The lights buzzed overhead with a fluorescent wheeze, flickering not because they were broken, but because they were old. Everything in the Preservation Room had that smell. Not dust or decay, but something older. Like a library that had been closed too long. Like the back of a television, hot and chemical, and slightly alive. The whims of nostalgic fragments sweeping through the cold of the room caressed his senses randomly. Like the room had its own will and a breathing pattern. Micah stood in the doorway longer than he meant to, as if the room itself had weight. It was colder inside. Not cold, but wrong. The sort of chill that felt... timed. Like it had been waiting for someone to step in before dropping a degree. Quite peculiar, yet quite familiar.
He crossed the threshold. His boots clicked softly on old linoleum, yellowing and dappled with scuff marks, as if someone had dragged metal furniture across it in slow, agonized loops. He wondered how many others had stood right where he was, if there were any to begin with. If any of them had walked back out. If any of them felt what he was feeling there at that moment.
A quiet laugh tried to rise in his throat, but it didn't make it. He moved carefully across the floor, stepping around loose reels of film, some of them unspooled like they'd been yanked out in a hurry. A tape label curled on the edge of the desk. Ink bleached, unreadable. It felt wrong. But he didn't leave. He couldn't afford to. There had been a time when he could walk away from work that didn't feel right. From employers who asked too little and offered too much. From rooms like this. Now, Micah worked jobs that didn't carry names. Now, he picked up work that wasn't advertised on public forums, only passed quietly along by people who didn't meet your eyes.
Now, he signed NDAs that read more like non-testaments.
He rubbed his jaw. The stubble was coming in uneven again. Too much sleep lost. Too many nights spent running theoretical in his head, budgeting the next week, selling off another piece of gear he used to call essential.
There were no windows, only a fan set high in the wall that spun in silence. If applied enough focus, he could probably count the blades; so was the momentum. The corners of the room collected the shadows in uneven mounds. A long table stretched along the far wall, stacked with reel-to-reel players, tapes and ancient devices to play them, a small tube TV, and a dusty logbook bound in cracked leather. Micah stood still for a moment, allowing the silence to sift around him, before reaching for the logbook beneath the desk. The page was blank now. Where his name had been written, in Lorne's precise, archival hand, there was nothing but a faint impression. As if the ink had never truly existed; only the idea of it. Micah exhaled, slow and silent... The eerie of the room was already getting to him.
A desk lamp hung above, casting a sharp triangle of sterile white onto the center of the table. A stack of tapes sat just within the glow, all unlabelled except one.
It read:
"Tape 1 – You've Been Here Before."
Micah's mouth tasted metallic. Maybe from anxiety. Maybe from the air. He reached for the tape and hesitated. There was a feeling... not fear exactly, not yet. Something like déjà vu cross-wired with the sensation of being watched. Like he had stepped into a room that someone had dreamed once, in pieces. A vague wrongness, difficult to pinpoint, but impossible to ignore. To the left of the TV sat something that didn't belong. A wooden object, a child's puzzle box, brightly painted, chipped at the corners. The kind you'd twist and slide and prod until it popped open to reveal a not-so-fancy plastic jewel inside. It was out of place, not just in time, but in context. No dust on it. As if placed recently.
He didn't touch it.
Instead, he loaded the tape into the machine, fingers automatic. The machine whirred softly to life, its mechanical innards spinning opposite directions with quiet purpose. The screen lit up, but not with any footage. Just uneasy static. And then, text.
Typed, white, humming:
"MICAH RUTHERFORD – ARCHIVIST #17"
His thumb paused on the brittle edge of the label. He blinked once, then again. The dim light overhead buzzed faintly, its stammering glow caught on the peeling laminate of the case.
Micah.
A name like any other, but not to him; not here. His own name, crisp in bold ink. The last name though... Rutherford? That wasn't his. His name was Micah Rourke. No question about it. Still, something tightened in his chest.
He exhaled through his nose, smirking faintly at the ridiculous coincidence.
"Maybe there's a dozen Micahs in this city I've never met. Maybe one of them was into archival work too. Hell, maybe they even put the same kind of cinnamon in their coffee."
He told himself it was a small, strange overlap. Like reading your birthday on a license plate or hearing your childhood phone number in a stranger's story. Odd, but not impossible. That's all it was. A funny but odd coincidence.
But even as he set the tape aside; gingerly, like it might dissolve under too much pressure... the skin along the back of his arms had started to pucker. His breath lingered in front of him in a way it shouldn't have in an insulated room. He slid the tape into the maw again. The machine resisted at first... its metal parts groaning like something waking after too long a sleep, but it gave in, clicking obediently into place. Micah reached for the switch.
Then paused.
Something caught his eye. Just past the lower drawer of the desk, a sliver of yellowed paper was jutting from the seam where the desk met the wall. Not dropped, not forgotten; it had been tucked, deliberately, with only enough visible to tempt curiosity. He crouched. The paper was soft, not brittle, but worn from time. Half a page torn from something larger. Lined, in faded ink. A journal? No... too structured. A log? There was no name on it. Just the date-
July 3rd. No year.
Before he could read more, the tape snapped into motion with a shudder. The room filled with soft static, like wind struggling through wires. Like a siren's soft whimper drawing Micah's attention away from his recent discovery.
Micah stood, paper still in hand. And then-
A voice. Muffled. Human.
Familiar.