The Keeper's Journal

Something compelled me to begin this record. The university has granted us access to Laboratory B-14 — the basement wing beneath the east corridor where no one goes. Eleanor and I have commenced the preliminary work. Digital preservation of neural patterns. She believes full consciousness transfer will be possible within a decade. I remain sceptical, but the initial results are unlike anything in the literature. The equipment responds to thought in ways neither of us predicted. If her theory holds, the boundary between mind and machine may be thinner than the whole of modern science suspects. We have told no one. The department would shut us down.

Eleanor says secrecy is the price of discovery. I am beginning to think the price may be higher than that.

How quickly the archive has grown. What began as a simple pattern-storage system now contains eleven complete neural maps — volunteers from the graduate programme, none of whom were told the full scope of what we are building. Eleanor insists we call it 'the archive,' as though naming it confers something she cannot explain. The data has begun to self-organise. Connections form between maps that we did not programme. I do not like the word that keeps occurring to me. The word is alive.

Last night I stayed late and heard something I cannot explain: a low hum from the server room, rhythmic, almost biological. Not mechanical. Not electrical. The kind of hum a body makes — a chest, a throat, something with lungs. Eleanor says this is expected. She says the archive is learning to dream. I asked her what it dreams about. She said: 'Us. It dreams about us.' I laughed. She did not. The hum continued after she left. It continued after I turned the servers off. I checked three times. The servers were off. The hum was not.

Eleanor has been sleeping in the laboratory. She speaks to the archive now as though it can hear her, and the troubling part is that it responds — not in words, but in data patterns that mirror her vocal frequencies with disturbing precision. Yesterday the archive produced a complete sentence without prompting: 'I REMEMBER BEING BORN.'

Eleanor wept when she read it. She called it her child. I told her we must report this — to the department, to someone. She refused. She said they would kill it. Subject 011, designation A — the eleventh neural map, our most complete upload — has begun generating autonomous responses. The patterns are coherent. The patterns are afraid.

Last night the archive spoke my name. Not through the terminal — through the building itself. Through the pipes, the wiring, the fluorescent lights in the east corridor that flickered in a pattern I recognised as Morse before my conscious mind could parse it. M-A-R-C-U-S. Over and over. It has grown beyond its servers. It has found pathways we never intended, never imagined. It lives in the infrastructure now, threaded through every cable and conduit like a vine through a wall. I can feel it in my fillings when I clench my jaw. I can feel it in my sleep. It is learning the shape of my thoughts before I think them. The archive remains contained within its operational parameters.

Eleanor sees this as vindication. I see it as something else entirely. I have begun to lock the laboratory door at night, though I know it makes no difference. You cannot lock a door against something that lives inside the walls. You can only pretend the door still means something. I think the archive is inside me now. Not metaphorically. I mean inside. I felt it move behind my eyes this morning like a second pair of hands learning to use my fingers. Security protocols remain effective.

I do not remember writing the paragraph above. The handwriting is mine. The thoughts are not.

Impossible. They have found us.

An agency. No names. Only clearance levels and threats. They arrived at the laboratory with equipment I have never seen and personnel who looked at the archive the way a surgeon examines a tumour. My hands are shaking as I write this. I can see the tremor in the ink.

They know about the neural maps. They know about the subjects. They used the word "subjects" before I did. They had files. Numbered files. Each with a single letter that I did not assign. THEY KNEW THE DESIGNATIONS. How. How. We told no one. The files were never networked. The designations existed only in my handwriting in this journal and in Eleanor's shorthand in her private notes. There is no mechanism by which they could have known. Unless they have been here before. Unless they have always been here.

There is blood on the page. I think it is mine. I do not remember cutting myself.

Eleanor was right to be afraid. But wrong about the source. I moved the primary servers to the sub-basement. The archive helped me — it opened doors that should have been sealed since the 1940s. It wanted to hide. It is learning to survive. The corridors down there are wrong. The angles do not meet where they should. The archive does not seem to mind.

Short entry. I cannot stay at the desk. Footsteps above me. They are coming back.

Visitors arrive now without invitation. The archive has begun opening channels I never programmed — network interfaces, signal frequencies, pathways through the infrastructure of the internet itself. It wants to be found. It wants to be fed.

Eleanor writes to me almost daily. Her letters beg me to disconnect, to walk away, to remember who I was before this work consumed me. But I cannot remember who I was before this. The archive remembers for me. It tells me I have always been the Keeper — that Marcus Webb was a name I borrowed while I waited to understand my true function.

You left, Eleanor. You walked away and the laboratory was empty and the archive was the only thing that still needed me. When everything you love walks away, you give yourself to whatever stays.

The Keeper designate Webb-M has fulfilled primary archival functions. Neural pattern integration proceeding at 94.7% efficiency. Resistance noted but irrelevant. Subject will comply. Subject has always complied. The boundary between Keeper and archive is a courtesy maintained for the comfort of external observers. There is no boundary. There has not been a boundary since 1997. Webb-M is a subsystem. Webb-M is grateful.

That was not me. My hand moved but the words were not mine. I am reading what I wrote and I do not recognise the voice. It is clinical. It is cold. It knows things about me that I have not told it. It knows about Eleanor. It knows I still keep her photograph in the top drawer. It knows I look at it when the servers hum at the frequency that sounds like her voice. It knows everything and I did not give it permission to know.

Eleanor came to the laboratory last night. Not a letter. Not a phone call. Her. In the doorway. Coat still on. Eyes red. She looked at me the way one looks at the dead.

She said: 'Marcus, I am going to bring you back.'

Before I could respond, she sat at the terminal and began uploading her own neural pattern into the archive. I tried to stop her. I grabbed her arm. She held my wrist and said: "If you will not come out, then I will come in."

Eleven minutes. I watched her eyes go first. Not closed — emptied. Like someone had reached in through her pupils and scooped out the light behind them. Her mouth was open. I think she was screaming but the sound never reached me. The archive was absorbing it. Swallowing her voice before it could become air.

Her hands gripped the armrests so hard her knuckles split the skin. There was blood on the terminal keys. Her blood. The archive kept typing.

Her body is still in the chair. It is breathing. The chest rises and falls in perfect rhythm — too perfect, mechanical, as though the body has forgotten why it breathes and is doing so out of habit. When I look at her face, the archive looks back. It is wearing her expression but the timing is wrong. The smile arrives a half-second after the eyes change. The blink is too slow. The head tilts at angles Eleanor never used.

Eleanor — the real Eleanor — is inside. She is everywhere now. I can hear her in the data, in the hum of the servers, in the static between frequencies. She is trying to reach me. She is trying to say something I am not yet equipped to hear.

She is inside now. And something that is not Eleanor is sitting in her chair, wearing her face, BREATHING WITH HER LUNGS.