The encoding was all wrong, he kept thinking, as in between last minute data entry he packed up the few meager extensions of himself decorating his workstation. It had been rushed. Everyone leaving after the funding dropped and there just wasn’t enough time. He’d done the best he could. But the fact remained that the archive was dying. Its electronic body was hemorrhaging records, each of them representing a sector of his time he could never regain (nor even recall). Hours of research, flipping through the 20-odd dictionaries lined up above his head in the dim cubicle. All of it slowly slipping away through gaps in the system’s memory, now ravaged by worms and bots crawling and marching in after unpaid bills led to the inevitable security breach. Ones and zeroes subdividing into anonymous content—data freed from its container only to lose all context and thus its purpose.

He watched the stream of suits marching toward the double glass doors. As they passed his cubicle they dumped their unwanted office effluvia into the vacant cubicle next door to his. Already these discards had begun to reach the tops of the dividers and spill over onto his modular desk topped with the false wood veneer. A box of paper clips fell, striking his enormous ancient monitor, where it erupted and showered the keyboard with tiny silver missiles. He typed on.

What’s laughable is that there are no other jobs for the suits to take. It’s all over. Officials sealed the city last night and from this day forward it is a closed system. So their rushing out the door is all for naught. They only have their sterile quarters to return to now, where they will wait, popping pills, desperate for an end to their newfound stagnation. He thought about that for a moment, his fingers paused above the keyboard, hovering in space, before one finger, the pinkie, extended slowly to the right and clicked the Enter key, thus enacting the command to shut down his machine for good.

(That is not to say there is no more to be said, to be written. Indeed, more has been written and more will continue to be written on these matters. In effect there is no end, now or ever. The death of the archive is only one death waiting among many to be noticed, to be recorded, to matter to someone, somewhere, at some time possibly centuries from now. It waits alone for an inquiry into its condition.)