James Axler – Exile to Hell

She wasn’t foolish or disturbed enough to voice her growing skepticism of the accepted dogma. She realized something more was there. But archivists were always watched, probably more than anyone else working in the other divisions. She had worked hard at perfecting a poker face. She wondered if some of the material handed to her was a test to gauge her reaction. Because of that suspicion, she had gained a reputation of cool calm, unflappable and immutable.

The only time that composure nearly cracked was one morning a year before, at the beginning of her shift. She had inserted a computer disk into her machine and opened it up. She had selected the disk at random, and so the message flashing onto the monitor screen had stunned her into momentary immobility. In that numbed moment, she read

Greetings, fellow scholar. We are the Preservationists. You have distinguished yourself as a seeker and collector of knowledge. Only those deemed most worthy of preserving the hidden history of humanity are selected to join us. We will contact you again very soon.

Then the message faded from the screen, as if it had a programmed time limit.

Brigid never mentioned the message. She was terrified by it, yet enthralled at the same time. Weeks passed before she was contacted a second time, and she supposed the gap between communique’s had been deliberate, a way of finding out if she would report the incident.

She also suspected a trap, something devised by the Magistrates. Only someone in her own division could have planted the disk. God only knew how long it had been on her desk before she had chosen to open it up.

The second message was just as brief, promising to contact her again in the near future. In the weeks that followed, more messages appeared on her screen. She slowly understood that the Preservationists were archivists like herself, scattered thoughout the villes. They were devoted to preserving past knowledge, to piecing together the unrevised history of not only the predark, but also the postholocaust world.

Whoever the Preservationists were, they had anticipated her initial skepticism and apprehension. To show their good faith, she found an unfamiliar disk in her work area one morning. When she opened it, the message said simply, “Read only in private.”

Shortly thereafter, she had found, retrieved and repaired the cast-off DDC. Though her curiosity was almost an agony, she kept it in control until the computer was operational. Then she slid in the disk and read the data it contained. Brigid was never the same again, even though she still sometimes suspected she was the victim of an intricate hoax.

On the disk was the journal of a woman called Mildred Winona Wyeth. A medical doctor, a specialist in cryogenics, she had entered a hospital in late 2000 for minor surgery. An idiosyncratic reaction to the anesthetic left her in a coma, with her vital signs sinking fast. To save her life, the predark whitecoats had her cryonically frozen.

She was revived over a century later, by Ryan Cawdor, about whom many tales still circulated. It was startling to read that Cawdor was indeed a real person, not a fabled folk hero, and she joined his band of warrior survivalists.

Though the journal contained recollections of adventures and wanderings, it dealt in the main with Dr. Wyeth’s observations, speculations and theories about the environmental conditions of postnukecaust America.

Her journal also delved into the history of one Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, who’d been a test subject for a project called Operation Chronos.

Brigid hadn’t known how much of the Wyeth Codex to believe. Worse, she hadn’t known how much to disbelieve, or who her mysterious contact might be. But the Wyeth Codex began her secret association with the Preservationists. Her assignment was to memorize any documents at variance with ville doctrine, put them in cogent form and use the trash hatch where she had found the DDC as a dead drop. She cooperated with the instructions, only to learn more.

She often suspected Lakesh was the Preservationist intermediary, but a year had passed with no overt or even oblique inference on his part, so she had dismissed him as a candidate.