by Neil Clarke
I was good at it.
It was a strange thing to be good at—it was supposed to be so solemn, I guess, to be clearing up after the Raid on the terrorists and their harborers; they played the Anthem every day at noon so we wouldn’t forget that it was so solemn—but there was a sense of victory, sometimes, that the city had gotten the traitors out. (“Good morning on another sunny, terror-free day here at WRPX,” Dexter Destro would say over the radio, every morning as they bussed us in.)
You got used to deciphering text from under layers of dust and blood, standing on a table in a pool of water knee-deep sticking your hand into a pool of sewage and hoping your hazard suit held up. The suit always did; it was surprising how much held up. I can’t remember how many times we walked into a building where the outside walls had blown out or in and left you with a five-million-dollar patio, but the books would be tucked safe into the shelves, ready and waiting.
They were always covered in dust an inch thick, from all the sheet rock and stone that turned to powder in the blasts. It looked like we’d come back to clean it out after leaving it alone a hundred years.
(It was just a feeling. They’d put out the call for volunteers pretty early; I got the call to sign up before I got the call that anything had happened.)
“I have allergies,” Kepler said the first time we ever walked into one, and the scope leader sighed and moved him to the electronics beat, where he’d be scanning through computers that still had any working parts.
I liked Kepler, but he was afraid of dirty work, that you could tell from a mile off.
(“He was a librarian,” Jesse said, like it explained anything, but the books were mostly okay, so I didn’t understand how that was his reason.)
We archived in pairs, when we came across a high-density area—I’d pack books one at a time into boxes on trolleys, calling out the titles, and Jesse would write them down on the manifest and hand it to the movers when the room was clear.
It was long and tiring work, and somehow books come in endless sizes so that no box ever fills up right, and eventually it makes you loopy. Some people had awful taste. Our whole scope would compare notes about the worst ones, when we were lined up on the benches eating dinner before the bus home. We laughed a lot.
Every so often, when we were in a high-density area that used to be a bookstore or a school library, I’d read a title and Jesse’s face would go tight for a second before she wrote it down.
In orientation, the Archives administrators tell you that you should be on watch for signs of burnout, and report them to your scope leader as soon as you saw anything that seemed like a panic attack, or a pattern of suspicious behavior from one of your team.
(“This job asks a lot of everyone,” the rep said, looking sympathetically around the recruits as if it was only a matter of time before we all peeled off our hazmat suits in tears and went home. I could have understood it for Census, but we only handled docs. Maybe that speech was meant to spur you on and make you more determined to archive until every street was clear. Just seemed like bad salesmanship.
Our scope leader only ever said, “Report the second you think something’s up. That shit’s catching.”)
It wasn’t anything that bad with Jesse, of course. That was the kind of thing you said about Kepler. Jesse had herself together, most of the time.
That odd expression always came and went in a second. Not even the Census people ever noticed her doing it, and they were nervous about the smallest things.
File 10095603. Twenty-seven (27) menus from Fresco Mexico, marked with handwritten telephone numbers, presumably arranged in order of delivery service. Phone number [REDACTED] is on a watch list for terrorist activity, and has been flagged RED and forwarded. All other samples archived.
File 10100676. One (1) hard drive from a laptop containing forty thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four relevant text, photo, visual and audio files. After scan, none suspected to contain seditious or revolutionary content. Archived.
File 10217794. One (1) official map of the American Museum of Natural History. Most likely identifiable provenance lies outside of current scope. Returned to Scope Leader 10024-F for appropriate filing. Transferred.
For the first week or so they left us alone, like it was a trial period to make sure you knew how to recognize a piece of paper when you saw one. Then they started breathing down your neck.
Parker was the first to go, for low output.
“It’s okay if you signed up because you want three squares a day and a place in the Days Inn until this is finished,” the reps told us that night, during headcount while we lined up for the buses. “We know times are hard, and we don’t discriminate based on anyone’s situation or background. But we ask that in return for the courtesy you’re getting, that you give one hundred percent while you’re here.”
No one said anything. That kind of thing was hard to admit, even when you were doing honest work. The buses always picked up from 108th on purpose, so no one knew where you were coming from.
At the end of the first week the scope leader came up over a dome of rubble and half a pool table out to the open yard where we were working, to ask us how many documents we thought might be from another scope by mistake. Things had spread, and people up in Municipal were trying to get survey numbers fast.
I reached into my cart and handed over a waterlogged copy of Computing for Beginners; the covers were curling back at the edges, like they couldn’t bear to touch anything.
Inside it was stamped for PS 75. They were up on 96th Street.
(Someone had to have brought it home from school; I couldn’t imagine the city having bombed that high just to get rid of a few kids making noise.)
The scope leader stared at it.
Kepler said, “At lunch, some people from 10024-F were talking about how it looked like Municipal was going to have to set up a whole other rig for the park, so much stuff got blown into it.”
“Jesus Christ,” the scope leader muttered, sounding the way I’d sound if I had to give very bad news to very organized people.
The next day when the shuttle bus dropped us off on site, there were half a dozen cop cars lined up along 89th Street. The cops closest to us were leaning against the side of their car, half-covering the ad stripe for the Alpha Team 5 movie that had been due in theaters two weeks ago. It was about saving the city from hackers, and the studio had postponed it in the wake of the Raid, out of respect.
The old date was still on the ad. It had all happened in a hurry.
“What is this?” Jesse asked Kepler, after we were suiting up, well out of earshot of the cops and the scope leaders.
“Maybe they want to make sure we’re not sneaking stuff in from other jurisdictions,” I said, because Jesse looked like she needed a laugh.
Kepler said, “We’re fine. We haven’t done anything wrong,” and turned into the tech tent to pick up his scanner.
When I brought Jesse’s scanner back for her from Registration, she was looking across the mostly empty stretch going west, from the park, the neat rows of stoops that climbed up to half-made frames and hills of dust, all the way out to the water.
File 18440569. Fourteen (14) pages and ten (10) partial pages of piano music. Appear to be excerpted from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Archived.
We did things in pretty big batches, because hauling back and forth meant standing in line to get your stuff dried out, and so we carried it all back at dusk so we could archive and take off the suits with their layers of dust and board the buses home all in one swoop.
So it must have been dusk, or near it, when we came back and Kepler brought his two laptops and the disc drive to the tech tent.
Jesse and I waited for the dryers for some handwritten notes we had found—handwritten was good, that meant maybe one of the New Day New City kids had written it after the city cut the power, trying to drive them out. I could see the words “sorry for,” which weren’t very damning but could be interesting al
l the same. The Archives people always got excited when you brought in anything handwritten that hadn’t been made by a grade schooler.
Mine were drying when Kepler called out, “Hit Blue,” like you were supposed to when you found something suspicious.
When I’d found the Ballet Hispanico sheets I’d brought them to the archive tents with a Hit Blue; one of the electricians had stuck his head in as the Archive monitors examined them and nodded at one another and took them to a locked flat file, and then they thanked me for my diligence and told me to keep moving so the guys behind me could dry out their hauls before the day was over.
When Kepler called his Hit Blue, there was a minute or two of quiet. (Now I imagine it must have been some half-interested Archive techie reading it over, their eyes slowly growing wider and wider. Maybe they read it all the way to the end, just to be sure what it was.)
Then there was a flurry from inside the tent. A second later, the flap flew up, and Kepler marched out with an Archives monitor on each side pushing him a little faster, and in the distance two of the cops had seen them and were already on the move. They were headed back to where we’d been all day, where he’d found it.
“Jesus,” someone said.
Jesse left her post, walked out the tent flap to watch them going. She watched them so long the paper in her dryer burned to cinders.
File 19005314. Document file (“systemsatwork.doc”), containing incendiary allegations against the State. Text has been previously published on liberal website ShoutLouder.org at [ADDRESS REDACTED] on [DATE REDACTED].
[QuickReference Identifying Text: “Unless our country’s people—its real heart and its real power—are willing to acknowledge that the system is the problem, that the system is broken, and that the people in charge have no desire to change it—and will NEVER change it—of their own volition, it must continue to be demanded, loudly, by all those people they’ve disenfranchised.
We will demand it on the steps of City Hall, on the steps of Congress, on the steps of the United Nations if need be. We are a country being held hostage by our government—we will cry out for change. They will shout that we don’t matter. We will shout louder.”
Full file attached for archival purposes.]
High probability of terrorist authorship. Recovered from Intellicorp brand USB drive (4GB). Flagged RED, PRIORITY 1. Device sent to Schematics for forensic and technical analysis. UPC code sent to Digital Division for purchase trace.
Human remains located in near vicinity, but due to proximity of the initial blast radius, unable to determine potential body of origin.
Kepler didn’t show up the next morning.
After a little quiet, Jesse asked me, “What do you think he found?”
She was a pretty good Archivist, for someone who’d joined up as an amateur. She always wanted to get to the source of a thing.
“Maybe we’ll find the first draft and find out.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” She pulled on the hood of her hazmat suit, until it was just a sea of yellow and her two black eyes.
He didn’t show up the next morning, either.
It was five days before he showed back up, with one dark eye socket.
I started to say, “Shit, what happened,” but Jesse shook her head no, and we all just stood uselessly nearby and watched him get into his hazmat suit, slow and painful and looking like he’d aged fifty years.
“Good to have you back,” Jesse said, as he headed out, but he never looked up. Maybe he hadn’t heard her.
“Cops must have had him this whole time,” she said.
I went cold all over. “What do they think he did? They can’t think he had anything to do with—there aren’t any more of them, the city bombed them out. He’s one of us.”
After a second she said, “They must know that. He’s back now.”
He never talked about what had happened while he was away. When he and Jesse were working closely together, sometimes they’d hit a body and have to call in Census, or a cop would walk by on patrol, and they would stand really close, too close, until everything was quiet again.
Once we came across some Hit Blue material (someone had had a protest pamphlet on their fridge), and Jesse picked her way over half a couch and a hill of splintered lumber and said something to Kepler.
All that day, he swung wide of us, picking at piles of nothing, so that someone else from the scope picked up the house computers and carried them back.
I didn’t say anything. It got harder to blame him, the more you looked around.
THANK YOU, HOMELAND ARCHIVISTS!
You are the most crucial workers, guiding us closer our vision of a safer, terrorism-free city. The work you do is difficult and exacting, and takes the utmost absorption and concentration, but do not let this discourage you from your duty. This is the necessary work on which a country’s safety is assured. Remember this!
You are heroes of the city; you are the keepers of the Republic!
You weren’t supposed to touch anything that was outside your scope—we were professionals, not scavengers—but every once in a while someone saw something they couldn’t resist. It was worse with the Census guys. Working that close to the bodies, it was easy for things to go missing; watches and rings and earrings are hard to keep track of when so much is in pieces.
Archives people were a bunch of collectors, and they picked up stranger things. A lot of the Museum shrapnel disappeared—half-tiles and slivers of placards and fragments of dinosaur skeletons. Every so often you’d see someone looking at a letter opener or putting a small painting on the trolley. The paintings almost always got confiscated, though.
“We’ll be rebuilding here,” one of the city reps said once, when they took back a painting of two apples and a brass teapot on a table in an empty room. She said it like they were going to be putting everything back right where it had been, like this had just shaken everything loose and it wouldn’t take long to set right.
Even then I didn’t think that was a very fair way to put it.
Somebody pocketed a little toy soldier once, one of the green plastic ones, out of a calf-deep pile of splinters that might have been a tree, or the dining room of a house. That struck me, for no reason I could say, and I looked at her and wondered if maybe she’d known one of the civilians who’d been caught in the blast, and got a sharp pain in my stomach for a second before I pulled it together.
You didn’t think about that kind of thing. Census workers had to get training about it, once a week, to remind them.
One of them gave Jesse a receipt once—pulled it out of the pair of jeans that was on a body, looked at it, handed it over. Jesse looked at the Census guy for a long time, and when she put it in her pocket he made a face like that was what he hoped she’d do.
I waited to see what would happen, but she kept it in her pocket without saying anything, until at the end of the day as we were getting the trolley ready, I said, “Did you want to put that receipt in with the rest?”
The answer was Yes, it was Yes, instantly; you didn’t pocket paperwork, that was the sort of guilt that made you look like a New Day New City sympathizer.
Sometimes, since Kepler, I’d gotten nervous.
She blinked for a second, like I’d surprised her. Then she said, “Oh, right,” and pulled it out, and marked where she had found it, the exact street address like she’d meant to do it all along.
I couldn’t tell if she looked guilty or not; it came and went in a second.
It was tiring work. There comes a point where it doesn’t matter; tables or trees, plaster or bone.
File 19044060. Receipt from Topped o’ the Morning soft-serve franchise, dated 11 April, for one (1) medium cup with toppings and one (1) child’s cone with sprinkles. No indication of terrorist relation. Archived.
NOTE: Recovered from within pants pocket of civilian collateral damage—preferred notation of Archive provenance uncertain.
REMINDER TO ARCHIVE RECOVERY ASSOCIATES
: Please indicate clearly the provenance of each item recovered and the circumstances of its archiving. Accuracy is crucial in determining the timeline of events leading up to the Raid. Items found on or in the near vicinity of human remains may be considered to be personal effects by the Homeland Archives. In these cases, please return them at once to the appropriate associate at the Homeland Evidentiary Census Office for filing.
NOTE TO ALL ARCHIVE RECOVERY ASSOCIATES: According to the most recent guidelines delivered from the Greater New York Municipal Authority to all Scope Leaders and Managers, all paper and/or electronic documentation or correspondence, regardless of provenance, is considered the jurisdiction of the Archive Department and will be cataloged accordingly. When part of personal effects, the corresponding remains will be cross-referenced with the Evidentiary Census.
It had been so many weeks that I’d started to feel like we’d be fighting snow on top of fighting the dust and the splinters and the rats that had just begun to get brave enough to appear all at once out of places that looked quietly dead, the day I found the police report.
It was curled at the edges—moisture was terrible for paper—but it had been shoved so far back in the drawer, in a folder marked “vacation plans,” that it was still legible right where we stood.
I glanced at it. Then without knowing why, I said, “Jesse.”
I showed it to her without letting her take hold of it. I didn’t know how to let it go. It felt like an alarm was going to go off the second I loosened my grip.
She stood next to me, reading, until she started to shake. Then she stepped back, like she was worried about alarms, too.
