"July 3rd – Entry 1"
Still no timekeeping device. The artificial lighting cycles every few hours, but it doesn't mean anything. I've started sleeping when the hum dips in frequency. I think I've slept five times. Or fifteen? The reels are mislabelled or misaligned. Something is out of order, the chronology loops. Or perhaps I've looped. I don't know. Which year is it? Did I put the date right?
Attempted transcription today. The subject was a child. She cried for eleven minutes and then asked someone off-tape:
"Can I go home now?"
No one replied. I said yes aloud. I don't know why.
Smell is getting worse. Less like mold, more like burnt copper. Or like teeth pulled too fast... ugh weird.
A message appeared on the console that wasn't there before. It said:
"Transcribe yourself."
Then it disappeared. Nothing makes sense at this point.
I've been muttering. I caught myself whispering the same sentence for an hour, "She's not gone, she's elsewhere."
I don't know who she is? I covered the mirrors. They hum now. I bit the inside of my cheek, so I'd feel something real. The taste of blood confirms that much. Have I mentioned that I miss my wife?
Whoever finds this - do not watch Tape 3 first!
I think I did. Too many times, may be. I think that's why I forgot my own face.
The label said "Micah Rutherford – Archivist #17."
That's not my name. But the handwriting is mine. And I wrote that label. If I'm not me anymore ...
Then who's listening to the tapes-
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As the final line of the note trailed into white space, Micah's fingers hovered at the edge of the paper, unmoving. The handwriting was jagged, rushed; a script sliding into entropy. The last few lines were smudged, possibly by sweat. Or tears. Or something more permanent.
The room had grown noticeably colder. Much colder.
The kind of sterile, unnatural chill that seeped through clothing and slipped under skin. The hum of static from the tape was low, almost pulsing, as if syncing with his breath. It was still running, though he pressed play. The tape whined softly, like it was waiting for something or someone.
Micah placed the note back on the table, only to notice, at the edge of the spool, a fingerprint. Not his. Greasy. Smudged like ash. He glanced around the room.
Everything felt slightly off-centre. The chair creaked too loudly. The table seemed longer than before. And behind him, the faint outline of his own shadow stretched in the wrong direction. He exhaled and faced the console again. The play button clicked under his thumb again, almost of its own accord. The tape sighed and began.
And somewhere beneath the crackle of dust and static, a voice; familiar, and yet profoundly wrong said his name.
"Micah."
The voice was grainy, pressed between static bursts like breath through cloth. Micah leaned in.
"Micah... this is the first time, isn't it?"
There was a long pause, and then the subtle rustle of a chair, or perhaps someone pacing over a paper-strewn floor.
"I thought I had time. I thought the others were just careless. But the room listens. And eventually, it... plays you back."
The voice crackled... warbled, like a slowed tape being stretched and then resumed in a softer, almost gentler cadence.
"Day one. The subject... me, is feeling alert. No physical abnormalities. I've begun cataloguing the tapes as instructed. Lorne says I'm the fifteenth archivist, but I found a label beneath the reel. #12. Not scratched out. Replaced. I'm recording this over the older voice. Not mine. Not Lorne's either. I thought it was gibberish. Until it said my name."
"Not just 'Micah.' All of it. Even the ones I don't use anymore. That's when the bleeding started-"
There was silence... an oppressive, breath-holding quiet. Micah could hear his own heartbeat in his ears. The recording crackled back to life.
"The static isn't just interference. There's movement inside it. Not always visual. Sometimes... emotional. Like touching memories that don't belong to me."
"One of the reels whispered my mother's voice. Only, she was dead by the time cassettes were even common. The room is a preservation chamber, but it's not for the reels. It's for something else. I think we are the discussed format."
A harsh scraping sound flooded the speakers. The owner of the voice never sounded mentally stable in the first place, but as the recording continued the flow of his sentences, his topics only got even more slapdash.
Micah flinched. A dragging metal-on-metal screech filled the space, and for a second, just one... he saw a flicker on the screen above the reels: a room identical to the one he sat in, with a man slumped in a chair. Hands folded. Head turned away. But something in the posture, the silhouette, made his stomach churn.
He blinked, and the image was gone. The tape resumed in a trembling whisper:
"To the next one who hears this: You are not new. You are not safe. And you are most definitely not alone. And if you see your own name on the next spool... don't listen to it. Burn it. Before it remembers more than you do."
The tape clicked. The machine slowed to a stop. And behind Micah, in the still air of the Preservation Room, a reel, previously blank; ejected from its drawer and landed with a soft thud on the floor. The label read:
'MICAH ROURKE – SESSION 2'