I rarely speak to anyone at work.
Most Archivists don't. We drift through the halls like ghosts, carrying other people's memories while avoiding our own. The building is always too quiet — a cathedral of fluorescent lights and humming servers.
I walked straight to my office, as always, badge flashing green when Mnemosyne approved my clearance. The door slid open with a tired sigh.
"New customer request: #230854 — Echo corruption detected."
The AI's voice echoed softly through the interface.
"Alright," I muttered. "Let's get to it."
I slipped on the neural gloves, opened the corrupted file, and began stitching memory fragments back into coherence.
It was nothing unusual — a broken childhood Echo, a lost smell of cinnamon, fractured laughter along a beach. People always brought us the pieces they couldn't bear to lose.
By the time I finished, the sun was already leaning into the horizon. Most Archivists had gone home.
I was packing up when the screen lit again.
"New customer request: #230913 — Echo corruption detected."
I should've let it wait until morning.
But routine was better than silence, and work was safer than thought.
I accepted.
The corrupted Echo flickered before me — dim, distorted, low emotional resolution. As I isolated the neural segments, a faint sound threaded through the static.
A voice.
A soft, familiar voice.
Her voice.
My chest tightened. My breath caught.
Ari.
I froze, waiting for Mnemosyne's anomaly alert — waiting for a warning, a spike in neural readings, anything that meant I wasn't imagining it.
Nothing.
The interface remained calm, unbothered, clinical.
The voice dissolved into static.
Hope surged — then died just as quickly, crushed under the weight of reason. If Ari's voice had somehow echoed through the system… the AI would have caught it. Filed it. Flagged it. Reported it.
I closed the file with trembling hands and went home with a heart split between grief and something more painful — possibility.
Ari Lenne.
My girlfriend.
My almost-fiancée.
The brightest part of my analog world.
And the last person I ever expected to lose.
She had asked me once — smiling soft, holding my hand — if we could upload the memory of our first date. "Just so we never forget it," she said. I thought it was sweet.
I didn't know that would be the last day she ever stood on her own feet.
A system-wide data collapse happened mid-scan. A surge so violent it ruptured the neural field. Her brain—her real, biological brain—took the damage.
They kept her alive by machines.
And I watched.
I watched until the doctors unplugged her from the world.
I returned to the office the next day anyway. That's the kind of man I am — or maybe the kind the job made me.
But something small, something fragile, hid in the corner of my heart. A hairline crack of hope.
I searched the archive, combing through old logs, unused partitions, forgotten clusters. Nothing surfaced. Nothing changed.
Until the day after.
I was reviewing a low-priority Echo when a whisper slipped through my neural link — faint, trembling, unmistakably hers.
A voice I knew better than my own heartbeat.
Ari.
Not a hallucination.
Not an Echo I had opened.
Something else.
Something impossible.
Her memories — what remained of them — were scattered across the archive.
And somehow, they were calling to me.