Archive 09. Aug 25, 12:07
The air was sharp this morning, cooler than usual for late August. The walk to the Archive felt longer than it should have, my steps echoing against the empty corridor walls. Outside, people were gathered in the square again, watching the morning broadcast on the central screen. I didn't stop, but I caught a glimpse. Archon's symbol—those three concentric rings—hovered there like it always does, spinning slowly, endlessly. No words, no speeches today. Just the emblem, radiating its calm certainty. That was enough for them.
What struck me wasn't the symbol but the stillness of the crowd. Nobody shifted, nobody fidgeted. They stood with their hands at their sides, eyes raised as though fixed on some invisible thread. I paused long enough to count them—forty, maybe fifty souls—and realized no one was speaking. Not a whisper, not a cough. Just silence, broken only by the occasional flutter of a flag in the breeze.
Inside the Archive, the usual monotony greeted me: files, records, endless pages to catalog. I handled famine reports again. This time from the southern zones. Numbers, graphs, curves rising and falling like waves on a flat ocean. Everything neat. Too neat. History reduced to arithmetic.
At lunch, the paste tray was late by two minutes. A minor delay, but the attendants in the hall looked lost without their routine. One muttered "strange" before catching himself and falling silent. Two minutes gone, and they stood stiff as statues until the machine hissed to life.
I wrote this down because it all felt connected—the crowd, the symbol, the silence, the delay. Threads weaving through the day, pulling tighter. It's probably nothing.
But maybe nothing has its own weight.