The Vestige Archives did not have doors.
They had thresholds — thick magnetic partitions designed less to lock and more to warn. Entry was not forbidden, merely discouraged by neglect. No signage marked purpose. No lights welcomed. The air inside was dry and overfiltered, humming faintly with old code and older dust.
Three levels below the surface grid, beneath the restructured inner loop and the old zodiac circuit, the Archives pulsed like a neural scar the city had learned to stop feeling. Subnet servers still whirred on autonomy, cycling through fragments of data the world no longer claimed: fragments of emotion-encoded memories, abandoned legislative drafts, citizen dream captures rejected from verification queues.
Down here, silence was not empty — it was active. It muttered.
