My name is Wei Han.
I am thirty-one years old. I work, three days a week, as a freedom-of-information processor for the Office of Memetic Containment, in the same building Marina Idris broke into on the morning of her death. I do not have her access. My access is the kind one gets by being patient and respectful and good at filling out forms. I have been patient and respectful and good at filling out forms for nine years.
The other four days of my week I have spent, since I was twenty-two, building this archive.
I am writing this without a header because the archive is finished now, and I am no longer reconstructing, and I do not need to pretend, on this page, that there is an institution between you and me.
There is no institution.
There is me.
There has been me, on the other side of every header in every file you have just read, choosing which document to include and which to leave out, which to redact and which to leave whole. I want to tell you who I am, and how I came to do this, and why.
I was raised by a woman named Lihua Han.
She was a nurse. She was a nurse for forty-six years. She was the most patient person I have known and the most secret person I have known, and the second of those things explains the first.
She told me, when I was seven, that my biological mother had asked her to raise me.
She told me, when I asked, that my biological mother could not be a parent to me for medical reasons, and that the medical reasons were private, and that I should not feel sad about my biological mother because my biological mother had wanted me to be raised by Lihua, and Lihua had said yes.
I did not feel sad. I did not feel anything in particular. I had a mother. The mother was good. The biological mother was a story.
I didn’t ask my mother more about it until I was thirteen, and by that point I had figured out that there were certain questions she would not answer, and I had decided to stop asking. We had a good life. She made me tea. She walked me to school. She came home from the clinic exhausted and lay down for an hour and then made dinner. We did not talk about her work.
When I was fifteen she gave me a name. She said the name was my biological mother’s. The name was Anna Vance.
She said, I will not tell you more. When you are old enough you will look her up. When you look her up you will find what there is to find. Do not look her up before you are old enough to know what you can do with the information.
I asked, how will I know I’m old enough.
She said, you will know.
She refused to say more.
I did not look the name up until I was twenty-two. By then my mother was sixty-three. By then I had finished my degree and started my first job. By then I had begun, in the way one begins, to understand the shape of the world I had been raised inside.
When I looked the name up, what I found was.
There is no good way to say this.
What I found was the case file of the woman in FILE 007. It was anonymized. The name had been scrubbed from the file. But there is a particular kind of cross-referencing that becomes possible when one has the name and the public staff roster of the bound-care unit at Mercy Eldercare Center, and I had the name, and the staff roster was on the public website, and the staff roster included my mother.
I read the case file in my apartment, alone, on a Tuesday night in March of 2088.
I sat with what I had read for a long time.
Then I called my mother.
I did not say, on the phone, I know. I said, can I come over Sunday. She said, of course. I went over Sunday. She made the tea. We sat in her kitchen at the table where she had made me bread and fruit when I was very small.
I said, the woman in your unit is my biological mother.
She said, yes.
I said, she is alive.
She said, yes.
I said, does she know I exist.
She said, I don’t think so. She has not known anything for some years.
I said, did she know, before.
She said, yes. She knew. She asked me, when she was still able to speak, to take care of you. We were not friends. We had been colleagues, once, briefly. She picked me because she had nowhere else to turn and because she trusted the way I had handled an incident at Mercy in 2066. She had been at the conference where the report I filed was discussed. She had decided, on no evidence other than the report, that I was a person who could be trusted with a child.
I said, the report.
She said, I will show you the report someday. I will show you everything someday. I will show you the leather book.
I said, show me now.
She did not show me everything that night. She showed me one entry in the leather book. The entry was from November 9, 2066. The entry said, The next one will not be filed as cardiac. She had been wrong about that, she told me. The next one had been filed as cardiac. The one after that had been filed as cardiac. But she had begun to keep the book that night, and she had kept it for twenty-two years, and she did not show me the rest that Sunday because she was tired and because she said Wei, I need you to come back next weekend, and the weekend after that, and the weekend after that, and I will tell you what I have, and then we will decide together what to do with it.
I came back the next weekend. I came back every weekend for a year and a half.
When she died, in 2089, I had three notebooks of my own, in addition to her leather book, full of names and dates and document numbers and the access paths I had been quietly assembling for everything she had told me about.
The archive you have read is the work of the eight years since.
It is mostly hers. It is partly Marina Idris’s, whose recovered cache I obtained, in 2084, through a chain of contacts I will not describe. It is partly Karl Olesen’s, whose widow released the audio diary in 2086, and partly Henrik Voss’s, whose personal papers were sold at auction by his estate in 2078, and partly Anna Vance’s, who is the woman I have called my mother once in this document and will not call my mother again.
My mother is Lihua Han.
My mother died on the second of August, 2089, in a chair by the window of her apartment, with a cup of tea cooling on the table beside her, looking, the autopsy said, perfectly peaceful.
I was with her.
I was holding her hand.
There is one more thing.
I have been preparing the reader, the way one does, for the structural truth of the world the archive describes. I have not yet stated it plainly. I will state it now.
Most people in the world I have been describing are not Class Zero.
The Cognitive Exposure Passport classification is, in the internal language of the Office of Memetic Containment, aspirational. It tracks what the system has registered. It does not track what is actually in people’s brains.
What is actually in people’s brains is decades of mundane exposure. A scent encoded from a particular dish eaten as a child. An ambient tone heard a thousand times in transit stations. A visual texture seen at a market on a Saturday afternoon when the light was a particular angle. Most adults alive today have encoded one component of one of the registered memotoxin patterns. Many have encoded two. Some have encoded all three and are walking around their lives in the precarious state called Sealed, in which the only thing preventing the cascade is the absence of a trigger that successfully evokes all three components at once.
A trigger does not have to be a deliberate attack.
A trigger can be a book.
A trigger can be a photograph.
A trigger can be a conversation at dinner.
The mechanism by which evocation completes binding has been canonical inside the Office since 2076. The public has not been told. The Office’s standing position is that telling the public would cause panic that would do more harm than the deaths themselves.
A specific class of documents has been identified as reliable triggers. Not lethal at high rates, but lethal at measurable ones. The Office calls them, internally, the Quiet Library.
The 2067 Memo signed by Karl Olesen, Margaret Tate, Henrik Voss, and Yelena Sokolova is in the Quiet Library. So are several academic papers from the early sensory-therapy literature. So are a handful of novels from the pre-2070 era that the Office has retroactively determined kill their readers at a rate above the population baseline.
The Office of Memetic Containment knows about the Quiet Library. The Strategic Stimulus Defense Office maintains it and has, on more than one occasion, leaked specific texts to people whose deaths the Office wanted to look natural. Several journalists who began to investigate this practice have died of cardiac events that were filed as such.
I have read every document in this archive.
I have removed what could be removed without losing the meaning.
I have left the rest.
Some of the documents I have left, including the reconstructed transcript of Marina Idris’s investigation, the partial reproduction of the 2067 Memo, and the Olesen audio diary, are documents the Office would categorize as belonging in the Quiet Library.
I have not categorized them that way.
I have published them.
I have published them knowing what publication means.
Some fraction of the people who read this archive will die of reading it.
I have been told, by people I trust, that I should not say this out loud. They have told me that even saying it is a form of harm, that I am increasing the rate by making readers think about it, that I am being morally indulgent at the expense of the people I am trying to help.
They are not wrong.
I have said it anyway.
I have said it because the alternative is the system’s alternative, which is to suppress evocation, to suppress description, to suppress the cooperation by which one person knows another person and tells another person and is heard. That alternative has produced fifty years of silence and fourteen thousand deaths from Verrick alone and the impossibility of my mother reporting what she saw and the impossibility of Anna Vance being known by her own son.
If the choice is silence or risk, I choose risk.
I do not choose it on behalf of the reader. I cannot. I choose it on behalf of the three women whose lives this archive is.
The reader may stop reading here if they wish.
I will think no less of them.
I would not blame them.
The reader who continues will do so as a cooperator. The reader who continues will be, in the way the system has forbidden, helping me say what we have not been allowed to say.
I have been asked, by friends who know what I do, why I do not stop.
The archive is finished. The argument is made. The system has not been reformed by the publication of any of this material. The Office of Memetic Containment has continued its work. New memotoxins have been deployed since I began assembling these files and will be deployed again.
I am not, by writing this, saving anyone.
I do not write this to save anyone.
I write this because three women whose names you now know spent their lives trying to tell a truth they were forbidden to say, and they could not say it together, and they could not say it loudly, and they could not, several of them, say it at all.
I can.
I have.
I am.
This is the cooperation, when it finally arrives, after fifty-eight years of silence.
This is what it looks like.
W. Han, archivist.