05. Discovery

A man and a woman sit at desks facing one another across a window filled with greenery.

The room is plain, like an office in a government building.

One wall is lined with cabinets packed with binders, reaching all the way to the ceiling.

On the other hangs a monitor across which lines of text stream endlessly.

A low-priority alert is blinking on it.

“Probably cultural material,” the woman says, turning to look at the wall monitor.

“It seems to date from around the year 2026.”

“Shall we leave it for later?”

“No, we have time today. Let's get it done.”

The woman nods, turns back to the monitor on her desk, and taps lightly at the keyboard.

It seems one of the exploration programs they left running has detected an image.

Keeping the wall monitor at the edge of his vision, the man thinks.

The great disaster—the GME, the Global Electromagnetic Anomaly Event—changed the world profoundly.

Digital data was corrupted without warning.

According to official reports, this mysterious disaster claimed approximately 350,000 lives. That figure does not include the missing or those whose causes of death were unknown.

Not long after the disaster, abnormalities were also discovered in many people's memories.

There were fears the damage would spread further, but the harm caused by those memory abnormalities proved far less extensive than expected.

People in those days appear to have relied on data and treated memory lightly.

Certainly, freedom from physical limitations is significant.

But their systems were not truly seamless, nor could they preserve memory itself in its entirety.

Why did they place so much trust in something so fragile that the slightest trigger could destroy it?

What did they use all the brain capacity freed by outsourcing their memories for?

Doing this work makes the boundary between record and memory grow indistinct.

—Am “I” truly “me”?

His focus returns to the monitor in front of him. A notification announces that restoration is complete.

“Oh. That was remarkably fast.”

Apparently, the header had suffered no critical damage.

There is only one candidate for each image.

They resemble kanji or pictographs, but are far too orderly to be either.

Twenty-four images line the monitor.

The two gaze at them in silence for a moment, then return to their usual work.