Troy’s fingers hovered over the glowing glass tablet. He was sweating even though the room was freezing. The air in the Archive smelled like old meat and burnt hair. Above him, the God hung from the ceiling like a massive, weeping bruise. It was a giant ball of black ink and shivering eyes. It groaned, and the sound made Troy’s teeth ache.
“Keep going,” a voice hissed from the shadows.
It was Jax, the head archivist. Jax had been here for twenty years, and his skin looked like wrinkled paper. He pointed at the tablet with a bony finger. Troy looked down. The screen showed a memory. It was a small town with a red church. There were kids playing in a dusty street. One of them was a girl named Cleo. Troy knew that face. Cleo was his sister.
“The God is rotting,” Jax whispered. His breath was sour. “If we don’t prune the dead parts, the whole thing dies. If the God dies, everything dies. Delete the town, Troy. It is already turning gray.”
Troy’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt a sudden coldness in his chest. This was why he was here. He was an indentured servant, a boy bought to do the dirty work. He was the one who had to decide what stayed and what vanished.
He looked at the image of Cleo. She was holding a blue flower. In the corner of the screen, the color was already bleeding away. The trees were turning into static. The God above them let out a wet, gurgling sound. A drop of black ink fell from the ceiling and splashed onto Troy’s shoulder. It burned like acid. Troy cried out and pulled his shirt away, but the skin was already turning gray.
“If you don’t delete it, the rot spreads to you,” Jax warned.
Troy looked at the window at the end of the long hall. Outside, the world was a jagged mess. Half of the mountain was gone. It didn’t look like it had been blown up. It just wasn’t there. It was a flat, white void. A week ago, Troy had deleted the memory of “The Great Peak.” Now, the peak was gone. He had watched the birds fly toward it and then simply blink out of existence. They didn’t fall. They just stopped being.
“I can’t,” Troy said. His voice broke. “Cleo is there. My mom is there.”
“They are already ghosts,” Jax said. He grabbed Troy’s wrist. His grip was surprisingly strong. “Look at the screen, boy. Look at their eyes.”
Troy looked. The people in the memory weren’t moving anymore. They were frozen like statues. Their eyes were wide and hollow. They weren’t looking at each other. They were looking up. They were looking at Troy.
A scream echoed through the vents of the Archive. It wasn’t a human scream. It was the sound of reality tearing. The God shifted its massive weight. One of its thousand eyes opened right above Troy’s head. It was a wet, yellow orb the size of a wagon wheel. It pulsed with a sick light.
“It’s hungry,” Jax whimpered. “It needs the space. Delete it, or it will take your memory instead. It will eat your name. It will eat your face. You will be a hole in the shape of a boy.”
Troy’s vision blurred with tears. He felt a sharp, stinging pain in his legs. He looked down. His boots were starting to turn into gray mist. The floor beneath him was dissolving into that same flat, white nothingness. The Archive was shrinking. The God was eating its own house.
He thought about Cleo’s laugh. He tried to remember the smell of her hair, but it was slipping away. The more he looked at the screen, the less he remembered. Was her name Cleo? Or was it Sarah? No, it was Cleo. He gripped the edge of the desk. The wood felt like sand under his fingers.
“Do it!” Jax screamed.
Troy slammed his hand down on the “Purge” icon.
The glass tablet shattered. A blinding white light filled the room. Troy covered his eyes, but the light went right through his eyelids. He felt a sudden weightlessness. It felt like falling and standing still at the same time.
When the light faded, the room was silent. The God was still there, but it looked smaller. It was less black, more of a dull gray. Troy looked at his hands. They were solid again. The gray mist was gone.
He looked at the tablet. The screen was blank.
“Good,” Jax said. He sounded tired. “We have another hour of peace.”
Troy ran to the window. He looked out toward the horizon where his village used to be.
There was nothing.
The village was gone. The forest was gone. Even the ground where the town had stood was gone. There was only a vast, white cliff that dropped off into a bottomless sky. It looked like someone had taken a giant pair of scissors and cut a hole in the world.
Troy tried to think of his mother’s face. He could see her dress. It was yellow. But he couldn’t see her eyes. He tried to remember Cleo’s voice. He knew she had a laugh that sounded like bells, but he couldn’t hear it in his head. The memory was a room with the lights turned off.
“What did I do?” Troy whispered.
“You saved us,” Jax said. He sat down in a chair and closed his eyes.
“But I don’t remember them,” Troy said. He felt a deep, soulful ache in the center of his chest. It felt like a tooth had been pulled out of his heart. “I know they were there, but I can’t see them.”
Jax didn’t open his eyes. “That is the price. To keep the world, we have to forget what was in it. Eventually, the God will be empty. And we will be standing on a single rock in the middle of a white sky, wondering why we feel so lonely.”
Troy looked back at the God. It was watching him with that giant, yellow eye. The God wasn’t crying anymore. It looked satisfied. It looked like a predator that had just finished a meal.
A new memory popped up on the screen.
It was a picture of a man sitting in a library. The man was old and had skin like paper. He was pointing at a tablet.
Troy looked at Jax. Jax was snoring softly.
On the screen, the image of Jax started to turn gray. The edges of his chair began to flicker into static.
The God groaned again. It was a hungry sound.
Troy’s hand trembled. He looked at the “Purge” button. He looked at Jax, his only companion in this dead place.
The coldness started in Troy’s toes this time. He felt his own name sliding out of his brain like water through a sieve. He tried to say it. “My name is… my name is…”
He couldn’t find it.
He looked at the screen. He looked at the old man.
Troy reached out. His fingers touched the glass. He felt the static humming in his skin. The God lowered a wet, black tentacle and wrapped it gently around Troy’s throat. It didn’t squeeze. It just waited.
Troy closed his eyes and pushed the button.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing he had ever heard. When he opened his eyes, the chair next to him was empty. There was no dust on it. There was no sign that anyone had ever sat there.
Troy stood alone in the dark. He looked at his hands. He didn’t know whose hands they were. He looked at the God.
“What’s next?” he asked the empty room.
The God didn’t answer. It just watched. It was the only thing left to look at. Troy sat back down at the desk and waited for the next piece of the world to die. He hoped it wasn’t something important. But as he looked out at the white void, he realized he wouldn’t know if it was. He wouldn’t know at all.