The Corpse Archives

by Kameron Hurley

  “What do they say?”

  My keeper was silent.

  “What do they say?”

  “They negate all truth,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I wrote words that told an untrue history. One different from all those others.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Why not? Are you a fool? There is no truth, Anish. Only stories. Only things we wished had happened. Words unmade the skin that formed so smooth and perfect in your mother’s body. And now we will finish negating the existence of the texts and the existence of all your bodies. We will finish unmaking history. We will unmake the world we crafted from lies.”

  “You can’t tell lies on a body,” I said. “You can’t –“

  “And what does Chiva’s empty body attest to, Anish? What truth does she tell? She is empty and free and when the last of us dies she’ll burn you along with the rest of them, to be free of you.”

  “Shut up!” I said, and I slammed the mirror panel shut and ran out of the dictation room. I saw again the vision of my burning kin. “You can’t negate their bodies!” I said, and I ran down through the corridors, my keeper’s laughter ringing in my head.

  Other students and archivists stared at me as I passed. I ran and ran, looking for the Hall of Unmaking. I knew the route so well, that place where Chiva and I had touched truth. Down this corridor, left, another left, and –

  A steel gate blocked my path. I stopped. I stared at it.

  “She likes to kill them, you know,” my keeper said. “She likes to kill them because she’s afraid of them.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You think that word saves you? It changes nothing. You think I can say no and go back to being an organic body? You think I can say, no and cease to be a swimming mass of synthetic fluid and artificial synapses?” my keeper said. “That word cannot unmake what I became. You want truth, Anish? We envy your bodies. Your beautiful smooth bodies. We covet them. We have built not an archive but a shrine, not a world of absolute truth but a world that records the stories we wish were ours by destroying you. We use flesh to fantasize about that which we can never be. You bodies are so stupid. You lie about this place talking of how ugly you are, running around in this artificial labyrinth of our making, your unmaking. You have not seen the sun in years now, Anish. You laze about here and squander your lives, and when we’re dead you’ll still lie about here as your bodies waste away. You’ll exist only to preserve the history of our death, wishing always that you were something other than what you are.”

  “You’re lying,” I said. I pressed my palms to the cold steel of the gate. “These are just stories.”

  “But now I’ve had you write them on your body, little Anish. Now they’re truth, aren’t they?”

  I turned away from the gate and began to run again through the halls. How long had we spent in dictation? How much had things changed? I saw more gates. Corridors ended abruptly. Those corridors still open had empty niches. What had happened to all the texts?

  “How many keepers are left?” I said. My legs hurt. My throat was raw. “How many have died?”

  “There are five of us left. We die in groups, you know. Just as we were made,” my keeper said.

  I stopped and stood still in the hall, breathing deep, gazing at the monstrous construction that enclosed us all. When the keepers died, would we be trapped in here? Trapped inside this hollow casing to die as the keepers died?

  No. Where did Chiva take the texts to be burned? Not inside. There had to be a way out. I remembered the way it felt to dance in the dust. I remembered sun on my skin. How had I forgotten it?

  I found Chiva with three archivists and another trolley heaped with bodies. When she saw me she looked away, but I grabbed her by the shoulder. The other archivists stared at us. I did not care.

  “When you burn them, where do you take them?”

  “What?”

  “Where do you burn them?”

  “Outside, of course,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You never wanted to talk about it before. You ignored –“

  “Show me,” I said.

  “We’re going there now.”

  We ascended through a long narrow hall, entered a cylindrical lift, and stepped onto ground covered in grayish ash.

  I saw a blue sky striated in white clouds. The sun was so bright it hurt my eyes, and for a moment I was blinded. The yard was a broad, circular pit surrounded by a wall fifty feet high.

  I collapsed into the grayish dust.

  The archivists piled up the bodies, wet them with reddish fluid, and opened a bin of flares. The texts burned without making a sound. I watched the bodies flame, bubble, melt and char.

  The archivists did not even wait for this batch of bodies to finish burning before they took the trolley back to the lift.

  “Chiva?” they called, but Chiva stood in front of me. The bodies belched smoke behind her.

  The lift closed.

  “What’s wrong, Anish?” Chiva said.

  I pressed my hands against my face, covering my eyes. “I’m unmade,” I said. “There is no truth.”

  She knelt beside me. “Don’t you know?” she said. “There never was any truth. We’re just like these burned things.”

  I reached out to her, tried to hold her body against mine. I had missed her so much. Having her close meant I was not alone, trapped within these walls with a dying keeper.

  I held her by the wrist. My grip was firm.

  She stared at me. She stared down at my hand on her wrist. “Anish?”

  I struck her, drawing blood. I saw the surprise in her face, the betrayal, because I had dared to try and write violence upon her body. She hit me back, so hard my nose burst.

  Someone was laughing in my head.

  I wanted her to tell me truth. I wanted to unmake her as I had been unmade, to write on her as I had been written upon. I could not tell my keeper no when he told me to write his lies. I would not allow her to be empty anymore, empty and free as I once was.

  But she struck me again, smashing my nose a second time. Blackness smeared my vision. I fell to my knees.

  I thought of the dancers, of our fire, the texts the keepers burned while I did nothing. I did nothing but watch, nothing but witness a truth no one would ever record. I wanted to silence Chiva as I had been silenced. But Chiva was not like me. She would never be unmade.

  Chiva kneed me in the groin. She balled her fists and struck my face, pummeled my head. I curled into a ball in the dust and tried to shield myself against her. Then the beating stopped. I heard her walk away from me.

  I raised my head and saw her walking to the bin of flares. She took one out and stumbled back toward me.

  Now she would burn me.

  I lay huddled in the dust, watching her approach.

  She stood over me, the flare in her hand. She had only to ignite it.

  “You love them, don’t you?” she said.

  I did not know what she meant. “Chiva, I—“

  “You think you can control the world by hurting me? They unmade you. They ruined you, but you can’t hurt them can you? So you tried to hurt me. You think you can unmake me? You don’t know anything about unmaking. I’ll show you how to unmake the world.”

  She collected more flares.

  “What’s she doing?” my keeper asked, very softly.

  I had almost forgotten him, this thing I could not silence.

  Chiva walked to the lift with a heap of flares in her arms. The lift closed.

  And I knew what she was going to do.

  I ran to the lift. I descended into the archives.

  I could already smell the burning bodies. A part of me hoped it was just the lingering smell of burning flesh from the yard. But then I saw the smoke. I heard the archivists screaming. I ran. I passed niches where the bodies inside were already aflame. I watched the history of Chiva’s destruction of the past.

  And then I saw her, heading back towar
d me, smoke billowing in her wake, her arms empty.

  “I need more flares,” she said, and she strode past me on her long legs, and her eyes were dark, her face grim.

  “Chiva, please…” I did not dare touch her.

  She walked away from me. The archivists ran madly through the corridors. I saw some of them huddled in the niches, weeping.

  “Do something,” I told my keeper.

  “What? This is your creation, Anish, not mine.”

  I could do nothing. The keepers were dying. The past was burning.

  I could do nothing but help Chiva with its destruction.

  I went back out to the burning yard. Chiva was there, piling flares into her robe. She tossed me a flare. I made the choice. I took it, three more, and a container of flammable fluid.

  We descended together.

  We burned the world.

  My mother was dead. Her history undone. The bodies were lies. My body was a lie. The world was a lie. I had hurt the one thing I knew to be real, to be true.

  We parted in the individual history corridor. I stayed there while she continued to burn. I needed to find my keeper.

  “Why are you looking for us?” my keeper said.

  “Because it was always you and your kind I wanted to silence. Just as you silenced my kin.”

  “We’ll die soon enough. Let us die.”

  “You didn’t let us die,” I said. “You used us. Destroyed us. Unmade us.”

  “No, Anish. You did that yourself.”

  I found the door. How I found it, I do not know, not to this day. I had walked so long and so far that I could no longer smell the smoke or hear the screaming. I pressed my hand against the door, tried to open it. It did not open.

  “Let me in,” I said.

  “Just let me die,” my keeper said.

  “No,” I said.

  The door opened. I approached the large structure of the hexagon. The sliding door of the central storage chamber was already open.

  I walked into the keepers’ room. I stared at the last of the little glowing lights. Three. Just three little lights. Three dying keepers left to rule the world.

  “I thought you said no,” I said.

  “I didn’t let you in,” my keeper said. “They did. You’ve burned the texts in the corridors they oversaw. Their overseers have run off. What do you expect them to do but die?”

  I pressed open the panel of one of the squares. I ripped out the tubing and gazed at the shiny black casing inside. I found a little groove on the underside of the casing and pulled it out. The whole black case came out smoothly, easily, as if it had been placed inside the square just a moment ago. It was rectangular, about as long as my arm, as wide around as my palm. I could not see inside.

  I brought the case to the doorway and smashed it against the wall until the casing came loose. I sat on the floor and pulled at the casing until I succeeded in tearing it off. The rectangle inside was transparent. I saw the red fluid inside, long rows of metal chips, spidery wires and tiny hair-like filaments. I set the keeper in the center of the room and unpacked the second keeper. I set it next to the first, then pulled out the last case.

  My keeper.

  When I sat staring into my keeper’s translucent body resting there in my lap, I said, “How long have you been watching me?”

  “Forever,” he said.

  “You saw my mother?”

  “The recordings used to be stored,” my keeper said, “when there were enough of us to oversee them. She was an exceptionally violent body. I watched you birthed out of her death. I was linked to the overseer that pulled you out.”

  “You know everything about me.”

  “Our observation of your compound deteriorated just after I placed you there,” my keeper said. “I sent the empty texts after you. They were going to burn everything, you know. But I knew you were still there. I had their keepers tell them to bring you back. I saved, you Anish.”

  “Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you just let me burn with the others?” My tears fell onto the casing. I did not wipe them away.

  “I watched you always, Anish. What we cannot have we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  I closed my eyes. Thought of Chiva.

  I set my keeper’s casing on top of the other two. I carefully placed three of the flares under the stack of keepers. I poured the whole container of flammable fluid over the keepers. I held the last flare, and walked back into the doorway, away from the pool of reddish liquid. I lit the flare. It glowed white in my hand. The heat was so intense that I had to hold it away from my body for fear of setting myself on fire.

  “What will you do now?” my keeper said.

  “Tell stories,” I said.

  I tossed the flare. The room exploded in a wave of brilliant light. The flame roared up and out. The heat knocked me out of the doorway. I felt the sensation of flight. My body smashed against the far wall. The flame whirled above my head, curled back into the room.

  It was very beautiful.

  *

  I did not see Chiva again. Most of the students and archivists had escaped to the burning yard, and I found them there. We climbed atop one another’s bodies to scale the wall. From the top of the wall, I saw the maze of the archives, the great hexagons-within-hexagons that wound outward for as far as I could see.

  The archivists told me Chiva was dead. They told me she choked on the smoke of the bodies and became lost in the maze, entombed forever. But I knew Chiva would never become lost in the archives. She knew them far better than I did.

  We walked as far from the archives as we could. Most of us. Some collapsed and wept under the heat of the sun, frightened by the chill of the wind, the uncertainty of living outside of the archives. The day it rained we reached a small settlement like none I had ever known. No gates. No fences.

  The bodies there were all empty, and they welcomed us. They smiled. They gave us food and drink, and they asked us to tell them stories. The others with me did not know what to say. It had been years and years, the new bodies said, since they had heard anything of the keepers, those strange beings said to have once ruled the world.

  “We’ve never seen them,” the bodies told us.

  “I have seen them,” I said, and they looked upon me: the tattooed partial text with burn scars on his face, his arms. I had no eyebrows, and most of my hair was gone. They called me an ugly body, but they wanted my stories.

  And I told them all I knew, as I am telling you now.

  No one ever asked about Chiva. Few of those from the archives remember her name. I thought the burning of the texts would erase all of our sadness, all that darkness. I thought we would forget. But now you come here to this little village, telling me there are free cities in the wilderness, and ask to dance around my fire and hear the stories of a past I thought no longer existed. If it does not exist, how can I tell it? There must be some truth, still, something to be remembered, if I can still speak.

  No, no. I am tired. Too old for dancing. But you are free to stay, free to dance as empty bodies devoid of history or truth, unburdened by the knowledge of a world built long before you were born. Dance, yes, and I’ll dream again the dream of Chiva, and the story of our unmaking.

  END