The Archivist's Logbook

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Before the droughts, there were barely even recorded reptilian tribes in the Arc Sync. The closest anyone could find, if they went looking, were the wives of the elected elite dynasty heirs, and even they don’t count because few were not born of it; most just settled for store-bought, hoping it would change their own DNA enough that their spouse would cherish them above all of the other local female contenders, choose them to carry their bloodline heirs. What true lizard bloodline samples could be found were sold for the price of entire towns to the wives, desperate to preserve their youth and purity.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley, but sometime around the late 19th century, as far as I can Sync, shit really went down the Hills. When I’ve scoured the archives that weren’t lost in the Great Fire Seasons, I found the same references to Belief System Creatures - but especially Draculas, Angels, and Paris Hiltons.

The old reference cards are usually crumbling inside their strange wooden mausoleums, so it’s hard to tell for absolutely sure. But my takeaway is that for a brief twenty years in Linear Timeline, all human females were put through intensive coercive conditioning exercises beginning at two years old through a form of media on a large surface that flashed neon colors. I didn’t major in Global Cultural Conditioning, but I did find a little something once.

In the Northwest Sector, on one of my stops, a box deep in the basement of the state library. A box of AC Era cultural control propaganda, covered in dust but a serious treasure find. I kept the inventory list that was taped to it and when it’s a calm enough night, just like this night above us right now, the fire is alive and warm, I take it out, just to hold it: proof. Proof that more than all of this hellhole I’m traveling exists. Proof that the SiltPeople - Mugles, I think they called themselves in print, were happy once. I know it’s not part of the Global Archival Expedition we are being paid a hefty amount of Futures Promotions Badges to trudge through, but human cultural anthropology has always fascinated me.

And it’s still serious work, because without the full picture, the Expedition Review Committee will sniff out incomplete aspects data, and the entire study will be scrapped, never to be seen again by Historian Meta-ArchEyes.

As a sworn Peacekeeper, Second Arc Division, I have pledged my life to preserve the stories of SiltPeople through intimate study of them, unbiased collection of cultural customs, and thorough proofing, leaving no room for circumstantial evidence.

Which would have been a lot easier if finding accurate, empirical evidence to add to the Expedition file didn’t require hiking across barren landscapes, sifting through ruins and occasionally finding the collapsed, heaped remnants of their rudimentary libraries. And having no living SiltPeople Historians to ask for clarification. And hiding from dragons.

I look down at the inventory list, cross-referenced by some ancient story-keeper. None of the cross-referenced boxes were around. Just that one, and this list, still held by a small, swirling metal artifact. I shield it with one hand from the sparks around the fire.

1900 AC - Age of Conspiracy Era (10/10)

Family System Control Propaganda

Special Thanks to the

Yurok Tribe Language Preservation Coalition

Obsolete English Archive Project (2145 LT)

One Night in Paris (ref. 41.233 Hollywood Era Conditioning)

Clueless. (ref. 96.455 Female Conditioning)

Mean Girls. (ref. 96.475 Female Conditioning Trials)

The Devil Wears Prada. (ref. 101.004 Female Labor Con. Trials)

Legally Blonde. (ref. 96.470 Female Conditioning Trials)

Fast and the Furious (ref. 85.667 Male Conditioning Trials)

Jackass (ref.41.900 Hollywood Era Conditioning)

She’s All That (ref. 98.128 Female Mating Conditioning)

“You gonna eat or what?” Strawmann is holding out a pan of mushrooms, still sizzling, from the other side of the fire.

I take one out of the pan, pop it in my mouth, and savor it.

“They came out really good,” I say.

He frowns. He always frowns. “Tastes like mushrooms.”

But I never ate mushrooms before entering the position with Source, and every time is exciting. Strawmann didn’t appreciate anything on the Expedition because he grew up eating mushrooms his entire life, inside his Tribe Region, a native guide who was impressed rarely if ever.

“As far as I can tell, the two hundred years or so before The Great Intervention, the end of the AC era at the very minimum - it was bizarre,” I say through chews, “the SiltPeople’s de-evolution on a large-scale was reaching its end. I mean, and not a minute too soon. Two millennia of a culture based purely in primitive thinking with a social model based on fear and slavery? Hot pocket!”

“I don’t think hot pocket means that,” he says.

The lighter stuff, the stuff the Expedition doesn’t think is important, but that truly rounds out the study to be effective, is an argument between us at least three times a day.

“What do you think it means?” I grab another mushroom. Extra cultural theories are my favorite, and for a guide, he’s got opinions.

“I don’t know. But my Grancestors used to say funny guys used it, during story gatherings,” he says. “And maybe…to eat. I don’t know.”

“You think it was a food?” I’m intrigued now. These theories never cross my own mind, and why? Because now there’s dragons in the Valley, and the Expedition has taken a bit of a stressful turn.

He hands me a metal cup with purified water. “I think so. In that place we saw, that steel building with the old rolling garage doors we cranked open, I saw some stuff. Box of stuff. There was some packaging-“

“Did it say Hot Pocket?!”

“No! It just was Food Supply, some red mud steaming, coming out of a dough. A dough pocket.” He jabs the logs in front of us with a stick. “What does it even matter? Who cares what they ate?”

I look back at my card.

“I care,” I say. “It matters because the past is the future’s blueprint for the survival patterns of Global Life Forms.”

He sighs. “People.”

“Yes, okay, fine. ‘People.’” I’ve been learning the Comfort Dialect used here, and for the most part, I think I do pretty good, for analogue learning with no Sync option. But we’ve been at this for close to a year now, and I don’t bother watching my peas and cubes when we stop to rest for the day.

“People matter to me. Their futures matter to me. Survival and Elimination patterns are the greatest predictor of future civilizations. Mass starvations, mass genocides, some tribes delusional mishap with nuclear science, the brief but catastrophic use of plastics on the aquatic life and the atmospheric quality - they don’t exist anymore, and that’s because Source is able to accurately predict up to one thousand years ahead of time now, recognize the early indications of a self-destructive tribe, and eliminate them from the BioDome before they infect any other healthy, happy cultures.”

“Well I’ve known a lot of people,” he says, “and not one of them has been too healthy and happy. Not your fault. You’re great at what you do. ”

“We’re great at different things. Have you considered that you are viewing people from a limited scope perspective point?” I ask.

“Ha! You think I’m short-sighted! Sorry to tell you, my dear, but there’s a big difference between theory and living it. I’ve seen a lot more than you. You’re a tourist to the SiltLands. My people have lived here for close to half a millennia, and on earth…I don’t know, but a really long time.”

I roll my eyes. “Not every tribe possesses the skills to survive and is able to run off into the woods to avoid the imminent destruction of all of their people.”

I kick my legs happily and wait for the boom. SiltPeople, particularly the males, can be coaxed into conversation if their culture is even slightly insulted, because their tribal need to correct wrong assumptions about their ways is one of their strongest communication assets.

Instead, however, he raises his eyebrows at me and then smiles. “Cute.”

I stand up and stretch, yawning as obnoxiously as I can. “Well. I’m off to sleep. Have fun staying safe out here where no one can get you and nobody else matters, and the future is just a daisy field of pretend that requires no planning or work. Sleeps tight, hope the beds don’t bite!”

I’m halfway to my tent when I hear it.

The whoosh of the dragons, far off, but not so far off that it’s not reaching us in this ravine in the Valley. I sprint back down the trail to the orange glowing dot and curl up in the seat again.

Strawmann is unconcerned. “Skunks?”

“No,” I whisper. “Not fucking skunks.”

He holds still and listens. “There’s a lot of cracking and humming. Deer walking far off. Crickets.” He pauses again. “Snakes. It’s just the living things. They come out at night.”

“I am familiar with Northern Land Mass life forms! It wasn’t that,” I say. “It was…”

He nods and grins. “Dragons, right?”

“Just because you don’t believe in something does not disprove it, especially when the thing you don’t believe in is…very real, and…and maybe your tribe just didn’t ever learn it during cultural conditioning!”

“We don’t do ‘cultural conditioning’ where I come from. That’s weird shit that other tribes used,” he says, looking way too sure of himself for a SiltPerson who only speaks his native dialect within a 30km radius and has taste buds that have skipped hundreds of years of evolutionary diversity.

But there’s no time for that. Source training is very clear that too much interaction with guides, helpers, or tribal study subjects could result in a conflict of interest, and so Peacekeeper training forbids the interference of long-standing cultural beliefs, so as not to replicate the Colonization Model that dominated the AC Era.

So I let it go, and look at the sky instead.

“Hot pocket,” I say. “This whole entire place.”

———————————————————

The sun is up, the blue sky uninterrupted as far as I can see. I dip my toes into the river, and pull back immediately. Icy cold, uninhabitable.

I sit down on the rockbed, touch my Arc Log Sync and begin to speak, the words appearing in thin air before me as they transcribe into the system:

Log Memo:

Year 2222, Year 1 of 3, Global Archival Expedition, Peacekeeper #85.45.03

Resident surviving SiltPeople natives have not carried historical AC Era culture forward

Include addendum in final notations.

Tribal biases prevail.

Fish do not know they’re wet.

Female and male regional conditioning phenomena has been observed in all sectors so far studied. Intentional destruction patterns integrated into all areas of necessary survival modalities.

But the food is really good. Too good, actually. Samplings have been kept for future molecular testing. I suspect food and water supply infiltration dating to mid-19th century.

Six of eight sectors have been visited. Historical archives in all have been destroyed or are inaccessible due to their placement within protected tribal perimeters.

Peacekeeper interactions have remained neutral as per Source regulation.

Expedition Goals are on track with the approved timeline.

Dragons have not yet been located or verified by sight.

Sync.

The words level themselves into straight lines, briefly glow, and then disappear.

Arc is efficient. But sometimes…I can’t help but disagree with their insistence that every anthropological finding be seen by a Peacekeepers eyes. No BioDrone footage. No digital renderings. Nothing that can be manipulated within the old binary code system.

Binary Code was an elective course during Training. I almost skipped it completely, but was talked into it by my Ascension Advisor, Todo, who thought it could give me an edge in the field.

“You have to make yourself indispensable,” she told me, during one of our weekly check ins. “You will be competing against thousands of years of dynasty bloodlines, competitors who were raised in the Languages, many of them as naturally as you were raised in your single one. If you want to succeed in a career with Arc, you absolutely cannot sell yourself short. Spend the extra time. Study the ancient languages.”

It turned out, though, that the ancient languages mostly relied on symbology, on storytelling with epic analogies, quests, adventures, and a lot of dragons. In my second year, she met me outside of a Preservation Room.

“We have something special here. And I thought you would like to see it,” she said, as the doors slid open, a green velvet room came into view. In the center was a steel table, on top of it, a large glass box. The room was small, climate controlled, and around the edges were perfectly lined glass boxes identical to the one in the center.

I approached the table with her.

“About a month ago, a Peacekeeper on Expedition in Indio-Asia submitted this for review. She found it within a rather-impressive group. The Mughal tribe.” She smiled. “It’s circa 1500 AC.”

I clasped my hands together, suddenly nervous to even be in that place. It was not every day that someone from where I came from gets to see 700-year-old Tangible Artifacts right in front of them. I was pretty sure the females I was in Mythological Stories with in my caretaker community didn’t even believe they existed. The Meta-Arc System was way older than me, or my caretakers, or even theirs, but in my first year of Arc training, I was gobsmacked to learn that non-digital categorization systems of history-keeping had been used up to only a couple hundred years ago.

I peered into the glass. A single page lay in the center, gold-leaf, vines and birds illustrated along the edge. Red and black scrolling text spelled out something in a foreign language. It was breathtaking to see.

Todo smiled. “It’s an original page from the journals a king had published about his life. A book, called the Baburnama. It’s in Persian, of course, as their native Turkish Chagatai wouldn’t have been able to sell so well. This was during a time when Silt societies still used class division and languages to keep certain groups illiterate so they would not revolt. So primitive, but the Dark Ages of this planet’s history has seen worse in their hands. Especially during the Americo empire’s short time.”

I thought I detected sadness in her facial muscles for a moment, but then her face returned to the calm neutral I was used to. Source had long ago smoothed out the lines of emotion on everyone’s faces as a standard recruitment procedure, removing the communication barriers that were occurring in the process of reviewing and understanding the events of the timeline, preserving the logical, unbiased conversations that occurred without them.

Todo was at least 80 or 90 years older than I was, based on her chosen area of expertise: Americo Silt Civilizations, a completely defunct earthen-based civilization that had experienced a quick rise and fall on land across the Great Ocean Divide.

As an area of study, it wasn’t old enough to be noteworthy and respected for those in Training for the status or from long lines of Peacekeeper caretakers, and it wasn’t new enough to be trendy for Future Timeline Prediction majors. As far as I knew, only Todo’s generation of Peacekeepers even remembered it existed. And they all smelled like a foreign herbal tea.

I tried to make out some of the Persian script, but I was only a tenth of my way through Indo-Asian language sync. “What does it say?” I ask her.

“Baburnama. An Empire’s History in Letters, perhaps. The translation gap was lost when it went from the Chagatai tribe’s oral storytelling to the Gutenberg system of printing to pass down stories. Who could even know what that Persian translator edited out or made simple error on.” She clicked her tongue in disgust. “You must remember, preservation of truth in the timeline was not honored by many tribes, for nearly 2000 years. Be able to tell the difference, always.”

I had stayed silent. I didn’t really care, at that time in my career, what it said. I wasn’t like Todo, angered and bitter about the way the Archives had lost so much because of little tribes hating each other, using language as weapons, editing out entire eras in history to keep their dynasty biographies impressive at dinner gatherings. Silt people, for as long as I could Sync, had lived in fascinating communities, each with their own unique ways of everything. No point in getting emotional about it, because it was simple history.

I just loved very old things, real artifacts, real proof of Silt civilizations, of the primitive humans. The Source Training was virtually synced. Our Learning Pods traveled together from one SyncSpace to another, every other Sun, immersing inside of thousands of years of simulated history. In my first year alone, I had Synced knowledge of nearly 3000 years of the Linear Timeline, and studied the languages, cultures, and rise and fall of over 5,000 civilizations.

But I had never yet seen a true artifact until that moment.

I glanced around the room, where Todo was leisurely browsing each glass case.

“Can I…” I wanted to look at them all, but professionalism and control of self while with an Advisor was paramount to making the marks for Placements at the end of Training. One female squealed in delight every time she was placed in simulations with baby sheep nearby. She was removed as a Peacekeeper in her second year, allegedly for trying to pet one and glitching the simulation for the day.

The Source would not graduate liabilities. The work was too imperative to the survival of the endangered Silt species, and with less than 200 years of the Global Archive Project being up and running, and a few thousand years of watching Silt civilizations die off in petty wars, famines, genocides, and corrupt violence, they only allowed those who demonstrated exceptional archival instincts to move forward.

Todo nodded. “You may look at anything you’re interested in. But first, what do you think of the artifact?”

“It’s beautiful. The gold scrolls, and two Lionesses at the bottom. The battle scene is gruesome,” I said, peering closer at the way the figures were falling from buildings, bloody, with long spears sticking out of their torsos.

Todo appeared in front of me. “Objective focus, first. You are not being trained to appreciate the beauty in the archives. What can you tell about the artifact?”

My face heated up, and I switched off my embarrassment, straightened my shoulders and focused. “The illustration matches Euro Renaissance era paintings, in a way. But there are no angel babies with wings or references to a God through illustrated beams from the sky, so it cannot be Euro-Christian based…odd for the time period of 1500 AC.”

I snuck a peek at Todo, and she nodded approvingly. “Go on.”

“The markers of Christian tribal culture are missing…it is an artifact depicting an event much earlier on the Linear Timeline?” I spoke it but knew immediately I was wrong. The Accuracy Sensors were top-notch, and unlike the generation before me, in my torso lining. Source improved sensor placement after too many Peacekeepers went ill from placement activity in their heads.

Todo did not wait for me to guess wrong again. “No. The Mughals were a Muslim dynasty family that ruled over Hindu tribes. At the same time as the Euro-Christian markers you’re looking for. They claimed the bloodline of a male warrior who had earned a place in both their history and their stories - Ghengis Khan was his name.” She gestured at the glass box. “Learn the value of artifacts for their insight into Silt daily life, a bird’s eye view of how that civilization spoke, thought, lived, mated, fought. Do not allow yourself to confuse the Belief stories with the timeline history.”

I blinked twice at her, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was totally lost.

“You are only in your second year of eight. In the SyncSpaces, you will see many, many civilizations, some with very long-standing cultural belief systems put into place. Value the artifact of the Mughals for its preservation factor, for its depiction of that era. Never for the details of the tribe’s stories. For that, you will learn in years 4 through 8 Sync how to evaluate stories for pattern recognition, to aid the Futures Prediction Timeline in prevention of further self-destruction in modern civilizations.”

She was silent for a moment, allowing me to process that warning, and then she moved toward the other boxes. “Here. Beowulf. 600 AC, England. A hero king fights a monster and the monster’s mother, a dragon, kills him. Here. Entymologies. 600 AC, Spain. The first encyclopedia of human and divine beings. Right here - you Synced Latin, yes? - what does it say?”

I looked in at the small, dull rectangle and focused in on the symbols. I was never good at translating aloud, and especially on the spot. I coughed once to buy myself time. “The dragon is the largest of all the snakes, or of all the animals on earth. The Greeks call it Δράκων, um…draken…serpent…whence the term is borrowed into Latin so that we say Draco. Even the…”

I stopped because I didn’t know that word.

“Elephant,” Todo said, without even looking. “Continue.”

“Even the elephant with his huge body is not safe from the dragon, for it lurks around the paths along which the elephants are accustomed to walk, and wraps around their legs in coils and kills them by suffocating them.”

I barely had that processed and stored before she was pointing at the next box. “Here. The Ebstorf Map, Germany, 1200s. A complete illustrative guide to all wild animals, one of the earliest maps, painted on the back of a goat skin carcass. Dragon, drawn just like the rest of the animal kingdom, in the North region of Africa.” She pursed her lips. “Painting on weaker animal carcasses. Dark Age savages.”

I followed her to the next box, where a single photograph lay. She tapped her finger to the glass, and I flinched. We were never to touch artifacts, never with our skin. The oils alone could completely destroy them. But Todo was streamlined focus.

“Here. A rendering of the Hunt-Lenox globe, New York Public Library, 1500s, about one thousand years after those first two. Read.”

The image was drained of most of its color, but I could see the small copper globe and the inscriptions marking the geography of the time. Directly off the coast of Southeast Asia, the faded ink words in a human’s messy scroll: Hic sunt dracones.

“Here be dragons,” I said, mildly surprised and slightly more interested. The Silt civilizations with mythological creatures in their stories were so much less boring than the ones without. Archivists who chose to study and record the dining tools used by all of the civilizations could have at it; I hadn’t selected by specialty area yet, and hadn’t really felt pulled one way or the other because the archaeology of these dead clans all looked the same, really.

Todo walked across the room, to a long rectangular glass box, where several tattered pages laid in a row. “Jishin No Ben, Japan map, 1800s, ringed with a dragon in the north. Harry Potter, late 1900s, England. A young hero helps a Forest Giant raise baby dragons that are illegal to have, for fear that the Mugles will find out or be killed by them.”

I looked over at the center artifact. “Those same Mughals? That guy Babar who wrote it?”

Todo smiled serenely. “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“Well…how did the Mughal dynasty fall?”

“According to the stories, Babar died of poisoning to his stomach lining, while fighting the Roman clan king that wanted to dethrone him and take the Indio earth territory.” She adjusted her grey silk scarf, and pressed the button opening the Preservation Room. Bright sunlight streamed in, and I hurried to exit before it could pollute the room. “You would need to speak to one of the Teachers who specialize in that. I find it overall distasteful to the soul.”

We walked the pale gold slate path back to the main building in silence. When we reached the doors, she turned to me. “Do you have any observations?”

“It seems culturally off for that era of battle…the poisoning. A king poisoned another king? They used violent means as a norm for nearly 2000 years. I find inconsistency in war strategy and method patterns,” I said, still thinking it over.

She smiled, a gentle, tight-lipped curve on her smooth, youthful face. Source had improved the external appearances to facilitate communication, but the eyes always held the true age. Todo’s looked old, wise, brown, happy.

“It was the Roman king’s mother, actually. Who poisoned Babar. A woman reportedly carrying bloodline of the reptilian clans, the holy drakones, in Greek, before they went extinct in the Great Timeline History Purge,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, eyeing the Recharge Stand and ready for a bland and predictable snack.

I forced my attention back to her. “Interesting. Well, thank you for showing me that room.”

She nodded. “That is one of the Preservation Rooms for the Erased. And I am telling you this, not just because you are bright, or because you possess a certain eagerness for the Arc field, but because in a bit under ten years, Arc is deploying Peacemakers to the last known archived references of dragons, to conduct an Expedition, so that the timeline accuracy can be finalized. A long, painful clean-up process after 2 millennia of the same stories, but this is the work we do.”

She had my attention off the snacks. “They’re going to pick Peacemakers to find empirical data supporting the existence and erasure of dragons?”

She cocked an eyebrow at me, a slight flinch upward, as all our eyebrows were standard relaxed into place so as not to imply threat in the field. “They will be deploying Peacekeepers to find the truth, be it dragons or no dragons. Don’t lead with your bias. Ever. It will get you killed.”

—————————————————-

The Strawmann sits across the fire from me, weaving sticks together to form a small grid. He lays plump brown mushrooms, four tall green leaves, and a silver fish on it, and holds it over the fire. His eyes skim the woodline, then turn to me.

“You look like you’re bursting to talk. Five minutes has gone by in silence. Something’s up. What?”

He hates both when I’m silent and when I’m talking, and a lot of our arguments during the Expedition have revolved around him insisting on not being informed of any of my findings. At least 400 civilizations have perished, simply from not wanting to know what they didn’t know, so it didn’t phase me. The Source training is clear about interfering in Tribe belief systems, so instead, I smile widely and lean forward, warming my hands. “Well, I am so glad that you asked! It’s dragons. It’s just dragons.”

He sighs and plops down on the seat, lowering the cooking grate closer to the flames.

“Don’t they teach you that dragons are fake? They’re all stories,” he says. “And, besides, with two centuries of BioDrones and HiveCams, they would have got some footage by now. Giant lizards flying around, breathing fire, picking off village people, shitting all over in giant dragon piles. So much for the logical Arc programming, huh?”

“You know what, I think you just hate dragons,” I say.

“I do not. I like them more than vampires and Jesus, and less than fairies. Way less,” he says, winking at me. “Can’t compete with the fairies.”

I shake my head, and pluck a green leafy food off the grate. “Is that why you haven’t paired with a mate yet? Holding out for a fairy?”

“I can dream,” he says. “But no. Haven’t ‘paired with a mate yet’ because they never shut up for two seconds.”

“Well, fairies aren’t documented on this continent, ever, just so you know. And wood nymphs, probably the only hybrid Silt species that could tolerate your cultural…habits, were lost in Norse translation sometime in the third century. So…you’re up a tree without a paddle then, I guess.”

He slides the grate over to me. “Here. Eat the fish. You have to. It’s slim pickings in this terrain, and it took me four hours to catch this one. You weren’t built for mileage. Gotta at least put fuel in that tank.”

I grab the charred fish, bite the top half off, and chew. “Dragons weren’t always in the Valley. Source says they are now. We’re going to find out in approximately two months, on schedule.” I swallow and wipe my mouth with my sleeve. He is staring at me, and I hold out the other half of the fish. “Oh, sorry. You want this half?”

He shakes his head and laughs. “No, it’s all you. Hate fish. Hate mushrooms. Have at it. Just watch the bones.”

I pop the fish into my mouth and crunch. “Aquatic mammals have small, soft bones. I can digest them just fine, thank you.”

“But could you eat them without spitting chunks all over? You’re a fucking mess, you know that? And I’m not the neatest of people, but, man…”

But I’m already dozing off, full belly, warm fire, and dragon archives just weeks away from being mine to Sync.