Location: Registry House, Cold Room Archive → Sublevel Lift → Layer 4 Access HoldingTime: 01:18 AM – 04:36 AMStatus: Custodial Records Unstable. Pattern Integrity Faltering.
Scene 1: The Empty Chair
Caldra’s breath still came in shallow bursts as she made her way back to the Annex. The Type 9 token felt like a coal in her pocket, radiating heat that seemed to pulse with her heartbeat.
Cassel’s workstation was dark.
Not powered down. Not logged out. Dark in the way that meant the system had severed all connections—power, data, even the emergency indicator lights that were supposed to stay active at all times.
She approached slowly, her footsteps echoing in the empty corridor. The chair was still warm. Body heat lingered in the seat cushion, in the armrests where his hands had gripped during those final moments of compliance.
His badge was gone. The plastic clip that had held it to his shirt lay broken on the floor, one small piece of evidence that someone had been here. Someone who no longer existed in any official capacity.
The terminal case was cracked—not from impact, but from internal pressure. As if something had tried to escape from inside the machine.
On his desk, drawn in the familiar chalk dust that seemed to follow her everywhere now, a single marking:
“4?”
The question mark made her stomach clench. Even Elric wasn’t certain what Layer 4 contained.
The screens around Cassel’s workstation flickered without input. Error logs began spilling out in corrupted loops:
EMPLOYEE_ID: THORN_C
STATUS: PROCESSING... PROCESSING... ERROR
LOCATION: FURNACE_LEVEL_404_NOT_FOUND
TERMINATION_REASON: [NULL_ENTRY_RECURSIVE_LOOP]
The text repeated, scrolled, repeated again. The system was trying to process what had happened to Cassel and failing. Like a bureaucratic machine having a nervous breakdown.
Caldra reached out to touch his keyboard. The keys were cold as ice.
A new line appeared on the nearest screen:
SEARCH_QUERY: "WHO_WAS_CASSEL_THORN?"
RESULTS: 0 MATCHES FOUND
DID_YOU_MEAN: "PERSONNEL_SCHEDULING_ERROR?
The system was already forgetting him. Not just erasing his records—forgetting that he had ever been something to erase.
Scene 2: Custodial Interference
The lights dimmed, then brightened to exactly 127% normal illumination—a precision that made Caldra’s skin crawl.
Auren’s presence filled the room without his physical form. His voice emerged from the document headers streaming across every active screen, stitched into the lighting grid, woven through the ventilation system’s hum.
“You were warned.”
The words appeared simultaneously on seventeen different monitors, each one displaying a different timestamp, all of them exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds in the future.
“Layer 4 reviews are terminal, not procedural.”
A pause. Static electricity built in the air until Caldra’s hair began to lift away from her scalp.
Then Cassel’s voice:
“Caldra… help me…”
But it was wrong. The words were perfectly enunciated, no nervous tremor, no fear. A synthetic reconstruction of his speech patterns, as cold and precise as everything else Auren touched.
“I didn’t want to go to the furnace level… but my badge turned red… and I couldn’t remember why I was scared…”
The voice fractured, digital artifacts bleeding through like a recording played on damaged equipment.
Caldra grabbed her chalk—the piece that had broken in the elevator, now somehow whole again. She pressed it to the nearest terminal screen and drew:
A circle. Incomplete. Three intersecting lines.
The same symbol that had forced the elevator to obey.
The synthetic voice cut out mid-syllable. The screens flickered back to their normal interfaces.
But in the silence that followed, she could hear breathing that wasn’t hers.
Scene 3: Echo Recoil
The Registry system was trying to solve the puzzle of Caldra Myre.
Her personnel file opened and closed on the main screen—not by her command, but by the system’s own initiative. Each time it loaded, the details were slightly different:
Version 1:
• Name: Caldra Myre
• Position: Custodian, Western Wing
• Clearance: Level 3
• Employment Date: [ERROR]
Version 2:
• Name: C. Myre
• Position: Senior Archivist, Sublevel 2
• Clearance: Level 7
• Employment Date: Six years prior
Version 3:
• Name: [REDACTED]
• Position: Containment Specialist
• Clearance: [CLASSIFIED]
• Employment Date: Before system initialization
The versions cycled faster, details blurring together. The system was trying to decide which Caldra to erase, which version of her was the “true” record.
In Version 7, she saw herself listed as working in Sublevel 6.
She had never been to Sublevel 6. She wasn’t sure Sublevel 6 existed.
But there she was in the system log: “C. Myre - Deep Archive Custodian - Security Clearance: Silent Type IV”
A transparency sheet fed itself through the printer beside her—old technology, the kind used for file overlays before everything went digital. The text was backwards, mirror-writing that she had to hold up to the light to read:
“You are not the anomaly. You are the record it couldn’t redact.” - E.M.
Below that, in fresher ink:
“They built Layer 5 to solve problems like you.”
[Author’s Note]
Well, that escalated quickly.
Cassel’s gone. Not fired, not transferred—*gone*. The kind of administrative disappearance that leaves only warm chairs and broken badge clips. The Registry doesn’t just terminate employees; it un-creates them, one layer at a time.
Caldra’s discovering she’s not who she thought she was. Multiple versions of herself exist in the system, each with different clearances, different histories. The question isn’t “Who is Caldra Myre?”—it’s “Which Caldra Myre is real?”
Layer 5 is coming. Elric’s warnings are getting more urgent. And somewhere in the bureaucratic machinery, something is building problems specifically designed to solve people like our custodian.
**FILE 010B drops Friday the 13th.** The elevator is waiting. Layer -4 exists whether it should or not. And Auren has very strong opinions about what constitutes “survivable.”
Tea is cold. Chalk is fracturing under pressure. Something in the mascot protocols just moved.
Thanks for reading. Don’t trust anything that breathes.
— Shiro Kuma (and Caldra, currently descending)
Comments (0)
See all