All Our Analogue Ghosts

The task was supposed to be simple, a final act of filial duty. He was to compile the eulogy reel for his father, Martin, founder and moral compass of an enclave called Reverie. They had come here two decades ago to build a world apart, free from the noise of the global net. Their connection to the outside was a single, firewalled satellite link, used only for vital supply orders and weather data. Their history was stored locally, on a closed system of servers housed in this climate-controlled cabin: The Archive.

Martin’s life was supposed to be an open book, meticulously documented. And it was, except someone had been tearing out the pages and pasting in new ones.

He cued up the first file, labelled ‘Founding Day Address’. There was his father, twenty years younger, standing on a stump, outlining his vision for a community built on truth and transparency. The video quality was poor, the audio tinny, but the conviction in his voice was undeniable. This was the man Philip remembered, the one who taught him how to identify edible fungi and splice fibre optic cables.

He opened the next file, a log from the community council, Year Five. The video flickered, then stabilised. His father was speaking again, but his tone was different. Colder. He was proposing a ‘truth protocol’, a system for monitoring all internal network traffic to prevent ‘ideological drift’. His arguments were sharp, logical, but tinged with a paranoia Philip had never seen.

“He was just worried,” Philip muttered to the empty room. “Protecting what we built.”

But the next file he found was worse. It wasn’t an official record. It was a fragment, mislabelled and buried in a diagnostics folder. A covert audio recording. Two voices, his father’s and another man’s, a former resident named Thomas who had left years ago. Thomas was arguing, pleading. His father’s replies were clipped, cruel. He spoke of ‘necessary sacrifices’ and ‘the weakness of dissent’.

Philip felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He searched for other files related to Thomas. He found the official record: a council meeting log stating Thomas had chosen to leave Reverie for personal reasons. There was even a short video of Thomas, smiling stiffly, wishing everyone well. But his eyes… there was a haunted look in them. It didn't look voluntary.

The Keeper of Records

The server room was at the back of the cabin. Banks of drives hummed softly, their indicator lights blinking in rhythmic patterns. Carmen was there, her back to him, methodically replacing a cooling fan. She was the settlement’s archivist and network guardian, a role she’d inherited from her mother.

“Carmen,” Philip said, his voice hoarse.

She turned, wiping her hands on a cloth. Her face was calm, but her eyes were wary. She had known this was coming.

“What’s happening with the archive?” he asked. “Why are there… different versions of things?”

She sighed, a long, slow exhalation of breath. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have to see it until after the service. Your father’s archive… it’s been a battlefield for a long time, Philip.”

“Battlefield? What are you talking about?”

“Your father wasn’t one man. He was many,” she said, choosing her words with care. “He was the idealist who brought us here. He was also the pragmatist who did questionable things to keep us here. Different factions in Reverie have been… curating his record for years. Promoting the version of Martin they believe in.”

She led him to her personal terminal. With a few keystrokes, she unlocked a hidden directory. It was a log of edits to the main archive. Hundreds of them. Files deleted, restored, edited. Audio clips subtly altered. Timestamps forged. It was a silent, digital civil war he had never known existed.

“There’s a group that believes in the original, open vision. They try to preserve those records,” she explained, pointing to a set of entries logged by an anonymous user. “And there’s another group, the loyalists, who believe his later, more authoritarian policies were necessary. They erase the records that make him look weak or cruel. They edit his speeches to make him sound more resolute.”

“They’re changing our history,” Philip whispered, horrified.

“They believe they’re protecting it,” she corrected gently. “Protecting his legacy. Protecting Reverie itself. Your father knew about it. In a way, I think he encouraged it. He called it ‘a living memory, shaped by the needs of the present’.”

Philip felt dizzy. The solid ground of his past had turned to quicksand. His grief was now tangled with a profound and unsettling confusion. Who was he mourning? The visionary founder? Or the paranoid warden?

“So the truth… it’s just gone?”

“It’s in there,” Carmen said, gesturing to the humming servers. “All the pieces are. But they don’t fit together into one clean story. No one’s story does.”

He stayed in the archive long after Carmen left, digging through the edit logs. He saw how a heated argument in the council over food rationing was edited down to a calm, unanimous decision. He found the original audio of a speech and compared it to the version in the main archive; pauses were shortened, hesitant words removed, making his father sound impossibly certain.

He was sifting through the wreckage of his father’s digital life when he found it. Tucked away in a corrupted partition table, a place no one would look, was a single, small, encrypted file. The file extension was one his father had designed himself. It was a digital lockbox. After an hour of trying old passwords—his mother’s birthday, the settlement’s coordinates, the name of his boat—he tried the serial number of the first server they had ever installed together.

The file decrypted. It wasn't a video or an audio log. It was a simple text file. And it wasn’t a confession or a justification. It was a warning.