like a signature than like an attempt at preservation a trace of myself

left in ink, perhaps enough to resist an iron grip of revision.

I did it draw shaky circle around the name and add observer unresolved memory active.

With petty defiance, a minor monument against the machinery of forgetting, but it's all

I have.

I'm whenever I rise that morning, I trust I will still be here that my apartment wouldn't

be occupied by someone else in every memory but mine that the building across town will

keep its secrets, at least for another cycle.

But I know, deep down, that the record is always hungry, always revising.

I'm a ghost in the city now, noted in pencil, imagines that might be erased tomorrow.

As I prepare to leave for work a different job now, say for profile, I urge that promise

sunlight rather than siphoning dusk I shake my pockets for keys, wallet, foam.

There is a slip of paper I don't remember folding, odd it's scheduled to 19 am, observer

status, review.

The handwriting is my own except it isn't, not anymore.

Brain drums and the roof, city humming with a purpose I will never again trust as benign.

Yet as I step out, I keep the scrap of paper close, proof against the lurking machinery

of the unfiled, the unresolved, the simply forgotten.

And on nights when I pass near the condemned archives, when the Iolines close to the change

of outwind the airways, deck in the city's collective memory, things I sometimes glimpse

a flicker behind those shattered windows, desk with a teacup, a waiting file, a shape

sorting the paperwork of erasure.

I do not go closer.

I do not let them in.

But each time I feel the weight of a gaze, I wonder if I already have.

And when the clocks of the city slip for a moment, and I find my name almost on the

tip of my own tongue and no further, I remember always what the record demands.

To be filed is to be real, but only for as long as the archival allows.

It's 2.19 am.

The wind sifts through the alas, and some more deep inside the municipal archive, the

next cycle is starting.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next one.