This is the full short story as some people said theyâd like to read the whole thing, so here it is!
The archivist sat with the bundle of papers in his hands, unaware that this moment would mark the turning point of his life. From here, all would change. The belief system that had kept him aliveâingrained, unexamined, absoluteâwas about to fracture.â
The day had begun like all the others he could remember, which, by the Regimeâs measure, were all the days he had ever known. No more, no less.
The call to work roused him from an uneasy sleep. He pulled on his archivist robes: deep red, embroidered with the gold eye of oversight on the chest. Ornate in appearance, the fabric was a cheap syntheticâuncomfortable to wear for more than an hour. Cotton, what little remained, was reserved for the white-robed class. Their robes bore no eye. Nothing to remind them they were being watched. For they were the watchers, and their judgment was law.
Breakfast was the usual sorry affairâhard cheese and stale bread, all that his ration card would allow. He ate quickly, watching the clock to ensure he left precisely when he should. Lateness was neither encouraged nor tolerated. He arrived at the Archive Hall as the clocks struck nine.
And so he came to be sitting with the bundle of papers in his hands, unknotting the twine that held them together. They had come from a box marked Category Câthe most dangerous classification: handwritten artifacts. In a state where memory was so fundamentally repressed, such documents represented an absolute truth. There could be no revision. No modification. Not without leaving behind some trace.
Almost by habit, he glanced around to see if anyone was watching. The cameras were, of course. But there was no one else nearby. The paper was oldâhe could tell by its thickness between his fingers. Regime stock was thin and brittle, endlessly recycled, like the constant revisions of its content. The creamy, embossed kind was reserved for death warrantsâthe only documents intended to last forever.
There was a date in the top corner. The day and month were meaningless. The Regime numbered time from the start of its rule. He didnât know what year he currently lived inâno citizen didâbut the one written on the page tugged at the corners of his mind. It wasnât a memory exactly, but more of a hollow where a memory ought to sit. He felt as though his brain was wrapped in the same synthetic fabric of his robes, with a friction and static that set him at unease.
As he scanned the page, it slowly clicked into place: this was a registry of birth. He tried to move past the date and read on, but his eyes were drawn back to it. Then details began to jump out at him; the parentsâ names sent a shiver through him, and his chest tightened, as though the air in the Archive Hall had thickened. His finger traced the ink. The place of birth made his hands tremble, though he didnât know why. The name of the town meant nothing. And yet it felt as if it had once meant everything. It was like a fragment of a dream, turned to sand upon waking.
The sound of footsteps on polished marble jolted him from reverie. Suddenly, and without knowing why, he folded the paperâonce, then againâand thrust it into the inner pocket of his robes. The fabric caught and rasped against the back of his hand, and he was forcefully aware he had never used the pocket before. By the time he sensed a white-robed presence behind him, he held the next sheet from the bundle in his hands, his face a blank mask once more. The reality of what he had done did not fully register, only that it could not be undone.
As the footsteps faded, he dared not look around. Instead, he tried to think. Would the cameras have seen his unintentional rebellionâhis theft of written word, of the most dangerous form of memory? Would that creamy paper, even now, be filled in with his name and rank? Would he vanish in the night, never to be seen againâevery trace of him scrubbed from existence?
He passed the rest of the day on autopilot, glancing over each sheet for anything that might be worth preserving before marking it for incineration. None of the other handwritten documents evoked the same response as the one now hidden in his pocket, and he couldnât keep his mind from wandering back to it. He stayed at his desk through lunch, as the other archivists came and went. It did not draw suspicion; to be lost in one's work was seen as a virtue. The sacrifice of the self for the good of the regime.
Still, he could not keep his focus. Countless documents destroyed, so many memories erased. He had never given much thought to it beforeâwords on paper had always seemed abstract, unreal. The people they referenced were sinners, heretics, the unsaved masses. But this paperâthe one he felt inexplicably bound toâwas different.
None of this turmoil broke the surface, and he played his role until the end-of-day call sounded. Walking home, he felt as though the paper in his pocket was a beacon, aflame with a siren blaring. But the men with guns posted on every corner paid him no mind, and the cameras did not follow his movements. He made it back to his block of flats, sweating more than was usual for the short walk. He expected a shout, a raised hand pointing in his direction, the stamp of boots coming his way. But he made it through his door, and as it closed, collapsed against it.
And the wave of anxiety broke over him as memory started to return. The year was familiar because it was his year. The town was his town. With shaking hands, he retrieved the sacred paper from his pocket, and this time he read it greedily.
As he pored over the paper, his fingers traced the parentsâ namesâhis parentsâ namesâand his eyes began to fill with tears. They fell thick and fast as he committed every detail to memory. The clash between the truth of his past and the regimeâs clinical erasure of it tore through his mind, too vast to hold, too real to deny.
As the memories carved new paths through his brain, his tears gradually blotched the document beyond comprehension. Then, slowlyâas his breathing steadied and the shaking subsidedâhe rose and made his way to the stove. He clicked on the burner. The paper hovered inches from the flame, wafted gently by the rising heat. It was far too risky to keep it, he knew that deep down. But holding the thing in his hands, the link to his past gave him an enormous sense of self.
That was what the Regime took awayâthe very core of your being. They whitewashed every citizen with the same anonymity. If you didnât fit into their plan for the way things must be, you were simply removed from the equation. Your body, your belongings, your memoryâall burned. Incinerated like the heretical papers.
He recited the details in his mind one last time: the names, the place, the year. Then, when he was sure he would never forget them, he moved his hand slightly, and the flame took hold. It consumed the evidence of his transgression against the Regime until the heat pinched his fingers and he dropped the final corner. The fire had eaten it before it hit the ground, and the thing was gone.
He would carry it with him forever, though, like a talisman within. It provided what the Regime took away. From now on, the smell of burning paper would ignite the memory inside him.
And so, with his first small act of rebellion, the archivist became the archive.
