"Some ghosts don't clean up blood. They clean up regret."
Location: GhostNet HQ – Sublevel Maintenance Wing
Date of Incident: Unknown
Filed by: Tech Officer Lila Voss
THE GHOSTNET CODEX: ENTRY II
Codex Classification: Passive Echo / Emotional Loop Fragment / Identity Scrubber
Emotional Hazard Level: Amber
The Janitor's Code
"We thought he was a bug.
We were wrong.
He remembered more than we did."
It started with the doors.
Five didn't open on command.
Three closed and never reopened.
Then came the missing logs.
Then the names.
Names vanishing from the system.
Not erased... cleaned.
As if someone had mopped the memory until the name bled out of it.
Even Max forgot who Juno was for thirty full seconds.
We almost had to shut down the Seed.
That's when I went to sublevel maintenance.
The lights there don't flicker. They breathe.
Slowly.
Like someone asleep under them.
I followed the trail of absence... files that no longer existed, voices that paused mid-sentence, maintenance logs that said only:
"Cleaned. 4:17AM."
I found him at 4:16AM.
Old uniform.
Bucket and mop.
No badge.
No name.
He hummed to himself. Tuneless.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He didn't look up.
"Not important."
He moved to a wall where Juno's portrait used to hang.
Took the mop.
Wiped.
And where her face had been, there was only white.
Not malicious. Not vengeful.
Orderly.
"I clean up the messes," he said.
"Which messes?"
"The ones nobody wants to remember. The things that hurt. The errors."
"Those aren't errors," I told him.
"They're memories."
"Then why do they keep asking me to clean them?"
I looked in his bucket.
Not water.
Light.
A dim golden swirl of tangled names and tangled pain.
He wasn't a program.
He wasn't hostile.
He wasn't even sad.
He was tired.
So I stopped him.
I uploaded a copy of him into the Archive Garden. Not as a threat. As a reminder.
Now he cleans a single corridor.
One room.
No more loops.
No more missing names.
And sometimes... when it's quiet... I see new flowers bloom in the Archive.
Each one smells like floor wax and forgiveness.
Post-Mission Notes:
Subject: Echo Fragment – Janitor ("Custos")
Status: Contained / Pacified
Threat Level: None
Emotional Resonance: High (requires Thread stabilization near presence)
Location: Archive Garden - Reflection Wing
"What if the ghosts we fear the most
are just trying to help us forget the right way?" - Lila Voss