The people assembled in the square, not knowing why, only feeling a vague compulsion to be there. Some among them know more than others, but collectively they know nothing.

It is an overcast day; the sun has not shone in weeks. In the distance, a thick band of mist obscures the ring of bare mountains surrounding the city.

A few minutes ago I stood among the crowds still filling the square, holding the instrument I finished constructing only this morning. With the compact machine tucked beneath my tunic, I moved slowly through the crowd, taking covert readings at specific intervals that I had painstakingly determined the night before.

My goal is straightforward enough: to establish what percentage of the populace exhibits signs of the burgeoning phenomenon known as ‘the condition.’ The instrument is not sophisticated enough to provide stage-level data, but a statistically valid estimate of how pervasive the condition is will still prove invaluable, not only to my own private research, but also in establishing a baseline for the benefit of Ministry of Public Health officials, to whom I intend to present the data.

My loose association with the Institute for Post-Change Studies (IPCS) secured me the materials and lab space necessary to construct this instrument. I’m not at liberty to elaborate on my exact connection to IPCS, but suffice it to say a long shared history exists between myself and its founders. The Institute provided the funding for the first round of research I led on the condition. The resulting treatise, entitled The Condition: An Inquiry, includes two volumes of field narratives and a formal report. It remains as yet unpublished.

Most of my ‘colleagues’ consider me a rogue scientist-at-large. Primarily I work alone, although I do utilize a small cadre of trusted research assistants when needed, usually for field work and data cleaning. Over the years I’ve cobbled together bits and pieces of formal training in between extensive periods of field study. My methods are often criticized for being too ‘extreme’ but no one can argue with my results. I maintain rigorous standards throughout the research process to ensure my data is never compromised.

This note is the first of an intermittent series of informal documentary records I plan to maintain adjacent to my formal research. In this initial entry I have introduced myself and my work in the event that these records are ever discovered following my inevitable demise. I suspect that I have contracted the condition, but I believe it is only a Stage 1 case at this juncture. For now I am preventing its advancement through use of the herbal methods I learned from one of my research subjects. I have no knowledge of their long-term effects.

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.)