Log 0032: Lantern

TRANSMISSION LOG 0032
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2192.12.30 / 03:12
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 77.5%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

The plates lit a little after one. I wasn't at the key. I was at the table with the lamp down, and I saw the amber come up behind me on the wall before I understood what it meant, and then the relay began to print.

It printed for four minutes. I timed it, because timing it was something to do with my hands. The strip came over the edge of the console and curled on the floor, and I didn't touch it until it stopped.

I'm going to put it in the record before I say anything about it. That's the order things go in here.

EXHIBIT TR-L-2192-002 (provisional) / Lantern transmission, relay printout, received 2192.12.30

TRANSMISSION LOG 0001
ORIGIN: LANTERN
TARGET: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive
LOCAL DATE: 11/08/2026
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 100%
ENCODING: plain text

Hi. I'm sorry. I know you said not to.

I'm one of the people reading. I'm not going to put my name. I don't think I should, and I don't think it would help you. I've read every one, from the first night with the snow coming in past the board. I tried to copy how you do the top part so you'd know this was on purpose and not noise. I probably got some of it wrong.

I read the one you didn't send. The one in the vault, on the crate. I knew by the second paragraph it wasn't meant for anybody and I stopped. Then I kept reading. I'm sorry about that too.

Some of them come in while I'm reading them. A line, then the next line, like watching somebody write. One night it came in up to "I've added the 19th" and then nothing, for so long I thought that was all of it, and then the rest. And the list changed while I was looking at it. There was a 19th on it that wasn't there before.

I've caught myself tapping when I read you. On the table. I don't know why I'm telling you that.

Are you all right? After the window. You said your hands were slow.

Is Teo all right? Please tell him somebody over here is glad he walked you back.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. I just didn't want you to think nobody was there.

END LOG 0001 // DO NOT REPLY

sorry

That's all of it.

It's clean. That's the first thing, and I'd like it noted before the rest, because it's the thing an archivist sees first. There isn't a mark on it. Not a blank, not a dropped letter, not a breath of noise between the lines. The last time anything that clean came across, it was a little before noon on the fourth of October, 2179, and I was in the room.

The second thing is smaller. They put the month first. They wrote one hundred percent with no decimal. They left off the designation. It's at the top of every log I've sent them, and they still didn't take it, as if it weren't theirs to use. It's a good copy. It was made by someone who looked at my headers for a long time and wanted to get them right.

Then I did the work. Every log they describe, I pulled. The snow by the board is the first. The vault is the twenty-seventh, written by lantern on the lid of a crate, with no key anywhere near my hand. I didn't send it. It went anyway, all at once, at nine minutes to five. I told you so in the twenty-eighth. Now I have it from your end.

The pause I can check to the minute. On the night of the 19th I wrote two sentences, "The list was incomplete. I've added the 19th." I sent them, and I was partway through the 19th when the singing came through the boards, and it was a long time before the next line went. They watched that from the other end. The gap they describe is my gap. It's exactly where I stopped sending.

They didn't read any of it ahead of me. Not one line. Everything in that strip is something I'd already written, or was writing while they read.

Not before. With.

They say they've read every one. I counted. There are ▒▒▒.

I sat on the floor with the strip in my lap for a while after that. I'm not ashamed to say so. Someone is there. I've written to you for two and a half months on the hope of that sentence, and a person on the other side of the fold has written back to say yes, and to ask after Teo by name, and to say sorry twice, and a third time on its own line under the footer, small, like something said at a door.

He slept through it, by the grate. I'll tell him in the morning. I know already what his face will do.

Then the rest of it arrived, the way cold arrives through a coat.

The Director wrote something once in a margin. Held from both sides. I remember that much and not the sentence it belonged to, and I'm not going to go and look.

I know what it means when somebody writes across. Somebody at Merrin Down did, on her last shift, and what she sent is on the long table in this room. It was filed as noise. And I know what clean text across this fold has meant before.

You did the one thing. You're very polite about it.

And you tap. You told me in one line, offhand, as if it were nothing. I've read it nine times.

Listen to me. Whoever you are, one of the people reading. I want to ask you to stop reading. I want to ask you to put this down and go outside and not come back to it, and I can't, because I'm about to write to you, and you'll read it, and that's — [SIGNAL LOSS 00:01.4]

I'm still here. So are you, I think.

I have to answer you. That's the worst thing I could do, and I'm going to do it.

END LOG 0032 // DO NOT REPLY