Archive 08. Aug 26, 15:51
The task remains the same—transcribe, file, tidy—but today something curious happened. While working through the Reconstruction Narratives, I stumbled on two documents dated to the same week, and for a moment I thought I had misfiled them. Both were council records, both marked with the same archive seal, both concerning the early years of transition. Yet they did not align.
The first file described the appointment of a provisional assembly, a group of seven administrators chosen to oversee resource distribution in the wake of the Collapse. The minutes listed their names carefully, in neat block letters: Washington, Bush, Hoover, Kennedy, Roosevelt. These names recur often in early policy notes, always credited with guiding the old ages through the ways of life.
The second file, however, written only three days later, referenced five only. Two names missing—Hoover and Kennedy absent without remark, as though they had never existed. The remaining five proceeded with a vote on agricultural zoning, their decisions carried forward into the neat historical timeline that every student now memorizes. No corrections, no amendments, no indication of change. Simply a smaller number, a different truth.
I cross-checked the registry indices, expecting perhaps a clerical oversight. But the official ledger recognizes only the five. There is no Hoover, no Kennedy. Their names appear only in that first, discarded document, a single echo of something erased.
At first, I dismissed it as a copy error, a duplication of files with early drafts mixed in. These things happen, though rarely, and the protocols are designed to minimize them. Still, something about the handwriting caught me. The signatures at the bottom of both pages were identical—the same slanted flourish of Washington, the same broad strokes of Maren. These were not forgeries or mistaken copies. They were real. And yet, they disagreed.
The work required me to proceed with the second file, the official five-member record, and file the first under "Obsolete Drafts." That is the protocol, after all. But I admit, I hesitated. There was a moment, as I slid the first document into its drawer, when I wondered: what happens to the things that contradict? Do they remain buried forever, or are they slowly gathered, piece by piece, until the contradictions themselves are smoothed into another narrative of certainty?
I made a small note in my personal journal here, though nowhere else. Not suspicion—merely observation. Perhaps it is nothing more than the natural mess of early governance, a transitional chaos later clarified by time. History always edits itself, after all. But still, I find myself picturing Storr and Veyna, two names that appear in one breath and vanish in the next, erased as cleanly as chalk on slate.
When the evening bells sounded, I left the archive feeling oddly unsettled. Outside, the air was heavy with the scent of rain, though no storm had been forecast. For a brief moment, as the clouds thickened, I thought of that lost council, and how fragile memory must have been in those first years.
Perhaps tomorrow the records will align more neatly.