“The Box”

Part I

Martin Greaves arrived at the Cortland Municipal Archive just after eight on a Tuesday morning, two days after the city finally cut power to the upper floors. The building, a vast brutalist monolith set between two defunct overpasses, had been shuttered since 2007, but the government hadn’t decided what to do with it until late last year. The concrete giant was to be demolished, a process delayed only by the bureaucracy’s inability to decide what might still be inside. Martin’s job was to find out.

The contractor, DTI Logistics, had sent him the assignment in the same terse tone they used for everything—standard municipal retention clearance, full digitization not required, time-sensitive due to environmental hazard designation. Six weeks to inventory and log everything of note. Discard what remained.

He had done this sort of job before—though never in a building this size. The archive encompassed eleven above-ground floors and at least five below, and most of it had been locked up since the late ‘90s. A city within a city, its skin crumbling and its guts long since rotted. Martin preferred these jobs. The solitude suited him, and the process was consistent: open a box, note its contents, check for water or pest damage, scan if needed, log and label. Repeat.

Still, the sheer size of the Cortland complex had given him pause, and not only because of the scale. The blueprints included in the assignment packet were full of contradictions—staircases leading nowhere, entire wings that didn’t align between floors, half-buried corrections scrawled across copier artifacts. It was the kind of bureaucratic mess that spawned ghost stories among temp workers. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in mold, mislabeling, and a complete lack of institutional memory.

His office was located on the second floor, though the elevator paused just slightly too long between the first and second landings, as though deciding whether or not to continue. The room itself had once served as a supervisor’s workspace, judging by the desk and filing cabinets, but was now stripped of anything personal. He found a hardwired phone, disconnected. A rust-stained sink. One of the windows looked down into a sunken courtyard choked with vines and debris. The glass bore the scabbed impressions of decades’ worth of impact marks—stones, maybe, or thrown trash, or birds.

He plugged in the portable scanner, laid out his laptop, and arranged his pens and folders along the edge of the desk with the same neatness he applied to every job. Then he checked the Wi-Fi—none, as expected—and confirmed his offline database was running correctly. His phone would have to serve as the only means of outside contact, though service was patchy even aboveground. That didn’t matter. Martin had no one to call, and no one who would call him.

By the time he’d organized the first of the floor-level inventory manifests, his inbox pinged with a new message from Gerald Withrow, his direct supervisor and project lead.

---

FROM: Gerald Withrow [gwithrow@dti-logistics.net]
TO: Martin Greaves [mgreaves@dti-logistics.net]
SUBJECT: Re: On-site Confirmation – Cortland Archive

Glad you made it in one piece. Let me know if the asbestos team is still camped out—heard they were behind schedule on the sub-basement sweep. Just remember, this one’s on a short leash. Building comes down in six. We don’t need everything, just enough to say we looked. Prioritize anything post-1985, and if you see anything with red tape or triangle seals, don’t open it. Catalog and move on. Some old things are better left boxed and crushed.

---

Martin read the message twice, then archived it. Withrow had a particular way of wording things. Sardonic. Cold. Always just ambiguous enough to hint at things better ignored. Martin had worked under him for almost three years and still didn’t know what the man looked like.

By midafternoon, he’d cleared the corridor outside his office, removing half-collapsed stacks of city planning proposals and water-damaged transit authority blueprints. He set up a makeshift staging area near the stairwell that led downward, hauling his cart and portable light stand into position.

Each descending floor seemed to hum louder than the last.

The third floor was blocked off by a barricade of rolling cabinets, all tipped on their sides. He didn’t question it—he simply logged the obstruction and moved on. The fourth was largely empty, save for a few disassembled cubicles and a stack of broken reels. The fifth and sixth housed boxes upon boxes of fire marshal reports, many of which were stamped as duplicates.

The lower he went, the more the building changed. The walls turned darker, water stains branching like veins across the ceiling tiles. Some fixtures still worked, flickering fluorescent tubes that buzzed loud enough to mask the occasional groan of shifting pipes or settling concrete.

There were no other people, no voices, no echo of work once done here. And yet, Martin often had the sensation—however fleeting—that someone had just turned a corner ahead of him, or that the lights hadn’t been flickering until he arrived.

The walls on Sub-Level One were lined with punch-card cabinets and thick manila envelopes, all labeled in a crisp mechanical font. The temperature dropped noticeably. In one hallway, the scent of ozone mixed with mildew. In another, the floor sagged slightly toward a central drainage grate, as though something had been very heavy, very wet, and very still for a long time.

By the end of the first day, Martin had mapped three floors and fully inventoried two. He documented eight structural hazards, logged sixteen sealed boxes containing questionable materials, and noted that the elevator skipped the sub-levels entirely. If one wanted to go lower, the stairwells were the only option.

He returned to his office as the sun sank behind the courthouse across the street. From his window, the city looked two shades more orange than usual, the horizon divided by the crumbling skyline and the curl of smog. It was quiet here, and growing quieter.

He didn’t mind. The deeper he went into places like this, the more himself he became.

Tomorrow, he’d tackle Sub-Level Two.

Part II

By the end of his first week, Martin had cataloged over nine hundred items, though not a single one had borne any obvious historical value. Most were duplicates—old records of supply chains, zoning amendments, interoffice memos, and transportation surveys yellowed beyond readability. The more he dug, the more it became apparent that much of the Cortland Archive had served as a dumping ground for bureaucratic overflow, long before the city had designated it an archive in any official sense.

The sub-levels, however, were different.

He first noticed the change on Sub-Level Two. The air turned heavier the farther he walked from the stairwell, and the dust took on a thicker, more oily consistency, clinging to his boots and clothes as though it possessed weight beyond what gravity should allow. The walls, painted once in a pale mint, had long since taken on a blotchy, bruised tone, and several bore signs of patch jobs and plastered-over cracks. At one junction, the signage abruptly shifted from English to French, though he found no indication the building had ever housed bilingual staff.

By the time he reached Sub-Level Four, Martin was beginning to suspect the building had been altered at some point—illegally or unofficially. There were structural inconsistencies throughout: stairwells that terminated at sealed concrete walls, hallways that shrank by inches every few yards until they were barely wide enough for his shoulders to pass through, fire doors bolted from the inside, and vents that led nowhere. His flashlight flickered with increased frequency, and the batteries he carried seemed to drain faster than expected.

The records here were stranger too. Not only older, but often written in non-standard formats. Some were typed in symbols or ciphered blocks of text he could not immediately recognize. Many of the folders lacked any kind of legible heading or date stamp. He made note of these anomalies and stacked the items for later assessment, but the growing dissonance between what the building was supposed to be and what it appeared to contain began to needle at him in a way he hadn’t experienced before.

Midway through his second week, Martin discovered a side corridor behind a collapsed shelving unit on Sub-Level Four. The air within was colder than the surrounding level, and the floor dipped slightly toward a rusted drain whose cover had fused to the concrete long ago. The corridor ended in what appeared to be a service vestibule. No doors, only a heavy freight elevator set into a recess in the far wall. Unlike the others he had seen throughout the building, this one bore no markings—no number, no inspection sticker, no sign of recent use. Its doors were fully shut, but when Martin pressed the call button, the elevator arrived with a mechanical clunk that reverberated through the floor tiles.

He hesitated before entering. There was no floor indicator, only a lever marked with a red vertical notch. When he pulled it, the elevator began to descend, smooth at first, then increasingly erratic, as though traveling on an unserviced line. The light inside flickered, then dimmed entirely. Martin waited, listening to the grinding of the mechanism and the faint creak of metal against shaft walls. It stopped with a jolt.

When the doors finally opened, he found himself facing a corridor he did not recognize—one that did not appear on any blueprint he had studied.

The air here was different—dry, but not in a natural way. It lacked the moldy, decayed scent that had permeated the rest of the archive. It smelled instead of dust stripped of time, as if whatever had gathered here had done so in a vacuum sealed off from decay. The walls were a smooth, slate-colored material, not unlike polished cement, but warmer to the touch when he pressed his palm against them. No signs marked the hallway. No fixtures lined the ceiling. Yet it was fully illuminated, by what source he could not determine.

He walked slowly, cautiously, counting his steps out of habit. The corridor extended longer than seemed architecturally possible. There were no rooms, no branches, only a gradual descent as though the floor had been built at a barely perceptible angle. He passed several alcoves—each empty—and a section of wall that bulged inward slightly.

At the end of the corridor, he found a door.

Unlike everything else in the Cortland Archive, it was untouched by grime or rust. A heavy steel frame surrounded it, and the surface bore no signs of wear, as though it had only just been installed. It was secured by a central locking mechanism—industrial, electronic, with no obvious interface—and above it, in letters etched so finely they might have been laser-cut, was the label:

ROOM B-9

Martin stared at the name for a long time, his mind immediately cycling through the blueprints he had studied. No such designation had ever appeared. The archive sub-levels had followed an alphanumeric system: S-1 through S-5. No “B” levels, no “Room” labels. No indication that anything beyond Sub-Level Five existed at all. And yet, here it was. A place out of sequence. A space that should not have existed.

He tried the handle, more from instinct than expectation. It didn’t budge. No keypad, no card slot, no sign of how one might access the room beyond. He noted the lack of hinges or visible mechanisms on the exterior—suggesting the door opened inward, but offering no clue as to what powered or permitted its movement.

Martin returned to his office that evening unsettled in a way he couldn’t quite name. His legs ached. His back felt tight. The elevator that brought him back up from the strange level had rattled louder on the ascent, and the call button had flickered after he’d exited, staying lit long after the elevator had returned to the bottom.

That night, he attempted to email Withrow a brief summary of the discovery.

---

FROM: Martin Greaves [mgreaves@dti-logistics.net]
TO: Gerald Withrow [gwithrow@dti-logistics.net]
SUBJECT: Room B-9?

Gerald—Found something off-blueprint today. Marked ROOM B-9, no record in schematics. Location inconsistent with listed sub-levels. Possible Cold War addition? Door locked. No access panel. Please advise.

---

The message sent, or seemed to, but never appeared in his “Sent” folder. He tried forwarding it twice. Nothing. He saved a draft and opened it again, only to find the text missing, replaced by a blank body and an error message in the header: Recipient unreachable – no such address.

When he rechecked his inbox, Withrow’s last email had vanished.

The lights above his desk dimmed, then steadied, then dimmed again. The bulb over the office sink buzzed once, spat out a flicker of blue light, and died.

He leaned back in his chair, staring out into the hall, where the dark seemed thicker than usual. He waited, not for anything in particular, but with the sensation that something else had moved when he had not.

In the silence, he thought he heard a faint dragging sound—something metallic and dry, like chains drawn slowly across tile. A second sound followed—softer, but unmistakably human. A whispering murmur, incomprehensible, yet unmistakably speech.

It faded after a moment. Or perhaps it had never been there at all.

Martin powered down his equipment for the night, but before leaving, he turned back to the computer and reopened the draft email.

This time, the subject line was gone. So was the recipient address.

In its place, a single word:

Remember.

Part III

It took Martin four days to breach the door to Room B-9. He began with cataloging—photographs, measurements, written reports. He traced the frame with chalk to track movement, suspecting at first some subtle shifting of the structure itself. Then came more forceful efforts: strikes with a mallet, attempts at leverage using a steel pry bar, then a portable angle grinder borrowed from the janitorial storage near the north stairwell. The door held against each attempt as if it had no moving parts at all—no hinges, no latch, no weight behind it. It gave neither resistance nor response. It simply remained.

What finally worked—though Martin could not articulate how—was the application of sustained pressure at the precise point where the upper right corner met the frame, followed by a half-turn clockwise motion with the grinder’s blade, and then, inexplicably, a push backward with both hands, as though dislodging a piece of cabinetry rather than a door secured by industrial means. The slab of steel moved with an audible suction, like something unsealing after years in place. No air rushed out. No lights flickered in greeting. The door simply opened, revealing the space beyond.

Room B-9 was windowless and square, no more than ten feet by ten. The walls were raw cement, cast in clean forms with no seams or discoloration, and the floor was the same, though covered with a faint white dust that gave way beneath Martin’s boots with each step. Overhead, a single rectangular fixture buzzed with dim, yellowed light. There were no vents, no power outlets, no sign of how the room had maintained its condition in a facility where most spaces had decayed into mold and mildew. The air was neutral, neither stale nor fresh, as though neither time nor weather had touched it.

At the center of the room sat a square metal table, unadorned and slightly pitted from age, its legs capped with rubber feet that had not left impressions in the dust. On top of the table sat a single banker’s box—cardboard, standard issue, the kind he had already logged by the dozens. It bore no markings on the exterior. No labels, stamps, or barcodes.

Martin approached slowly, aware of the stillness around him. The light overhead seemed unnaturally steady, its buzz a constant that offered no modulation, no sense of motion or life. When he placed his hands on the box, the cardboard was cooler than expected, and faintly damp.

He lifted the lid.

Inside, he found media—disparate formats, all of them obsolete or on the cusp of obsolescence. VHS-C cassettes, mini-DV tapes, flash drives, and what appeared to be a Betacam reel, wrapped in a static bag with his name printed in thermal ink across the plastic. Beneath these were manila envelopes containing printed photos, photocopies of handwritten notes, and a series of thermal-paper printouts folded into triplicate. Every item bore a date. Most dates were familiar—years of significance in Martin’s life, though nothing as overt as birthdays or holidays. One envelope was labeled simply: November 14, 1991 – 3:36 PM – Library. Another read: THERAPY_SESSION_004_TRANSCRIPT / 2016. Some were tagged with file numbers. Others with combinations of letters and digits that resembled internal coding systems he recognized from DTI’s own archiving protocol.

He did not remember ever having had therapy.

He removed the topmost tape and turned it over in his hands. No label. Just a faint indentation on the spine where a sticker had once been peeled away. He recognized the format—it was one he hadn’t seen in years, used primarily by consumer camcorders in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The camera in his office was compatible, though he hadn’t used it since college. He set the tape aside and began to work through the rest of the contents, laying each item out with surgical care, photographing and logging them before sealing them into new archival sleeves.

An hour later, the box was empty. He checked twice.

He logged the contents—eighty-seven unique items—and returned to the second floor. As he climbed the stairs, he tried to recall anything about the therapy transcript, the specific date in 1991, or the file labeled “M_Greaves_SUB_AUDIT_17.” His memory offered nothing. No gap, no haze—only a complete absence, as though those moments had never belonged to him at all.

That night, he played the tape.

The image was grainy, the audio faint. It had been recorded indoors, judging by the acoustics, and featured a child—him, unmistakably—seated at a small table in front of a window that looked out onto a snowy backyard. A Christmas tree blinked in the background. He wore a red sweater. His hands fidgeted with a toy truck.

A voice, off-camera, asked him to describe his “special dream.” Martin, on-screen, smiled and said, “The one where I open the box.”

He did not remember this recording. He did not remember that sweater, or that room, or ever having such a dream.

The next morning, when he returned to Room B-9, the box was full again.

The new contents were entirely different—no duplicates. This time, the material was heavier on written artifacts: spiral-bound notebooks he vaguely recognized, receipts for places he’d forgotten he’d visited, and a CD labeled “First Voicemail – Mom – 2005.” He remembered that year well—her decline had started in February, the diagnosis confirmed in April, the last real conversation in June. He had saved the voicemail back then, but it had been lost when his phone corrupted later that year. He had never been able to retrieve it.

The disc played flawlessly.

Her voice was exactly as he remembered—too cheerful, too forced, fighting against a wave already cresting. “Marty,” she had said, “don’t forget to take care of yourself. The world doesn’t stop for any of us, no matter how much we wish it would. You’re stronger than you think. Love you.”

He listened to it three times before he ejected the disc and sealed it in a fresh sleeve. He labeled it meticulously and logged it into his private spreadsheet—separate from the DTI database. The official records would not include any of this.

Each day thereafter, the box replenished.

He tested it—emptying the contents completely, photographing the interior, even placing a blank notecard inside with a handwritten date. Every morning, it was gone, replaced by a new collection of artifacts drawn, apparently, from his own life.

Some were benign—report cards, cancelled checks, lists in his handwriting. Others were stranger—audio recordings of conversations he had no memory of, surveillance-style videos showing him at coffee shops, riding trains, walking through cities he didn’t remember visiting.

And always, each item was tied to him. Not just in the label, but in the content, the intimacy, the specificity that no one else could have known.

He became obsessive. Sleep came in fits. Meals were consumed mechanically. His hands developed calluses from handling old plastic and paper, his eyes strained from the constant low-resolution playback. He spoke less aloud. He stopped responding to DTI check-ins. Emails arrived unanswered. Then they stopped arriving altogether.

Each night, he descended again.

The hallway to Room B-9 remained unchanged. No dust gathered. No lights failed. No noise intruded. The building, for all its previous instability, seemed to calm around him the deeper his work became.

And the box was always waiting.

He stopped wondering how it replenished, or who—or what—might be supplying the contents. He began instead to question the nature of the items themselves. Were they records? Replicas? Were these things ever truly lost, or had they been excised, stolen, curated?

Had he chosen to forget, or had someone chosen for him?

By the end of the month, he no longer used his upstairs office. His cot had been moved to the hallway outside B-9. He ate only when hunger dragged him from the trance. The line between inventory and identity had blurred, and in its place grew a singular, persistent compulsion: to know everything the box had to offer.

He told himself that once he’d seen it all, he would understand. That knowledge would bring closure.

But the box was never empty for long.

Part IV

There came a morning when Martin stood outside the door to Room B-9 and, for the first time in weeks, hesitated.

He could not recall how many days had passed since the project had begun. The calendar in his old office, long abandoned, had fallen off the wall during a recent tremor—though he did not remember when, exactly, that had happened. The paper had curled at the edges like something scorched, though there had been no heat. No fire. Only the unyielding hum of light and silence and the soft, dusty exhalation of the lower halls.

When he opened the door, the box was already full.

He pulled on latex gloves with practiced motion, unfolded a clean notepad, and clicked his pen. Each movement repeated from the day before. And the day before that. If he did not repeat the process precisely, he feared something might shift again—some small hinge of reality might loosen just enough to open further.

The first item that morning was a compact flash drive in a padded envelope marked with a black sticker bearing the initials M.A.R.T.I.N. There were no periods on any of the other tags. This one was deliberate, as though the name had been segmented—broken apart into an acronym, or into something else entirely.

He logged the envelope, photographed it, then inserted the drive into his personal laptop. The folder that opened bore a single timestamped file: Session_5_CAM2_FINAL.mp4.

The video opened in a cold, clinical room. A couch. A coffee table. A diploma hung crookedly on the wall. The figure seated across from the camera was him—Martin, hair slightly longer than he wore it now, dressed in a gray collared shirt he could not recall ever owning.

His voice was soft, barely audible beneath the static interference that bled in along the recording’s lower register.

“I don’t think it’s real,” he said. “I know the door isn’t supposed to be there. I know the building doesn’t want me inside it. But I go anyway. And when I do, I forget things. Not just for a minute. They’re gone. Like they were never mine.”

The therapist’s voice—if that was what the person off-camera was—replied, but the words were muffled, buried under a low-frequency hum that almost resembled breathing. Martin watched the version of himself on-screen lean forward.

“You don’t understand. It’s not just memories disappearing—it’s the meaning of them. The glue between things. That feeling you get when you remember your first apartment, or your mother’s handwriting, or the weight of the keys to your childhood home. That’s gone. Not just the thing, but the shape of it in my mind. Like someone has taken scissors to the filmstrip of my life.”

Martin paused the video. He scrolled back. He watched again. There was no recognition. No flicker of familiarity. And yet the words could have come from him—had come from him—if the timestamp was to be believed.

He checked his hands. They trembled slightly, even when still.

The rest of the items that day followed a theme: scraps of correspondence, old voicemails transcribed into neat courier font, insurance claims tied to incidents he didn’t remember being involved in. A torn photograph of himself standing in front of a gray building he didn’t recognize, with the caption “Visit #3 – Do not linger” printed faintly on the back. None of it triggered any response beyond confusion, and yet he knew—deep down, in some place older than knowledge—that it all belonged to him.

That night, the box offered something new.

A video clip labeled SUBWAY_FOOTAGE_12A_2014. No location, no clear source.

Martin played it.

It began with shaky, grainy footage—security camera quality—of a crowded underground platform. The crowd was thin, mostly commuters. After thirty seconds, the camera panned, or perhaps automatically tracked, a figure near the edge of the platform.

Martin.

He stood facing the tracks, back hunched, lips moving in a steady rhythm. The audio was faint, but enough of the sound carried to pick out fragments of speech:

“…before they find me… not here, not again… I just need time… can’t keep it all… can’t hold it…”

The image shook again as a train passed, obscuring him. When it cleared, he was gone.

Martin rewound the clip. He watched it again. The date—2014—should have placed him in Denver. He had been working contract IT that spring, managing digitization protocols for municipal court records. No recollection existed of any trip to New York, or Boston, or anywhere else with a system that resembled the platform in the video. He checked old calendars, old work logs. Nothing contradicted the fact that he had not been there.

And yet there he was.

He began to doubt the certainty of his own biography. Not in grand strokes, but in a thousand tiny details that, under closer scrutiny, no longer fit. The order of events. The colors of old apartments. Faces of coworkers he once knew intimately, now blurred and featureless in memory. He opened a drawer and found a birthday card addressed to “Matt.” He stared at it for ten minutes before realizing that the handwriting on the envelope was his.

The next morning, he found he couldn’t remember how to reach the stairwell from Room B-9. The hallway outside had shifted—grown longer, or perhaps more narrow—and several doors had appeared along its length, none of which had existed before. When he opened them, he found supply closets full of empty boxes, mold-lined offices with chairs bolted to the floors, a break room with a kettle still warm on the counter.

He had not seen another soul in weeks. He no longer expected to.

When he finally reached the upper level, the floor numbering had changed. What had been the second floor was now labeled “P3.” The elevator no longer displayed its interior panel. The stairwell looped back on itself when he tried to descend beyond Sub-Level One. A hallway he had walked a hundred times now terminated in blank wall.

The building was shifting. Reacting.

He tested it. He wrote messages on scrap paper and posted them outside his office door. He laid down a trail of folders leading from the stairwell. Each attempt at breadcrumbing failed. The signs vanished. The folders were found scattered in different rooms. His own writing had altered—sometimes sloppy, sometimes cursive, sometimes in block capitals.

He spoke aloud, out of frustration. He accused the archive itself. Accused the room. Accused the box.

“You’re taking them from me,” he whispered, pacing the threshold of Room B-9, fists clenched. “I know what I’ve lost. I know it’s not just my memory anymore. It’s… the shape of me. The continuity. The thread.”

The light in the room flickered, once, and then held steady.

“You’re not preserving anything,” he continued. “You’re dismantling it. Turning me into record. Into artifact. Into noise.”

He fell silent.

Later that night, a new file appeared in the box.

It was labeled MGreaves_Audio_Replica_Session1.

When he played it, he heard himself. The same accusations. The same pacing footsteps. The same bitterness in his voice.

Every word he had spoken aloud was there.

But the file’s metadata listed the recording date as two days prior.

That was when he realized: the box was not only cataloging what he’d forgotten.

It was predicting what he would say. Or worse—determining it.

He stared at the monitor for a long time after that, wondering if there was anything left that hadn’t already been labeled, timestamped, and filed away. Wondering what part of him was still original. What remained that had not been absorbed, indexed, and replayed.

Outside, the lights hummed with renewed intensity. The hallway walls gleamed faintly, as if freshly polished.

Martin closed the lid on the box.

For now.

Part V

Martin first noticed the change beneath the table in Room B-9 on a morning much like the rest—air still, light flat and yellow, the box awaiting him in its usual spot, half-lidded and bulging slightly with fresh contents. But today, as he knelt to pick up a folder that had slid to the floor, his fingers caught the edge of something rough—a seam in the cement, no wider than a coin’s edge, running along the base of the western wall.

He hadn’t seen it before. And yet the dust pattern said otherwise.

The table, always centered before, had shifted slightly off its mark, leaving the impression of its previous placement like a shadow baked into the concrete. When he moved it aside and brushed the area clean, he saw it clearly: a thin, rectangular hatch recessed into the floor, ringed with rivets and fitted with an inset handle.

He hesitated before pulling.

It took effort—grinding metal, a protest of hinges—and the smell that rose from beneath was old, dense, and bitter. Not rot in the traditional sense, but the kind of decay born from sealed spaces where things had once lived and then forgotten how. The darkness below accepted his flashlight without resistance, but what it revealed made his throat tighten.

A crawlspace, no more than four feet deep, extended under the room in a narrow channel. Its walls were older than those above, made of unpainted stone and concrete pocked with time. Martin slid down carefully, knees braced, light in hand. The temperature dropped immediately, as though the hatch had opened into a cellar rather than a structural recess.

He found the furniture first—rusted steel chairs collapsed in on themselves, a cot frame twisted at the joints, the remnants of a desk whose drawers had fused shut with corrosion. Around the perimeter, stacked in loose arrangements, sat dozens of metal canisters—film reels, most labeled in block script, all yellowing from age and moisture. Each one bore a name. Not his. Never his.

Trial #07 – H. FALCONER
Trial #12 – J. DEEM
Trial #23 – K. INGRAM
Trial #31 – B. COLFAX

There were over forty in total, their lids marked in red grease pencil. Some bore additional labels—“DECLINED,” “NO STABILITY,” or “EXTERNALIZED.” A few had the tape sealed back across their spools as though re-wound in haste or rejection.

He selected one without thinking. Trial #19 – D. SILVA.

The projector he used to review it—recovered weeks earlier from the AV supply room on Sub-Level Two—had long since been modified to accommodate various formats. He loaded the reel that night, fed it through the teeth and guides, and closed the housing with the click of old plastic.

The film began in a blank room, walls bare, a chair at the center. A man sat facing the camera. Eyes unfocused. A thin line of blood ran from his left nostril. He spoke without prompting.

“Corpus memini, nomen dele.”

He repeated it. Over and over.

“Corpus memini, nomen dele. Corpus memini…”

Each repetition grew fainter. Blood pooled beneath his chin. His head lolled once, then again. By the twelfth cycle, he was leaning so far to the left that the frame captured more of the wall than his face. Then the reel ended—no outro, no artifact. Just the stuttering tick of the sprocket claw reaching for what wasn’t there.

Martin sat in the dark for a long time after.

He rewound the film and watched it again. And again. He wrote the phrase down, sounding it out phonetically, breaking it apart by syllables.

Corpus memini, nomen dele. I remember the body. Delete the name.

The phrase echoed through his head like static, finding purchase in places it shouldn’t. He dreamed of it that night, or thought he did—dreamed of men and women reciting it like prayer, seated in half-lit rooms beneath buildings that did not exist above ground, their eyes black and mouths full of smoke.

When he returned to the crawlspace the next morning, he found the words etched into the far wall in his own handwriting.

He did not remember writing them.

He touched the grooves to confirm their depth. Not marker or paint. Carved, as though by knife or chisel. The characters followed the exact penmanship of his notes. The slant. The pressure. Even the way he formed his R’s—over-curved and slightly raised.

The foundation of the Cortland Archive was failing. That much was obvious. Pipes groaned in the ceilings above. Sirens sounded at odd hours with no pattern or purpose. Water stains bloomed in real time across the floors of Sub-Level Two, and the lights no longer flickered. Some doors refused to open. Others no longer led where they had.

Martin documented the decay with increasing obsession, not out of concern, but as evidence—as confirmation of the pattern he believed he was uncovering. The building had not simply grown sick. It had been infected. And whatever entity lived within Room B-9, whatever curated the box and replenished its contents, was merely the symptom of a deeper rot—one embedded in the cement and steel long before he had arrived.

The footage that surfaced in the box that night bore no label at all.

He played it regardless.

It opened with darkness—movement audible but unseen. Then a faint click. A flare of light. The static snap of an old security camera kicking on. The image stabilized to reveal Room B-9. The box was visible in the corner of the frame. The table had been pushed aside.

Martin appeared in the doorway.

He looked thinner than before. Paler. His movements were tight, halting, as if governed by a rhythm not entirely his own. He entered the room, carrying a drill in one hand and a canister of industrial foam in the other.

He said nothing.

Over the next six minutes, he worked methodically, sealing the perimeter of the room. Foam in the seams. Reinforcement of the hatch below. He bolted the interior of the door shut using steel brackets affixed directly to the wall. Then he returned to the center of the room, where he knelt beside the box and opened the lid.

He withdrew a single sheet of paper. From the camera angle, its contents were unreadable.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he spoke.

“Identity is cancerous if left unchecked,” he said. “It metastasizes through memory. Through attachment. Through name. Better to excise it. Better to preserve what can’t evolve. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I agreed.”

He looked up—directly at the lens.

“It only needs one to remember. One to hold the index. All the rest can be filed away.”

The recording ended there.

Martin sat for hours afterward, trying to determine when the footage had been captured. The timestamp was missing. The file name indecipherable. The metadata scrambled. He ran analysis programs, checked logs, cross-referenced his own activity. There was no match. No record of that moment existing. And yet he had watched himself perform each action with absolute clarity.

He rose, walked to the door, and checked the brackets.

They were in place.

And he did not remember installing them.

Part VI

The building died with less ceremony than expected.

A week after city permits cleared and contracts were signed, the Cortland Municipal Archive was reopened—not by clerks or auditors or those trained in record preservation, but by men in dust-coated vests, clipboards tucked under their arms and respirators slung across their chests. They arrived in twos and threes, trailing heavy cables and fluorescent markers, measuring walls with lazy precision and testing for lead or asbestos with plastic instruments that blinked red more often than green. The building had long since failed its codes, and no one expected to find anything worth saving.

The first man to descend below Sub-Level Two returned after fifteen minutes, claiming he’d seen a nest of rats the size of cats and that the stairs had buckled beneath his weight. The others laughed and offered no challenge. Their job was not to verify floorplans but to level them, and no one on the crew had any intention of digging into places the blueprints didn’t even acknowledge.

And yet someone went down anyway.

It might have been a junior inspector, or perhaps one of the subcontractors assigned to cable clearance—no one could remember who, precisely. The report filed afterward offered little clarity, only that a single item had been found in what had once served as a basement utility room: a cardboard box, standard size, unmarked, with a faint impression along one edge that suggested it had spent a long time pressed beneath something heavy.

Inside, there was only a USB stick.

The box was tagged for disposal, but the stick was brought to the trailer, plugged into a station laptop, and opened without ceremony. The file it contained bore no extension—only the name: File: M-A-R-T-I-N. It launched in a proprietary player, one the technician didn’t recognize and couldn’t close once it began.

The footage showed a man seated at a steel table.

Behind him: cement walls, unadorned. A single overhead light cast a pale circle that caught the lines of his face in soft, static motion. He looked neither young nor old. His hair was short, dark, neatly trimmed. His clothes were plain. He did not blink for the first minute.

Then he spoke.

“This is the last entry. The index is full. Redundancies eliminated. Cross-references complete.”

He smiled faintly. Not with pride, nor resignation, but with a tiredness that carried no weight, as if the expression had been rehearsed too many times to carry meaning anymore.

“There was a time I thought I could walk away,” he continued, his voice low but steady. “That I could burn it all, scatter it, refuse to be filed. But it doesn’t work like that. Identity is a closed system. It loops. And if you try to sever the loop, you just make a copy. One more duplicate. One more trial.”

He leaned forward, folding his hands on the table. Behind him, the light dimmed for a moment, then returned. No sound interrupted the stillness—not footsteps, not hums, not the ambient noise of mechanical life.

“Someone has to remember. Even if it isn’t me. Even if what’s left of me fits inside a box.”

A pause followed, longer this time. His gaze dropped to the surface of the table. His fingers traced something there, just out of frame.

Then he looked up again.

“It has to be someone.”

A flicker of something behind his eyes—regret, maybe, or anticipation.

“Might as well be me.”

The screen froze.

Then the file closed.

No one could retrieve it after that.

The USB stick, when reinserted, showed no data. Attempts to scan it returned errors. Eventually, it was placed back into the box, which was sealed and logged as “Misc. Ephemera – Archive Incident,” then stored on a shelf in a municipal warehouse slated for closure the following year.

The Cortland Archive was demolished ten days later.

No Room B-9 was found. No records were recovered.

No one ever located Martin Greaves.

And yet, somewhere, the box still exists.