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Chapter 30: The Archivist's Gambit
Another day, Another tiresome shit
My job was a special kind of irony. While most people used the Motherboard to escape reality, I was paid to dissect it. My official title was "Narrative Integrity Analyst" for OmniCorp Archives. In practice, I was a professional spoiler.
I sat in a cubicle farm that stretched to a horizon of white noise and low light, my terminal displaying the pulsing text of a trending romance novel, A Thousand Kisses Under the Astral Moons.
// ANALYSIS MODE: ACTIVE // // TASK: Identify and log plot holes, continuity errors, and narrative inconsistencies. //
I highlighted a passage. "Chapter 14: The protagonist, Lyra, states she was born and raised on a desert planet with no oceans. Chapter 42: She has a vivid, calming memory of her father teaching her to sail. Flag as: Major Continuity Error."
A report pinged on my screen. It was from Zara, my work "rival" — a fiercely ambitious analyst who believed every story could be reduced to a perfect, logical algorithm.
"Kai, your flag on 'emotional incongruity' in Chapter 55 is subjective and non-actionable. The character's shift from grief to rage is within standard deviation for human-like responses."
I sighed, typing back. "Zara, it's not the shift, it's the speed. She finds her mentor dead and is leading a charge thirty seconds later. It's emotionally hollow. It's bad writing."
"It's efficient pacing," came her immediate reply. "Not every reader needs to wallow."
This was my daily grind. I was a critic, a pedant, a ghost in the machine's machine. But it was the perfect cover. The OmniCorp Archives had one of the largest, most poorly secured backdoors into the Motherboard's raw data streams. While I was supposedly ensuring Princess Lyra's sailing memories made sense, I was running deep-layer queries on something far more interesting: The Fallen.
The morning passed in a blur of logged errors and passive-aggressive memos from Zara. My terminal was a mask of corporate compliance, while in a hidden partition, a script was running, searching for any whisper of the expunged author.
A new message flashed, this one personal. It was from Leo, sent from his school comm.
"Bio-chem test aced. Think I used the 'Intellectual's Focus' perk from that sci-fi mystery I finished last week. Jax says hi. He's trying to beat Dragon's Reign in under 10 hours. Told him about the glitches. He said to tell you to 'stop hacking reality before breakfast.' P.S. Be careful."
I smiled. Leo was the anchor to my real life, the one who reminded me why all this mattered. Jax, for all his joking, was a loyal friend. But they were in the light. I was venturing into the shadows.
My script pinged. A single result. Buried in a deprecated log file for The Fallen, was a fragment of a user tag, partially scrubbed: [CR8TR].
Not a name. A title. Creator.
Before I could dig further, a shadow fell over my cubicle.
"Kai."
I minimized my screens with a practiced flick of my wrist. The man standing there was Mr. Sterling, the department supervisor. He was impeccably dressed, his smile a sterile, non-threatening curve that never reached his eyes.
"Mr. Sterling. Just finalizing the report on Astral Moons."
"Efficient as always," he said, his voice smooth as synth-silk. "I've been reviewing your performance metrics. Your error detection rate is 18% above the sector average. Impressive."
"Thank you, sir."
"It's the nature of the errors you flag that intrigues me," he continued, leaning casually against my cubicle wall. "So many are about... emotional logic. Character motivation. The 'why' behind the 'what'. Most of our analysts focus on temporal or physical impossibilities. You look deeper."
A cold trickle of apprehension ran down my spine. This wasn't a compliment; it was an observation.
"The story's foundation is its internal consistency, sir," I said, keeping my voice neutral. "If the 'why' doesn't hold, the entire narrative structure collapses."
"Indeed." His gaze felt like a soft, focused beam, scanning me. "That kind of insight is rare. It shows a unique... connection to the narratives. Almost as if you don't just analyze them. You feel their architecture."
He knew. He had to know I was digging. Was this a warning?
"Just doing my job, sir."
"Of course." He pushed off the wall, the sterile smile still in place. "Keep up the excellent work, Kai. OmniCorp values employees who look beneath the surface. Just remember... some surfaces are best left unbroken. Have a pleasant day."
He walked away, leaving a silence that felt heavier than the office hum. It was a threat wrapped in corporate jargon. We see you. Stop.
My heart was a drum against my ribs. I waited until he was gone, then reopened my hidden partition. The [CR8TR] tag glowed on the screen. Fear warred with a burning curiosity. Sterling's warning had the opposite effect he intended. It confirmed I was on to something.
The work day ended. I met Leo and Jax at our usual spot, a noisy, vibrant food court overlooking the central Hub. The cavernous space was a riot of color and sound, with holographic ads for the latest stories flashing overhead.
"Rough day at the spoiler factory?" Jax asked, shoving a loaded synth-fry into his mouth.
"Something like that," I muttered, glancing over my shoulder. The encounter with Sterling had left me paranoid.
"You okay, Kai?" Leo asked, his perceptive eyes missing nothing.
Before I could answer, a commotion erupted a few tables over. A girl with short, electric-blue hair and a leather jacket covered in patch-notes from obscure stories was arguing with a hulking Security Enforcer.
"The data-stream was public domain! I was just running a comparative narrative analysis!" she protested, her voice sharp and intelligent.
"Unauthorized data-scraping is a violation of Motherboard Terms of Service, Miss Cogs," the Enforcer droned, his tone devoid of inflection. "You will come with me for a compliance review."
Her eyes, a startlingly bright amber, scanned the crowd as if looking for an escape—or an ally. For a split second, they met mine. It wasn't a plea. It was an assessment. Quick, calculating. Then she was being led away.
"Who was that?" Leo whispered.
"I don't know," I said. But I felt a jolt of recognition. She wasn't just a random rule-breaker. She was a digger, like me.
Later, back in the safety of our apartment, the pieces swirled in my head. The [CR8TR] tag. Sterling's veiled threat. The blue-haired girl being hauled off for "data-scraping."
I couldn't stop. Sterling's warning had made the mystery undeniable. I pulled out my personal datapad, the one not connected to the OmniCorp network. I navigated to a back-alley of the net, a forum for "Narrative Deconstructionists"—a fancy term for people who thought the Motherboard was hiding something.
I typed a query, my fingers trembling slightly. Search: Creator Tag [CR8TR]
The results loaded. Most were nonsense, conspiracy theories about the Motherboard being a god or an alien AI. But one post, from a user named Cipher, caught my eye. It was a rambling, half-coded theory about "Original Worlds"—stories that weren't written by human Authors, but were discovered by them. It claimed these worlds had a different code-base, a "living architecture." And it was tagged with one, single, haunting line:
"They don't like it when you find the source code. They expunge the Finder. They become the [CR8TR]. And the story... the story becomes a cage."
My blood ran cold. I looked at the date of the post. It was from three years ago. I clicked on Ciphers username.
// USER NOT FOUND. DATA EXPUNGED. //
The pattern was there. I wasn't just investigating a bad story. The Fallen was one of these "Original Worlds." Its author hadn't written it; they had found it. And they had been erased for it. The demon wasn't a glitch; it was part of the cage. A guardian.
And I had attracted the attention of the cage-makers.
The mystery was no longer a puzzle. It was a trap. And I had just put my foot in it.
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