October 20, 2025 – 23:00

They called it the Data Graveyard.

Officially, it was Archive Server 9, a DEC Alpha server running Windows NT Server, patched, and patched, and patched again, since 1998. A hulking relic stashed in the sub-basement of the old municipal building downtown—where the city kept its records, some dating back to the early ’90s. Payroll files. Permit requests. Zoning appeals. And death records. Lots of death records.

Ray didn’t mind the quiet work. After all, he was good at digital janitoring: erasing old backup files, purging deprecated logs, making room for the ever-growing weight of now. It was a peaceful gig for someone who didn’t like people much. The humming fans, the dim fluorescents, the dead silence—that was Ray’s idea of heaven.

Until the day he found the directory that wasn’t supposed to be there.

/graveyard/root/lost/

No date. No permissions. No creation metadata. Just there.

Curious, he poked inside.

Hundreds of files. Names he didn’t recognize. Each one labeled with a string of letters and numbers that looked almost like Social Security numbers, almost like case IDs. He opened one.

It wasn’t a document.

It was a video.

Low-res, grainy. A hospital room. A man lying in a bed, eyes open but not blinking. A timestamp in the corner: March 4, 1997.

He clicked on another.

A woman sitting perfectly still in a chair, facing the camera, murmuring something too quiet to hear, too fast to understand. Timestamp: October 18, 2003.

He kept clicking. Couldn’t stop.

The videos got worse.

People screaming. People smiling too much. People staring straight into the lens like they knew he’d be watching one day. His heart pounded. His skin chilled. But he didn’t stop.

Then, just as he reached for one more—

The screen went black.

All of them gone.

Except one.

/graveyard/root/lost/ray.2032.mp4

He hadn’t made that.

He hadn’t been filmed.

Not yet.

Ray’s breath hitched. The file began to play on its own.

It was him. Sitting in the same chair. Same flickering light. Same dead air.

Except something was wrong. His mouth was open. His lips moved. But his eyes—his eyes were glassy, vacant. Like something inside had been emptied out.

He tried to close the window.

It wouldn’t close.

The file kept playing.

The power switch wouldn’t work.

The lights overhead dimmed.

The fans stopped humming.

The door—locked.

He was still trying to pry open the case when the monitor blinked and filled with one final line:

INFORMATION NEVER DIES. IT JUST WAITS TO BE REMEMBERED.