It twitched in her hand. Something inside Vanja resisted. Calling a thing by another name still gave rise to a vague, indeterminate horror that made her brain glitch. She gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. “Key, key, key, key. This is a key. I am holding a key in my hand.”
When she opened her eyes again, she was holding a stick that branched at one end. Calling it a key was a bit of a stretch. But then, she hadn’t given it a lock to open. She pushed the key-thing into the lock on the door to the secure archive. “Key, key, key.”
The key-thing let itself sink into the lock. Vanja pushed until she met resistance and closed her eyes again. “The key has cuts that fit the bolts in the lock. The cuts are hard enough to move the bolts. The key fits the lock. The cuts on the bit fit the bolts. The key can open the lock.” Her head hurt.
Eventually she opened her eyes again. She tried to turn the stick to the left but lost her grip—the key didn’t have a proper bow, after all. Vanja screwed her eyes shut. “The key has a bow, the key has a bow, the key has a bow.”
The gloop flattened between her fingers and her headache intensified, converging sharply at a point behind her left eye. But she could turn the key now. The bolts rotated with a series of clicks. She pulled the key out again and put it in her pocket. Then she opened the door to the secure archive.
It wasn’t much bigger than a bathroom; all it held was a filing cabinet with three drawers. The topmost drawer had a handwritten label that read INCIDENT REPORTS; the other two were labeled HISTORY and RULES AND REGULATIONS. Vanja opened INCIDENT REPORTS. It contained a suspension-file system with folders in receding chronological order. The oldest folders were thin, but the closer they came to the present day, the thicker the files grew. Vanja pulled out the outermost folder and opened the cover. According to a helpful little index, the folder contained one form per incident. The report titles referred to the type of event: Collapse, Increased Dissolution per Quadrant, something called Manifestations.
One Seconday, someone had seen a train arrive and then vanish from where it was parked on the rails.
A group of children had been playing unapproved games in a corner of Children’s House Four. Someone had begun to pretend that one thing was another. Suddenly every single object in the room had dissolved.
There were several cases of people appearing at the edges of the colony. The individuals could not be identified as citizens and “looked strange.”
The latest incident report was only a few days old. It concerned the collapse in the mushroom chambers and the subsequent discovery of the pipes. A summary of Ivar’s statement was attached to the form. There was no mention of yesterday’s events, or the day before that. Maybe they were too busy now to write reports. Vanja leafed back through the years. The same types of events occurred again and again.
At the far back, a folder containing a stapled bundle of papers. The title read Fish in Balbit. The reports described an event where the first generation of children had started playing a new game: they went “fishing.” The children had learned about “fish” from the books their parents had brought with them from the old world. Previous investigations had established that ocean life had evolved no further than algae. Even so, the children were pulling “fish” out of the water.
According to the informant, the adults discovered what was going on only when the children, who had been left unsupervised, had pulled a large amount of “fish” out of the water.
The informant states that the things scattered around the children could superficially be said to resemble fish, but upon dissection turned out to have “neither guts nor spine, just some sort of gunk inside.” It emerged that the children had organized a competition. The children would take turns announcing the description of the fish they planned to catch and were awarded points according to how much the catch resembled the description.
A decision was made on the spot to confiscate and destroy all books containing pictures and descriptions of marine wildlife. Furthermore, a motion will be proposed to the Central Administration in Essre for stricter regulation of contents in books available to the public, and to children in particular. This incident is particularly alarming considering the recent events in Colony 5.
Vanja closed the drawer and opened the next one. The files had been shoved in haphazardly, meeting protocols jumbled with what looked like essays and lists. Vanja reached into the very back of the drawer and pulled out one of the oldest folders.
After the tragic events that lay waste to Sunborough, it is the decision of the Central Administration that all names of places and people in the colonies be regulated, effective immediately. Any name that refers to a thing or animal, is immediately homonymic with a word used to denote another meaning in modern language, or in any other way attributes qualities to the place or person shall be changed to an approved name. Approved names shall be simple and mirror the origin of the majority of the pioneers. All place-names will be replaced with a letter combination chosen at random. New place-names are as follows:
Designation/Old name/New name
Colony 1 / Base / Essre
Colony 2 / Seaview / Balbit
Colony 3 / Oilfield / Odek
Colony 4 / Frostville / Amatka
Colony 5 / Sunborough / —
They had named Colony 5 after a light in the sky, and the world had replied.
Vanja put the papers back into the folder and looked at her wrist clock. It would be morning soon. She couldn’t waste the night reading if she were to have any hope of doing what she had come for. She pulled the bottom drawer out and off its tracks. It was so heavy she could barely lift it. She lugged it upstairs to the reception, where she left it under the front desk. She repeated the process with the other two drawers and returned to the main archive.
With all the drawers completely pulled out, the space left in the middle was just big enough to stand in. Vanja looked around. All this paper really only served one purpose: to anchor the colony’s shape, to keep people from breaking free. It would burn in no time at all. All she had to do was set fire to it. Set fire to it and scatter the secure archive in the streets. Then she would tell them. She would tell them all. People had a right to know how trapped they were, how much they had never been allowed to know, how they had never been allowed to choose what life they wanted to live.
Vanja abruptly realized she had nothing to light the paper with. She had never even owned a lighter. Evgen had had one, not she. She drummed her hands on her thighs in frustration. “Come on, burn,” she hissed at the archive. “Burn.”
A few of the papers rustled as if in a breeze. Of course. Vanja let out a laugh. She pulled a bundle of mycopaper out of the closest drawer and stared at it. “You’re burning,” she told the paper. “You’re burning, burning, burning.”
When the mycopaper flared up, it was so sudden it scorched her fingertips and made her drop it. It landed in a box of mixed good and mycopaper. The good paper wasn’t immune to the flames. It almost burned better than the mycopaper. Vanja took papers from the other drawers, lit them and put them back, until half of the archive was ablaze and the flames were spreading rapidly on their own. Black smoke roiled up toward the ceiling, choking her. She crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees.
They were waiting for her at the front desk. A clerk was crouched by the drawers from the secure archive, going through the folders. Two sturdy couriers were on their way through the reception toward the archive door. They stepped back as Vanja threw the door open and smoke poured out.