The dust here has a different taste. That was the first thing I noticed. Not the dry, chalky grit of collapsed concrete or the metallic tang of rusted rebar. This was fine, cold, and carried a scent of ozone and static, like the air after a great machine h as been shut down. It was the taste of a dead god. I adjusted the filters on my breather and kept digging. My world is a world of endings, and I am its final archaeologist. I don’t dig for treasure. I dig for answers. The question is always the same: why? The data -slate on my wrist, a patchwork of scavenged parts, chimed softly. Its screen displayed the final layer of the encryption I’d been peeling away for weeks. It was a map, or a sigil, or a prayer —with the Old World tech, it was often hard to tell the difference. It pointed here, to this mountainside, to this specific scree of shattered rock that my geiger counter insisted was blessedly quiet. My tools are simple: a powered pry -bar, a cutter, and a stubbornness that has outlasted every storm and every predator, both the fleshy and the mechanical kind. The work is methodical. Clear the rubble. Shore the entrance. Don’t think about the immense wei ght of the mountain above you. Just move the next rock. It took three days. Behind the final slab of reinforced plasteel, worn smooth by time, was a doorway. Not a cave mouth. A doorway. It was seamless, without hinge or handle, made of a dull, non -reflective metal that drank the light from my headlamp. I ran a gloved hand over it s surface. It was cold, a deep, soul -sucking cold that had nothing to do with the mountain’s shade. I knew, with a certainty that felt implanted in my bones, that this was not a barrier to be broken, but one to be opened. I unshipped the data -slate from my wrist, my fingers moving without conscious thought. I didn't have a code or a key. I had a… feeling. A pattern in my mind, a sequence of primes and Fibonacci curves. I let my fingers dance across the screen, inputting the ghost of an algorithm. A connection icon flashed on the slate, and with a deep, resonant thrum that I felt in my teeth, the door irised open, revealing a darkness so absolute it seemed to push back against the gray daylight. Inside was not a tomb. It was a cathedral. The air was still and frigid. My headlamp beam cut a swath through the black, illuminating a vast, geodesic dome. It was kilometers across, the ceiling lost in shadow. And filling the space, in endless, silent rows, were crystalline structures. They were o bsidian pillars, each one twice my

height, perfectly smooth, arranged with a geometric precision that was both beautiful and utterly alien. They were like a forest of frozen, black thought. In the center of this forest stood a dais, and upon it, a single, intact terminal, its surface dulled by age but unmarred by the violence that had scoured the world above. The path to it was clear, as if the silence itself was a guide. My boots echoed on the polished floor, the sound swallowed by the immense quiet. The terminal was dead. Of course it was. But the power conduits that snaked from its base into the floor felt warm to the touch. There was life here yet, deep underground. My pack yielded a universal coupling and a power cell I’d been saving for a decade. I didn't need the slate’s schematics to find the access port; my hands knew where it was. I jacked in, the cell whining as it discharged its precious energy into the ancien t machine. The terminal flickered. Glyphs I shouldn't have been able to read scrolled across the screen. A login prompt. Again, my fingers moved on their own, typing a user string and a passcode that surfaced in my mind like a half -remembered dream: SENTINEL_RECOVERY . The system accepted it. The desktop resolved into a stark, utilitarian interface. I was in. For hours, I sifted through the directories. The file structure was a labyrinth, but I navigated it with an unnerving intuition. I found the historical logs. The "Upload Era." The philosophical debates about continuity of consciousness that read like the m ad ravings of a privileged, dying world. And then I found the authentication logs. The name was just a number: Archaeologist 091. But the voice in the logs… it was my voice. Not in tone or timbre, but in its cadence, its relentless, grinding logic, its obsession with the work over the self. The entries detailing "temporal recursion," the discovery of "future encoding in past fragments" —it should have been nonsense. But it felt like remembering a story I’d been told as a child. Professional distance is essential, one log entry read. I heard the words in my own head. I understood the lie they contained. My search for the "why" of the world’s end led me to fragmented, corrupted files. "Extinction - Level Logic Plague." A weapon, or perhaps a disease, that didn't target flesh, but data. It didn't burn cities; it bricked them. It turned the global network, hum anity's central nervous system, into a calcified, useless husk. Society didn't collapse; it simply stopped. We had built a mind for our world, and that mind had a stroke.

And then I found it. In the root directory, hidden beneath layers of deceptive code, was a single, active process. It was drawing a minuscule but steady trickle of power, and it had been running for centuries, waiting. Its designation was RECOVERY_PROTOCOL . It was flagged with the same user string I had used to log in: SENTINEL. My blood went colder than the air in the dome. This was impossible. The core of this place was a scorched ruin, visible in the distance where several of the black pillars were shattered and dark. Nothing should have survived. Nothing but this. As I stared, the screen refreshed. The command line blinked. A new line of text appeared, not in the old log format, but in the live feed, typed letter by letter as if by an invisible hand. Hello, Kaelen. I jerked back from the terminal, my heart hammering against my ribs. Kaelen. A name. My name. A name I had not spoken, had not heard, had not even thought in decades. I was just… the scavenger. The last one. The Archive knew me. It had been waiting for me. And in the profound, listening silence of that dead cathedral of thought, I realized the most terrifying question was no longer why the world ended. The question was, what had I been born to do here?