Archive

For the first time in his life, the Corrector stole a file.

Then — another.

And another.

The archive of anomalies stretched beneath the city deeper than the underground transit system. The shelves had no end. On them lay records, gathered over centuries, of events that officially had never happened.

Most files ended the same way.

Anomaly removed.

But in the oldest records he found a strange pattern.

Every major anomaly didn’t begin with the physical world.

It began with a person.

One man suddenly stopped fearing his enemy.

A week later, the city wall disappeared.

A woman confessed to a crime that no one would ever have uncovered.

A few days later, the court system collapsed.

A monk publicly admitted his hatred of God.

A month later, all religious teaching changed.

At first the Corrector thought these were coincidences.

Until he couldn’t find the last page.

It had been torn out of almost every file.

Only one line remained.

Subject merged. Further prediction impossible.

He found that sentence hundreds of times.

Nowhere was it explained what “merged” meant.

Nowhere was it written with what.

The next night he didn’t go home.

He watched people.

And for the first time noticed what he hadn’t seen before.

The more a person hated, the sharper their second outline became.

The louder they condemned others, the denser it grew.

The more convinced they were of their own righteousness, the further it separated from their body.

It seemed that every act of hatred didn’t weaken that other one.

It fed it.

The Corrector began checking old anomalies.

They all showed the same thing.

The world didn’t begin to unravel when people became evil.

It began to unravel when a person stopped fighting the thing they had spent their whole life pushing out of themselves.

As if reality itself had been created not to protect people.

But to protect their fragmentation.

In that moment, the Corrector allowed himself, for the first time, to voice a thought that until then would have been considered madness.

Perhaps the system doesn’t exist to sustain the world.

Perhaps the world exists to sustain the system.