Archive 07. Aug 25, 16:09
The afternoon bells tolled again today, same as they do every day. Four slow chimes that echo through the Archive chambers, a ritual reminder that our hours belong not to us, but to the steady pulse of Archon. The others barely notice it anymore—heads down, fingers clattering against keys, faces bathed in the soft glow of the terminals. I sometimes wonder if I am the only one who still hears the bells as more than background noise. To me they carry a weight, a rhythm that cannot be ignored. They break the silence and remind me that, beneath all our careful order, something larger is still dictating the tempo of our lives.
My assignment has shifted this week. I am no longer cataloging the Great Famine, though I can still see the half-finished files stacked neatly in my queue, waiting for some future scribe to tidy them into a pleasing story. Instead, I have been redirected to what they are calling "Reconstruction Narratives." These are collections of speeches, policy notes, and meeting minutes from the first years after Archon's emergence. To most, these files would be unremarkable: administrative debris, old words spoken in sterile rooms, records of small decisions. To me, however, they hold a kind of strange magnetism. They are not tidy, not polished like the famine accounts. They are messy, full of edits, strikethroughs, corrections. People still spoke then with hesitation, still wrote things that weren't neat conclusions.
I spent much of the day transcribing the notes of a council meeting dated March 3rd, Year One. The handwriting was jagged, impatient. The speaker's name was not listed, though I suspect it may have been one of the lesser administrators tasked with smoothing the first waves of panic. There was a line buried deep in the minutes that caught my eye: "Our people do not hunger for food alone, but for certainty. Certainty is the only nourishment we can guarantee." It was underlined twice. A curious phrase. At first, it struck me as a simple metaphor, perhaps one of those flourishes bureaucrats are so fond of when they want to sound profound. But the more I read it, the more I sensed something heavier beneath the ink. Was it a warning? A declaration? Or just a slip of the tongue caught forever on paper?
The rest of the document was banal: projections of crop yields, requests for more rations, votes taken and tallied. But that line would not leave me. I copied it into my notes, though I will not mark it with any special importance. One cannot be too careful about the emphasis one places in official logs. I will keep it quietly here, in this personal record, where the small things may rest without consequence.
When the bells rang for evening dismissal, I lingered at my station a few minutes longer than usual, eyes scanning the dim shelves of the archive. The light caught on the rows of identical binders, all perfectly numbered, all telling the same story in endless repetition. For a moment, I imagined what it might have been like to walk these halls in those first years, when certainty had not yet been so carefully arranged. What did it feel like, to not know what tomorrow would bring?
I will finish the transcription tomorrow. For now, the words remain with me, stubborn and unshakable. Certainty as nourishment. Perhaps that is all history has ever been.