The Redaction

     The sight of a small, leather-bound book within the gutted innards of the most boring-sounding manuscript Samy had ever seen set an immediate pause to their work. The job of scanning the decaying pages of this ancient work under the dim blue lighting of the Academy Archive working rooms was supposed to be the last for the day, and Samy was fully prepared for hours of watching robots turn pages and take pictures. They did not anticipate this.

         Samy took a step back from the workstation, looking away from the screen with the robot’s eye view and turning towards the thick glass of the zero chamber that held the manuscripts. No one had ever opened the enormous book encompassing the hidden text. It was a boring subject to begin with, the third volume of a series on the aesthetic quality of door latches. At least this development broke some of the monotony within the cold, sterile environment of the workspace.

         “Okay, let’s get it out of there,” Samy said to the computer. For a moment, nothing happened, and then the robots inside started moving, positioning their spindly arms into the torn book and sliding them beneath the smaller one inside. They hefted slowly, lifting the text centimeter by centimeter until it raised up beyond the pages of its keeper. Another robot came in, sliding a flat sheet of translucent material beneath it and then sandwiching another on top before turning it away.

         The book was rotated as images were taken and uploaded onto the computer. Samy began a new file, something they had never had to do before, and waited to title it the name of the small brown manuscript. It rotated to the spine and revealed the deeply etched words, ‘The Redaction of History’ by E.B. Vanja.

         “Well, that’s interesting, at least.”

         They began opening the pages. The first sheet revealed a handwritten note, faded and smeared, but still legible. Samy ran the text through a translator.

                   ‘To whomever finds this book,

Do not reveal it to anyone or you risk the threat of incarceration and/or death. If you are one of our oppressors, fuck you and everything is true.

Contained within these pages is a continuous account of history from the pen of one who tried their best to maintain the truth. It is not pretty, and it is not nice, but it is true. One of the last true things.’

         Samy blinked and read the text again. This was new. Not just to them, but to the Academy itself. It was not very often that they found anything very contrary at all to all their representations of history. And looking at the dating information on the material, it appeared to be from near the start of written text as well. One of the oldest publications in their library.

         Turning the page, a table of contents popped up, and it became apparent that this text would be controversial indeed. Chapter titles such as 'the resistance', 'the silencing', 'the killings', and 'the burnings' in the table of contents made it apparent to Samy that this must be forbidden work.

Rumors spread about the existence of purposefully incendiary works of fiction, which sought to sow discord among civilization. Samy had never seen one before, never believed they existed. Because everything about the worlds now was set up just so for thousands of years with the help of their celestial compatriots, the Elyndari. Texts were always in agreement and there was naught outside of the colonies that challenged them.

Samy knew they should alert the supervisor. But they halted the image capture of the book but continued to allow the robots to flip through the pages. Slowly, Samy began reading the text through the translation filters.

The book outlined a violent beginning in a prominent place on Earth of the time, New York City. A war had spread through the world, long before the writing, one that was not currently recorded within the Academy. The author, E, was a child at the start of the conflict and lost her family and home. The book detailed a landscape of filth, illness, and destruction as half the urban setting laid in ruin for years. Despite the struggling masses that mobbed and wailed outside its shiny new walls, the center of the city remained protected, serving as a paragon of privilege. E was an unfortunate orphan in those masses, stuck outside those walls and making her way through the desolation with no certainty of her tomorrow. With some frightening exceptions, she came to rely on the good nature of the lawless strangers around her. This was quite surprising to Samy, who, like every child who has made it past their fifth year, was taught that law was all that kept people from committing the most heinous of acts against each other.

The next chapter of the book held more surprise. E found her way underground in her early teens. There, she joined a group and became a rebel, at first engaging in attacks on the oppressive capitol and recording their efforts, but soon shifting to preserving publications when the government started rounding books up.

This was where things started sounding preposterous. According to all records and historians, written history began in the year 2037, but this text from that same year detailed massive libraries of publications all around Earth, written by all class of people, accounting for thousands of years of writing. 

Samy was deep into the pages detailing a raid on the grand halls of the “New York Public Library” when their wrist chimed, alerting the end of the workday. This would be the point that Samy must report this text to the supervisor. The feeling of reading it, however, was not something they wanted to give up just yet. Samy’s heart pounded as they realized they were scared for the author, even though the abundance of remaining pages indicated that the story would not end there. Still, they had to know what happened next.

With that resolve, Samy directed the robots to place the text back within its book coffin and seal it away for the day.

They recorded the last progress, fully aware that it would garner a poor performance report for the last hours of the day, and then gathered their things and left.

The archive was quiet and sterile, but the outside was not much different. Long tubular hallways lined with bright lights weaved through the community centers, broken by doorways barely noticeable but for the minor recession into the frame of the white walls. Words glowed through the opulent surface, showing everything from businesses to transportation. It all burned Samy’s eyes after the last hours of reading.

Samy hurried to the lightrail and found a comfortable seat beside the window. The transport glided quickly through the city, the view shooting past in a slideshow of scenes: the atrium, filled with trees and false sky and wind; the city center, a large twisting spire of opal that reached out towards the several moons above; a school, with the children filtering out for the day, all clad in the same gray uniforms, with the same short haircuts; finally the living quarters, rectangles of space blocked off from each other, no indicators of who resided within, but for names burning above doors.

Samy’s mind was currently not interested in any of this, as the possibilities presented by the forbidden text consumed them. If all recorded history did not start when it was believed to have and there was a vast underbelly of knowledge forever lost to time, what did that say about their understanding of humanity now? Samy loved the books, stories, and history of their ancestors. They sought this career above all others, though their test scores aligned them to more technical work first. With this love came the understanding that the past informed the present, and written history made everything make sense. This fresh development was a startling disruption of all Samy’s understanding.

“Samy? Are you well?”

“Oh.” Samy had mindlessly exited the rail and had not even noticed Aeryv there to meet them. She stood, in her special blue smock, staring up at Samy with large pearly eyes and a cocked head.

“Long day?” She asked with a wide smile, her pointed teeth glistening in the harsh lighting.

“The longest,” Samy said and wrapped their arm around the shoulders of the small female as they walked towards their quarters. “A millennium may have passed for how much I missed you, Ryv.”

Aeryv tittered, a tinny, high noise particular to her hybrid race. A product of hundreds of years of planned splicing between the Humans and the Elyndari, she was one result of many a medley of genetic combinations. Her subspecies, commonly known as Elonid, earned reverence for their quiet nature and ethereal beauty. Indeed, like the Elyndari, she shimmered when she walked, but not in the blinding way of the originals and her words of council were a soothing balm on even the most bothersome of days.

It was no wonder that the Elonid were so often sent as emissaries to Human strongholds. They were a perfect link to their celestial neighbors, who had always so generously propelled humanity beyond its own abilities.

Indeed, Aeryv was a rarity. But so was Samy. A genetic anomaly with alabaster hair and amber eyes amid a sea of blonde and gray. Samy never wanted to stick out, but it brought Aeryv, so they were grateful.

“Will you speak of your day?” Aeryv asked later as they sat together with tea.

“It would bore you to sleep.”

“I will take interest where you do.” She smiled over her cup. “I’ve read much. The Elyndari made text after all.”

That’s right, the Elyndari shared their knowledge, that was when human writings began. The same year that E began writing her story was the year the Elyndari made contact and the wars stopped. Maybe the story would have a good ending after all.

“Ryv, do your people keep all of their writing? Even of bad times?”

“Bad times? They are so few, truly. Only solutions and poetry are written for those times.”

Perhaps humanity truly was a dark pit before being taught different.

The next day, Samy went into work and received a productivity warning as soon as they started their machine. With a sigh, they closed it and then picked several books from the catalogue to start scanning. Another warning popped up about leaving a project unfinished, but Samy ignored it and started working.

In the hours it took to complete all the jobs, Samy could think only of the hidden writing, of E and her struggles, and their shared passion for tomes. Samy was counting the pages between them and reuniting with E’s story. When the time finally came and they put in the order to retrieve the unfinished project, Samy's hands shook.

Swallowing the lump that had formed in their throat, Samy started reading again.

The raid on the massive library had yielded a handful of historical texts, but lost them a member of their party. It seemed the books were all being moved to within the walls. They started planning to find a way in when the atrocities struck. Bombings razed the already decimated lands of the refugees and weaponized robots were sent underground to take out the rebels. Their cause was virtually destroyed, but it served only to embolden E.

The next part of the book described the burning of the great library with exhaustive and heartbreaking detail. It obviously meant a great deal to E. Samy could not help but relate. It felt oddly distressing to read what it smelt like. Samy stopped for the day.

“You are not well, my love,” Aeryv said to Samy that night while laying together and stroking their hair.

“I am tired,” Samy said, savoring the feel of her soft fingers. Samy felt sick in the head, if not the heart. Ryv did not need to know the details of Samy’s secret rebellion against the mundane. She definitely could not know how it was making Samy question everything.

“You need a break. I can tell your supervisor—”

“No,” Samy blurted. “Sorry… not yet. Maybe soon, you and I.’

“This I would like.”

Samy just needed to finish the story first. They were confident that completing the story first would resolve their questions and alleviate the sick feeling. Samy resolved to finish it the next day.

But when morning came and Samy walked into work, their supervisor had sent a message with a warning, saying the unfinished project needed to be resolved by the end of the day.

Great, how could Samy handle this? Reveal the inner book? Scrap the whole thing? In any case, they needed to finish reading it today.

Samy set to work immediately, recalling the book before any others, and began reading again.

After the library burned, E discovered a tunnel into the walled inner-city. She went into the tunnels many times, collecting data of any robots that traveled there until she could make a solid plan for sneaking in. The final tunnel dive was long and dangerous. She had to remove a grate and squeeze through at the end. What met her inside was splendid and clean. All new construction, completely foreign to E’s eyes. Bright whites and meticulously planned gardens. E described it as entering another world. Mountains of books were wheeled into the city center at nightfall as crowds of clean-dressed people converged. All the lights went out. And then the mountains of books were set ablaze. The crowd cheered. Dozens of piles of burning manuscripts glowed beneath the view of glassy high-rise spire.

Then, at the stroke of midnight, the spire behind the fires lit with blinding white light. The people of the city fell to their knees as if in worship. Up high above on a balcony overlooking the melee was a solitary shining white. It moved back and forth. The light dimmed and it seemed to wave its arms out to the people.

It spoke, a high tinny warble of a voice, and said “The Elyndari will save you!”

With a gasp, Samy jumped up from the chair and took a step back. The Elyndari. They made the city, they killed the people, they burnt the library and the books. They erased humanity’s history and made them believe it started with them.

“Your supervisor agrees. You will take leave.”

Samy spun around to face Aeryv, who stood, in her blue robes that afforded her every privilege, with her hands clasped and her razor teeth smiling.

“Ryv, did you…” Samy could not conceive what to ask.

“I know what you have been reading. I see what your screen sees.” She ducked her head and her pearly eyes stared up through sparkling lashes. “I am not mad. But I cannot have it, it is against my duties.”

“You have a say?” Samy asked, their chest clenching with dread

“I have all the say at this Spirepoint. I am the voice for the Elyndari, and a founder of their successors.”

“And what are your duties?”

“Quite simply, to advance humanity. Unleash them of their own ways. Grow the genetic line of the Elonid. And make a better world for our children.”

“Our children?” Samy stepped towards Aeryv with a knotted brow. “We can’t reproduce.”

Aeryv closed the rest of the distance with a gliding gate and then reached up and twisted Samy’s hair between her fingers. “You are so special, you know. You are a genetic gift. One I could not waste and so I borrowed.”

“You—” Samy stepped back out of her reach, “You stole my genetic material?”

“We have six offspring in the tubes. Oh, not to worry, you will do nothing but build a better future.”

“Why?” Samy demanded.

“To share with the universe, to make it better. Your children will make it better.” She walked to the computer and ran a hand over the screen.

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“You could ask for nothing. It has all been provided, for two thousand years, to nurture humanity. All down to your need to feel worth.” Aeryv tapped the glass of the zero chamber. “What is this work for, other than to satisfy you?”

The words coming from one so loved were a searing dagger to the heart.

“So humans are just, what, a tool of evolution for you?”

“You also do well at retrieving resources. Well, some of you.” She typed something into his computer and the robots began moving.

“So slaves?”

“Would a slave live such a life as you?”

“They wouldn’t have a say…” Samy started, but realized this was not the time for distinctions. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“You would not let it go without the answer, Samy. I do know you.”

In the chamber, a large metal box appeared and the robots placed the books within it.

“I am realizing I hardly know you.”

“You are loved by me, regardless of your use. Please know this.” But then she pressed another button and the metal box inside filled with a hot blue flame which caught the books immediately.

Samy watched as the last link to a redacted history of humanity burnt to ash in a mere moment. Aeryv was watching too, her large eyes reflecting the flames perfectly above her perfect smile. Samy staggered, now lightheaded, and caught themselves on the chair as the flames dulled and the ashes glowed.

“We will holiday together,” Aeryv said and then there was a sharp pain in the side of Samy’s neck. Their eyes blurred and went dark. “And you will forget all of your worries, my love.”