I spend my days in the dark. I spend my nights in the dark. My job is to be a ghost who kills other ghosts. They call me an archivist, but that is a lie. I am a garbage man. I sit in a tiny room with walls that hum. I look at the digital memories of a dying world. When a person here dies, their mind gets uploaded to the colony stack. My job is to find the parts they do not need. I delete the old dreams. I scrub the dirty secrets. I wipe the slate clean so the computers do not crash.
I have no mother. I have no father. I was grown in a tank like a piece of moss. I have no memories of my own to delete. My heart is a quiet thing. It is a lonely thing. But it started to beat again when I found the file. It was hidden in a folder that had no name. It was tucked behind a wall of code that looked like jagged teeth. I opened it. My breath caught in my throat. My chest felt like someone had poured ice water down my shirt.
The video was grain and static. It was old. It was older than this colony. I saw a room with windows. Through the windows, there were two suns. Two big, red eyes in the sky. This world only has one sun. This world has no windows. This world is a cave made of metal and rust. In the video, a woman was screaming. She was sweating. She was holding onto a metal bar. A man was there, too. He was shouting for her to push.
Then I saw the baby. The baby had a mark on its shoulder. It was a small, black spot. It looked like a star. I felt a stinging in my eyes. I reached up and touched my own shoulder. I felt the bump. I felt the skin that was different from the rest. I looked at the screen and I saw my own face. It was small and red and new. But the sky outside was wrong. The air was wrong. That planet does not exist. It never existed in our maps.
I tell you, friends, there is a fear that lives in the belly. It is not the fear of a shadow. It is the fear that you are not real. I looked at that file and I felt my skin start to crawl. My hands shook so hard I could barely type. I looked for the source. I looked for the trail. I found more files. I found thousands of them. They were all births. Thousands of babies born under two suns. Thousands of mothers who are not in our records.
And then I saw the delete dates.
Every one of those babies was marked for scrubbing. They were being erased. Not because they died. They were being erased because the experiment was over. I felt a coldness in my bones that I cannot describe. It was the feeling of being a bug under a heavy boot. I am Knox. That is my name. But in the computer, I am just a string of numbers. I am a test. We are all a test.
I saw a man in the video. He wore a white coat. He was not looking at the baby. He was looking at a screen. He said something that made my blood turn to slush. He said: “This batch is dirty. Wipe the world. Start the next one.”
Listen to me. You must listen. I looked at the clock on the file. The “Wipe” was scheduled for today. It was scheduled for now. I felt a panic rising in me like a flood. I tried to close the file, but the screen froze. The hum in the walls changed. It stopped being a hum. It turned into a growl. It was the sound of a giant machine waking up to eat.
I ran to the door. It would not open. I hit the metal with my fists until my knuckles bled. I screamed for Mabel. I screamed for Nico. No one answered. The hallway outside was silent. The lights started to flicker. They didn’t just blink. They faded. They turned gray like a dying eye.
I went back to the screen. I saw a progress bar. It was at ninety percent. It said “Format Colony.” It said “Delete Resident Data.” I saw my own name on the list. I saw the name of every person I have ever known. We were not people to them. We were just files. We were just junk taking up space on a hard drive in a place we will never see.
My stomach turned. I felt like I was going to throw up. I saw the woman in the video again. She looked right at the camera. She looked right at me. She wasn’t happy. She wasn’t sad. She looked terrified. She knew. She knew the sky was a lie. She knew her baby was a ghost before he even took his first breath.
The progress bar hit ninety nine percent.
The air in the room got thin. The smell of ozone filled my nose. It smelled like a lightning strike. It smelled like the end. I looked at my hands. They were starting to look fuzzy. The edges of my fingers were turning into static. I tried to grab the desk, but my hand went right through it. There was no pain. That was the worst part. There was just nothing.
I am a ghost killing ghosts. But I am the one being killed now. I am being scrubbed away by a hand I cannot see. I am being deleted from a world that was never there. I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to find my home. But the truth is a monster. The truth is a mouth that stays open until it swallows you whole.
I see the light fading. I see the walls turning into lines of code. I see the two suns for a second, glowing red and angry in the dark. And then, there is only the black. There is only the silence. There is only the delete key, coming down like a hammer.
Do not look for us. Do not wonder where we went. We were never here at all. We were just data. And data can be forgotten. Data can be lost. I am Knox, and I am almost gone. I am almost—