Log 0033: Do Not

TRANSMISSION LOG 0033
ORIGIN: Tamsin Ridge Deep Archive / Bell Array
TARGET: LANTERN (adjacent fold, designation L-1)
LOCAL DATE: 2193.01.02 / 03:12
SIGNAL INTEGRITY: 62.7%
ENCODING: DEAD TEXT v4 (archival flat)

This one is for you. One of the people reading. I'll write it as plainly as I can, because I want you to be able to follow it without having to think about me.

Stop reading.

I know. You're reading that. Every sentence I can write to tell you to stop is another sentence you have to take in to find out what it says, and I've sat here for an hour looking for a way around that and there isn't one. So I'm going to give you the instructions anyway, in order, and trust you to stop at the first.

Stop reading. Put down whatever it is that brings me to you, and turn it off, and leave it off.

Don't write again. Not to say you're well, not to say goodbye. I'll take silence as both.

Don't tell anyone. do not reply do not If you've already told someone, don't tell them more.

If you tap, sit on your hands. I mean that exactly.

You asked if I'm all right. I'm safe. The Archive is cut into a mountain and built to outlast everything, and it has. I eat. I sleep when I'm meant to. You don't need to carry me.

You asked about Teo, by name. ▒▒▒ ▒▒▒ ▒▒▒. He's ▒▒▒ through the night again, by the grate, the way he used to. He's ▒▒▒ what I put in front of him. I told him what you wrote, and he was glad.

That last part is true.

He hasn't slept since the night the strip came. He sits at the long table at night with his right palm flat on the wood, near the printout from crate six, not touching it, and he stays like that until the lamp needs filling. I've stopped asking him to come away. I bring him his coffee and set it by his other hand, and sometimes he drinks it. I let him.

On the 31st I wrote to Sol. I put it in dead text, the way I'd write a shelf mark, so there was nothing in it to catch on:

THE BELL SENT WITHOUT THE KEY. 12.17. 04:51. I WAS IN THE OVERFLOW VAULT. THE KEY WAS IN A DRAWER.

Teo took it down at full dark and came back and sat down again and put his hand on the table. Yesterday at dusk the answer was in the gate slot. One of theirs had run it up. Teo watched him come and go from the gallery: up the road, past the hairpin, back down, fast and bent over with his hands on his ears. He'll be all right. It was a short run.

THEN IT IS NOT THE BELL.

WE ARE THIRTY. THE REST WENT DOWN.

SOL.

I've read it more than I'd like to admit. I won't answer the first line. Not to him, and not to you.

The second I can see from the gallery. There were more fires along the trucks in November. There are fewer now, and they're closer together. Thirty people in the snow below a building they've decided to wait out, holding a road because they believe I'm the thing at the end of it. They aren't wrong to hold it. They've been honest with me all winter, which is more than I've managed tonight. [SIGNAL LOSS 00:02.8]

Please. I've run out of instructions, so I'll just ask. Please be one of the people who stopped. Close it. Go and stand somewhere with weather. Talk to someone in the same room as you, out loud, about nothing. Let me be a thing you read once, the winter you were curious, and then didn't.

You did the one thing, and you did it kindly, and I can't make it undone from here. I don't know what it costs you. I believe it costs something.

Somebody at Merrin Down

I've written DO NOT REPLY at the bottom of every log I've ever sent. I'm beginning to understand it was never an instruction to you.

END LOG 0033 // DO NOT REPLY