The Archive went silent, and Nero felt it before his mind could catch up to what had happened, because the hum—the constant, omnipresent vibration that filled the building like breath inside a living chest—did not simply fade or weaken, but vanished completely, as if something vast and mechanical had suddenly decided to stop existing.
For a heartbeat, Nero stood frozen in front of the terminal, staring at his own faint reflection in the darkened screen, acutely aware of the sound of his pulse hammering in his ears, too loud, too human, echoing in a place that was never meant to be quiet.
Silence did not exist in the Archive.
It never had.
Suddenly the screen lit up. A single word appeared, glowing a deep, unsettling red against the black background, stark and unmistakable.
UNLIVED
Before Nero could even begin to understand what he was looking at, a second line formed beneath it, clean and precise in the Archive's official formatting.
SUBJECT: NERO VALE
STATUS: CLASSIFIED
That was impossible.
The Archive did not catalog people. It cataloged events—moments in time, recorded outcomes, verified branches of reality that had already occurred or had been stabilized enough to be preserved as data. Personal information existed on an entirely separate network, sealed off from the temporal systems by layers of security so excessive that even senior archivists joked about it in hushed tones.
And yet his name was here.
And then the display shifted again.
A face flickered into existence on the screen, resolving itself into the image of a boy—young, perhaps twelve years old, with dark hair and pale eyes that locked onto Nero with unsettling familiarity.
They were his eyes.
"Hello, Nero," the boy said calmly, his voice carrying through the speakers with a clarity that sent a chill straight down Nero's spine.
In that instant, Nero understood with terrifying certainty that what he was seeing was not a malfunction, not corrupted data, and not some elaborate system glitch.
It was intentional. It was a message.
[ Only a few hours earlier, the day had begun like every other. ]
The hum of the Archive had greeted him the moment he stepped inside, low and steady, vibrating through the steel floors and up into his bones, a sound that most employees claimed they stopped noticing after a few months, their minds filtering it out for the sake of sanity.
Nero had never stopped hearing it.
To him, the hum was not noise but presence, something that existed alongside him rather than around him, something that rose and fell with such subtle variation that it felt disturbingly similar to breathing, as though the building itself were alive and aware of every person moving within it.
He had passed through the security gate as the retinal scanner washed cold white light across his eyes, the glass doors sliding open with mechanical smoothness to reveal the Archive's interior, vast and solemn and impossibly precise, rows of server towers stretching into darkness so far that their ends dissolved into shadow, their indicator lights blinking in shifting patterns of red, green, and white that reminded him, not for the first time, of constellations trapped inside steel.
The air smelled faintly of sterilized metal and recycled atmosphere, sharp and clean, devoid of anything organic, as though the Archive itself rejected the idea of life existing within its walls.
This was the Archive—the city's most sacred system, a machine designed to preserve everything humanity feared to lose.
Every recorded moment of history, every confirmed branch of time, every stabilized possibility that reality had permitted to exist was stored somewhere within these endless racks, broken down into data and categorized with ruthless precision, waiting to be accessed, reviewed, or quietly forgotten.
The scale of it always made Nero feel small, and perhaps that was the point.
He had adjusted the identification badge clipped to his jacket as he walked, the familiar lettering grounding him in routine.
Nero Vale.Junior Archivist.Temporal Storage Division.
Routine was comfort. Routine was safety. Cataloguing unstable timeline fragments was not glamorous work, but it was quiet and predictable, and Nero had learned early in life that curiosity, when indulged too freely, often came with consequences that could not be undone.
He reached his assigned station, entered his access code, and watched the diagnostics populate the screen in their usual orderly fashion—temporal threads aligning, stability values locking into place, timestamp chains resolving into neat sequences that confirmed reality was, at least for now, behaving as expected.
Everything glowed green.
Everything was normal.
Almost.
A single red indicator pulsed faintly at the far edge of the hall.
Nero frowned, his fingers pausing above the console. "Com Nine?"
He was not scheduled anywhere near Com Nine today, nor was maintenance planned for that sector. The Archive did not make mistakes lightly, and anomalies did not appear without reason.
Protocol dictated that he report it immediately.
Curiosity, quiet and persistent, urged him forward instead.
After a brief hesitation, Nero left his station and walked toward the red light, his footsteps echoing far louder than they should have in the cavernous space, each sound magnified by the sudden awareness of how much empty distance surrounded him.
With every step, the rest of the room seemed to fall away, until the blinking monitor was the only thing that existed.
"Run diagnostics," he said.
Nothing happened.
The screen remained dark, unresponsive, as if it had not heard him at all.
Then it blinked.
Once.
Twice.
Without warning, symbols flooded the display in a violent surge—numbers, broken letters, fragments of corrupted code twisting and colliding too fast for the eye to follow, patterns forming and collapsing before Nero could grasp even a single recognizable structure.
He leaned closer, scanning desperately, instincts screaming that whatever this was, it was not meant to be seen.
Then the chaos stopped. The symbols vanished and only one word remained.
UNLIVED
Nero stared at it, his brows drawing together slowly. "That isn't a valid classification."
He knew the Archive's taxonomy by heart. This word did not belong to any system in use. He typed a query.
The system rejected it instantly.
Another line appeared beneath the first.
SUBJECT: NERO VALE
His throat tightened, a cold knot forming beneath his sternum.
Personal data was never stored here. Employee records existed on a sealed network entirely isolated from temporal archives. The Archive tracked events, not individuals, not living people who could still make choices.
So why was his name here?
"Access override," he tried, his voice lower now, cautious.
Denied.
The red light brightened, pulsing faster, and the hum of the Archive deepened until Nero felt it vibrating through his ribs, the sensation growing so intense that for a brief, disorienting moment he thought the floor itself had shifted beneath his feet.
Then the screen changed.
A face appeared.
A boy—young, pale-eyed, dark-haired—stared back at him with unsettling calm.
Identical to him.
Nero froze, his breath caught halfway between inhale and exhale.
The boy tilted his head slowly, studying him with detached curiosity, the movement feeling unnatural, like watching a corrupted recording skip frames, and then he leaned forward.
"Hello, Nero."
The voice was calm.
Real.
Nero staggered backward, his hand slamming against a nearby console as a loose panel sparked and fell to the floor, narrowly missing his foot, his heart pounding so violently that he could feel it in his throat.
"Who are you?" he demanded, though some part of him already feared the answer.
"I'm the one who should have been you," the boy replied, his tone devoid of anger, filled instead with something colder, something absolute.
A chill crawled up Nero's spine.
"You got the world," the boy continued. "I got the Archive."
"That doesn't make sense," Nero said, his voice unsteady. "Timelines don't work like that."
"You're living my timeline."
The screen went black.
The hum died.
Silence crashed down around him, heavy and suffocating.
The Archive never went silent. Not during recalibration. Not during shutdowns. Not ever.
Nero stared at the dark screen, waiting for the hum to return, waiting for proof that reality had not just fractured in front of him.
A sharp pulse throbbed behind his eyes, pressure building in his skull—electric, resonant, almost musical—as a whisper surfaced in his mind, not in any language he recognized.
A single word formed.
VEYRA.
He gripped the console as the air around him rippled, lights dimming and flaring as if the room itself were inhaling, then exhaling.
Then it stopped.
The hum returned, steady and mechanical, indifferent as ever.
The terminal remained black. No logs. No trace.
Nero looked down at his hand. A thin cut crossed his palm, already drying, though he did not remember being injured.
He let out a quiet, humorless laugh. "No one's going to believe this."
He turned to leave.
And froze.
In the polished surface of a nearby server, he saw a reflection that was not his own.
A boy stood behind him, wearing the same eyes, the same half-smile.
Nero spun around.
The corridor was empty.
The Archive hummed steadily again, but now he heard something beneath it—an uneven rise and fall, like breath caught between inhale and exhale.
He backed away until his shoulder hit the wall.
Everything looked normal.
Everything sounded normal.
But the Archive felt alive.
And Nero knew, with terrifying certainty, that his life had already changed.
He simply did not yet understand how much.