The Continuity Board had given me thirty days to save the old internet. By day four, someone had already spent forty percent of the space for me.
That someone was Halvard Prell. He was fifty-nine and the Board's Director of Continuity. He arrived at the Rink by video call, because he did not travel for things he had already decided.
"Ms. Abernathy," he said. He had silver hair, a high collar and the expression of a man reading fine print on a document you had not yet seen. "I understand you found the preload."
"I found forty percent of my drive filled with manuals," I said.
"Not just manuals. Legal codes, medical references, maps, engineering standards."
He folded his hands. "Civic value, Ms. Abernathy. If the world has to rebuild, it needs to know how pumps work."
"It also needs to know what it was rebuilding."
"That's sentimental."
"It's an archive," I said. "Sentimental is the whole job."
Desmond sat in the corner during the call, recorder running. Every so often he leaned toward it and murmured something.
"For the record," he said afterward, "the caretaker called the Director sentimental."
"He called me sentimental," I said.
He checked the playback. "For the record," he corrected, "the Director called the caretaker sentimental. The caretaker agreed."
Juniper gave the call a two. "He didn't blink once," she said. "Not one blink. That's a two."
Prell had sent rules. They came as an attachment named SELECTION CRITERIA FINAL v9. The criteria ranked every clip on clips.com by a score called Civic Value.
Instruction manuals scored high. Court records scored high. Anything with a cat in it scored zero.
"Zero," said Otto, reading over my shoulder. "He's given cats a zero."
"What happened to versions one through eight?" asked Juniper.
"They had cats in them," said Otto.
"He's given most of it a zero," I said.
"That's how coupons work," said Otto. "Not everything gets a discount."
I didn't know if that was wisdom or just Otto. Usually it was both.
On the fifth morning, I pulled my daily clip before anything else. The system gave me clip 412,005,331. It was a teenager's video from 2034, in which an exhausted grandfather tried to explain a joke to a smart speaker for six minutes.
The speaker never got it. The grandfather never gave up.
I wrote it on card four thousand and fourteen. Feeling: this would score zero.
Then I made a decision. It wasn't in Prell's rules, which meant it wasn't against them either.
"We're going to ask people," I told Otto and Juniper. "Everyone on the parish nets. We ask what they want saved from clips.com."
"Prell will hate that," said Juniper.
"Prell decided forty percent," I said. "The other sixty is still mine."
Desmond looked up from his recorder. For a second he looked like he wanted to say something. Then he clicked the button. "For the record," he said, "the caretaker is conducting a survey."
That evening I walked the racks, the way I did every night. Row one held 2019 to 2022: coupons, mostly, and the first nervous recipes. Row forty held the Fade.
You could hear the difference if you listened. The old rows hummed. The last rows hummed faster, as if they knew.
"You talk to them," Desmond observed. He had followed me in, recorder off for once.
"They're good listeners."
"For the record," he said, "so am I." Then he went back to the motel before I could decide what that meant.
We put out a notice on every parish net in Region Four. One line, plain text, because most parish nets could barely handle anything else.
clips.com is closing in 26 days. Tell us one thing we must keep.
I thought we would get a few hundred replies.
We got eleven thousand by the end of the first day. Most of the parish nets were slow, so half of them came on paper. The mail truck from Tallow Creek had to make two trips. The driver, a calm fifty-year-old named Bettina with a ponytail and very large gloves, stacked the mailbags in the old team locker room.
"Somebody's popular," she said.
"Somebody's dying," said Otto cheerfully. "We're the somebody."
We sorted letters at long tables under the scoreboard. Juniper read them aloud. I matched each request to a clip number, if I could.
That turned out to be the hard part.
People didn't remember clip numbers. People remembered feelings.
"The dog that rings a little bell when it wants soup," Juniper read. "My son and I watched it every night during the Fade."
"Clip 7,700,414," I said, without looking up. "Card two hundred and six. Feeling: the dog had a better routine than me."
Juniper stared. "You know that?"
"I watched it on a Wednesday."
"The video of the old man teaching his neighbor's kid to tie a tie," she read. "We used it before job interviews. Everyone in my building did."
"Clip 19,330,018. Card nine hundred and twelve."
"A man who reviews every bench in a city park," Juniper read. "He gave one bench a two and apologized to it."
"Clip 88,140,227," I said. "Card fifty. Feeling: oddly proud of him."
Otto set his coffee down. "Wren," he said slowly. "How many of these do you know?"
I glanced at the nine shoe boxes under my desk. "Four thousand and fourteen," I said. "Give or take."
By the end of the week, we had thirty-one thousand letters.
Juniper started a tally on the old whiteboard in the referee's room. She wrote the clips that people asked for most, with tick marks next to each one.
The dog with the soup bell had four hundred ticks. A woman in 2029 narrating her houseplants like a nature documentary had six hundred. A complete broadcast of a small-town spelling bee in 2033 had a surprising eight hundred.
And at the top of the board, so far ahead it had needed its own column, sat the Jar Clip.
Eleven thousand, two hundred requests.
"Ten out of ten," said Juniper, admiring the column.
"It's still a man losing to a vegetable," I said. But I said it more softly than before.
Some of the letters about the jar were funny. Most of them weren't.
My husband and I watched it the night the power went out for good. We laughed so hard we forgot to be scared.
During the Fade my father couldn't open anything anymore. He'd watch it and say, "See? Even the young ones." It made him feel better.
Please keep the jar man. He never stopped trying. That's the whole internet, isn't it?
I read that last one three times. Then I put it in my pocket next to card number one.
Desmond did not sort letters. He sat at the end of the table and logged them.
Every time Juniper read out a jar request, his pen paused. Just for a moment. Then it moved on.
On the ninth day, Juniper read one aloud that made the whole table laugh. It came from a retired schoolteacher in Carrow, who wanted the jar clip saved "so that future historians understand that we, too, were weak."
Desmond didn't laugh. He stood up, said "For the record, I'm taking a break," and walked out to the parking lot.
Juniper watched the door swing shut. "What did I do?" she asked.
"Nothing," I said. "You read a letter."
"I'm giving his exit a four," she said. "Abrupt. No closure."
Otto watched him go through the locker-room window. "That man," he said, "has a coupon he's not using."
"What does that mean?"
"I'll tell you when I know."
I went home late that night. My apartment was a converted ticket booth on the Rink's east side. I could hear the racks through the wall, like the ocean, if the ocean ran on fans.
At three a.m. my phone buzzed. It was the overnight integrity report.
Usually it said nothing. Usually it said ALL CLIPS PRESENT, which was my favorite sentence in English. In eleven years, clips.com had never lost a clip on my watch.
Tonight it said something else.
9,214 CLIPS DELETED. ADMIN CREDENTIALS. 01:12–02:48.
I sat up. I scrolled through the list. Every single deleted clip had the same upload month.
April 2041.
Up next: The Night Shift
Continue to Part 3 →