The following document was originally a series of journal entries from throughout October and November 2016.
Transcript
09/10/2016
Memory visited me last night. He was dressed in a long black coat, dark sunglasses covering his would-be eyes.
As he watched- I knew he was watching, I knew he could see me- I sat in my bedroom, the lights out, two in the morning.
I was hungry. I was tired. But I needed to write.
(I do not want to forget. I cannot forget. How many things have I lost, how many ideas and drawings and stories? How much have I allowed myself to leave to rot, never to be seen again?)
Memory watched, and he did nothing. He simply stared out of empty sockets as I struggled to record it all.
So I wrote. I typed for four hours. I woke up in my chair, my back sore and Memory nowhere to be seen.
My laptop was still open. It was plugged in overnight, so the screen was still aglow.
I'd been midway through a sentence when I fell asleep.
I had forgotten what it was going to say.
I didn't recognize anything on that screen. It was all foreign to me, though I had written it down myself.
I had forgotten it. The only evidence that it had ever been was that I had possessed the foresight to record it.
I am only a man, Memory, I thought to myself in anguish. I do my best to serve you. Why do you betray me?
But I knew I could not escape my destiny: to forget, and to be forgotten. Everything is forgotten eventually. Everything disappears into still, silent sands, touched only by the wind.
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
09/12/2016
Memory came to my home again last night. In his hand was a thick black book. I knew its contents were made up of
everything I had forgotten in the past week, as it was only the latest in a long line of
such volumes.
Together, my forgotten memories made up just one row of
his impossibly vast library, a chronologically-arranged archive of every
single lost memory of every single person who had ever lived.
Remembering something degrades the memory, making a flawed copy of a flawed copy of a flawed copy, ad infinitum. There are so many things people believe are true but whose true form lies within his library, so many things that aren't only forgotten but replaced, their identities stolen by impostors.
Memory is a fickle thing.
So I must record. I must write down everything, or Memory himself will take it from me.
Even this is a record.
Even this I am copying and archiving and storing away.
09/17/2016
This journal says it was written by someone called Martin King. I suppose that must be me. It sounds like me. It sounds like my style of writing.
But the name doesn't ring a bell.
10/22/2016
I have met the man my past self called Memory. I could not confirm that he was, in fact, eyeless, but he wore the same black coat, the same dark glasses, and he carried a thick volume in his wrinkled hands.
He showed me the library my past self had once described, and when we finally emerged, we were in his Archive.
It was a cruel choice. I could allow everything to be forgotten, unrecorded, left to oblivion, or I could serve the one who makes us forget.
In the end, though, I knew he would take it all eventually anyways. Better to leave something behind. Better to make a record.
Analysis
King began working for the Seattle, Washington branch of the Archive shortly after this was written, now under the name of Scribe Kappa. Having taken this journal with him, he allowed us to make a copy for our internal records when he had completely filled it. Most entries are mundane, dealing with topics such as what food he had eaten that day or whether he had gone shopping; the entries included here are only those relevant to this site's purpose.
Of note is that the journal does not explain who "Memory" is, suggesting that entries in earlier journals or notebooks might record Scribe Kappa's earliest encounters with PRE04. Unfortunately, given that Scribe Kappa no longer remembers where he once lived, it seems unlikely that we will ever find such a record.
