James Axler – Exile to Hell

The computer was a cast-off DDC model, one that had been remanufactured several times. The older the DDCs became, the less able they were to sustain their workloads. Brigid had picked this one up out of a trash hatch and spent weeks repairing it.

Technically what she’d done was illegal, but archivists were allowed a certain leeway in the pursuit of their professions. Besides, she was fairly certain the machine had been planted deliberately by a Preservationist for her to find and salvage.

She sat down at the machine, turned it on and put on her badge of office, a pair of wire-framed, rectangular-lensed spectacles. Unlike many archivists, the eyeglasses were not of historical importance to her, but were a necessity. Years of inputting predark data and documents, reading screens and staring at columns of tiny type had resulted in a minor vision problem.

Ville manufacturing hadn’t gotten around to mass-producing contact lenses, and she doubted they ever would. The barons frowned on them as expressions of human vanity, and therefore considered them superfluous.

While the machine ticked through its warm-up sequence, Brigid closed her eyes and regulated her breathing, focusing her mind on the documents she had seen that day.

Almost everyone who worked in one of the divisions kept secrets, whether they were infractions of the law, unrealized ambitions or deviant sexual predilections. Brigid Baptiste’s secret was more arcane than petty crimes or manipulating the system for personal aggrandizement.

Her secret was the ability to produce eidetic images. Centuries ago, it had been called a photographic memory. She could, after viewing an object or scanning a document, retain exceptionally vivid and detailed visual memories.

When she was growing up, she feared she was a psi-mutie, but she later learned that the ability was relatively common among children and usually disappeared by adolescence. It was supposedly very rare among adults.

Brigid was one of the exceptions, and she often suspected her eidetic memory was the primary reason she had been covertly contacted by the Preservationists. But there was no way they could have known of her ability, except through information provided by her mother. Brigid hadn’t seen her in thirteen years, yet she found comforting the possibility that her mother was somehow associated with the Preservationists.

Now twenty-seven, Brigid had trained for ten years to be an archivist, and for the past six had worked as one. Despite the common misconception, archivists were not bookish, bespectacled pedants. They were primarily data-entry techs, albeit ones with high-security clearances. Midgrade senior archivists like herself were editors.

A vast amount of predark historical information had survived the nukecaust, particularly documents stored in underground vaults. Tons of it, in fact, everything from novels to encyclopedias, to magazines printed on coated stock that survived just about anything. Much more data was digitized, stored on computer diskettes, usually government documents.

Even though she was a fairly senior archivist, she wasn’t among the highest. Those in the upper echelons, holding “X” clearances, were responsible for viewing, editing or suppressing the most-sensitive material. Still, she had glimpsed enough to know there were bits and bytes of information that were still classified, even all this time after the nuking.

Her primary duty wasn’t to record predark history, but to revise, rewrite and often times completely disguise it. The political causes leading to the nukecaust were well-known. They were major parts of the dogma, the doctrine, the articles of faith, and they had to be accurately recorded for posterity.

Scheming, wicked Russkies had detonated a nuclear warhead in the basement of their embassy in Washington, D.C., even while they negotiated for peace. American retaliation had been swift and total. The world came very close to transforming into a smoldering, lifeless cinder spinning darkly in space.

People were responsible. Russians, Americans, Asians. People had put irresponsible individuals into positions of responsibility, so ergo, the responsibility for the nukecaust was the responsibility of people. Humanity as a whole.

Brigid had believed that, of course. For many years, she had never questioned it. Humankind had been judged guilty, and the sentence carried out forthwith. As she rose up the ranks, promoted mainly through attrition, she was allowed greater access to secret records. Though these were heavily edited, she came across references to something called the Totality Concept, to devices called gateways, to a place called the Anthill Complex and to projects bearing the code names of Chronos and Whisper, which hinted at phenomena termed “probability wave dysfunctions” and “alternate event horizons.”