Log 0005: Burn

TRANSMISSION LOG 0005
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.10.23 / 20:05
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 89.6%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

I'm sending tonight with a glove on my left hand, and since you'll wonder, I'll tell you.

The transmit key is brass, older than I am, and bolted onto a console I assembled from three dead ones and a cutting board. It warms when the Bell is live. My left palm doesn't like warm things. There's a burn across it, shiny and pale, from the base of the fingers almost to the wrist, and when it touches heated metal it remembers, so I wear one of my mother's gloves, green kid leather, cracked at the knuckles, a size too big.

It's a very boring scar. I want to be clear about that up front.

In the winter of 2183, the winter I came back to Tamsin Ridge, the geothermal line was down and I was cooking on a lamp-oil burner in the Archive kitchen. I had filled the reservoir myself. I had overfilled it, it turns out, which is a thing the manual specifically warns against on page one, in a box, in red. It tipped. The oil went across the counter and the flame went with it, and I reached for the burner with my bare hand, because apparently that is the kind of person I am in an emergency. I put the fire out with a sack of rice. I had very little rice. I mourned the rice more than the hand.

So: the Archive's first fire in living memory, and the archivist set it. I've since been banned from the burner by a man who arrived three years after the incident and has no standing to ban anyone. He bans me anyway.

That's the whole story. There isn't more of it.

Something else, for the maintenance log, since I'm keeping one now. For the past several nights there's been a hum under the Reading Room floor. Low and steady, a little below where a note would start. It comes up through the grates after midnight, when everything else is still. I'm fairly sure it's the geothermal line. There's a ground fault somewhere in the old conduit, I'd bet my coat on it, and when the load shifts at night the cable sings a little. I'll trace it when the weather turns.

It isn't the Bell. I know the Bell. When it's live it rests at ▒▒ hertz, a number I could recite in my sleep, and you feel it in your teeth. This is fainter than that, and steadier, and it's there when the Bell is cold. It's there when I'm trying to sleep. This is something else. A fault. Patch-on-patch cable does strange things.

Listener, I owe you the next part of how I came to be here.

I joined Project Lantern in the autumn of 2176, a few months after I turned eighteen. June was nine. We had a two-room flat in Halvard with a kitchen just big enough for the lamp and the two of us, and I'd been doing night shifts sorting freight manifests at the rail depot, which paid in exhausted. Lantern was hiring junior transcription technicians. It paid properly, it came with a medical plan that covered dependents, and it was the most famous project in the world. I applied the day I saw the posting. I wore my mother's coat to the interview because it was the only good thing I owned, and the man interviewing me stood up when I came in, the old habit, before he'd checked my name.

The badge was a disc of pressed tin with a lantern stamped on it. June wore it more than I did. She pinned it to her raincoat and told her whole class her sister was going to talk to the other universe. I told her I was going to type what other people said about the other universe, which was closer to accurate. She didn't care for the distinction.

The work was listening and writing it down. Scraps came in off the plates, and we transcribed them, catalogued them, cross-referenced them against everything that had come before. Fourteen of us on rotating shifts. We had a pool on which of us would be the first to catch a whole sentence. Nobody ever won it.

I worked in the records annex, three floors above the control rooms. Most of us did. The control rooms were for senior staff and Morrow's people. I was never in — [SIGNAL LOSS 00:01.9]

I liked the annex. It had a window, which most of the mountain didn't, and on clear days you could see Halvard's spires down the valley, gold at sunset, and pretend you could pick out your own street.

I've been at this console for two hours, and my glove hand has gone stiff, and I've dropped my pen twice. None of that is nerves. I've always been clumsy. Ask anyone. There's no one left to ask, but you can take my word.

An archive keeps everything, not just the parts that flatter the archivist. Teo has been standing behind my chair for some minutes. I knew he was there; the lamp put his shadow across the page. When I turned, he signed something, and I'm going to transcribe it exactly, because that is the job.

[TEO: You told me it was the Bell.]

END LOG 0005 // DO NOT REPLY