Somebody was deleting the old internet early. They had nineteen days less patience than the Continuity Board.
That was my first thought, sitting on my bed in the ticket booth at three in the morning. I had spent eleven years keeping clips.com alive. clips.com was going dark in nineteen days anyway. Why would anyone bother to rush it?
My second thought was that only three people had admin credentials. Me, Otto and the auditor.
I put on my boots and walked over to the Rink.
The racks were humming normally. Nobody was there. The scoreboard said HOME 3, VISITORS 2, which at that hour felt like a judgment.
I pulled up the deletion log on the main console. Nine thousand two hundred and fourteen clips. All of them from April 2041.
I scrolled through the titles.
"Man Fails To Open Jar (Remix)." "Jar Man But It's Opera." "Jar Man Vs. Ten Other Jars."
"Every Jar Man Clip At Once." "Jar Man, Slowed Down, With Rain."
It went on for nine thousand lines. Someone had deleted every copy, every remix and every parody of the Jar Clip. Every one except the original.
The original was still there. Clip 66,000,001, fourteen seconds, two point one billion views.
It had been opened at 2:48 a.m. Someone had watched it, and then they had stopped.
Here is something people forget about Otto Varga. He built clips.com for coupons, but he built it carefully.
When you deleted a clip, it didn't disappear. It went into a hidden folder that Otto called the Attic. It stayed there for thirty days before anything happened to it.
"Nobody throws a coupon away the same day," he'd told me once. "You put it in a drawer. You feel bad about it later."
By six a.m. I had moved all nine thousand jar clips back down from the Attic. The integrity report blinked. ALL CLIPS PRESENT.
I wrote my morning card at my desk, out of habit. The system gave me clip 50,912,447: a bakery in 2038 that iced a cake while describing the owner's divorce. Feeling: tired, but the frosting was good.
Card four thousand and twenty.
"It wasn't me," said Otto, before I had finished asking. He was sitting in the door of the Airstream with his coffee and his cardigan. "I haven't touched a terminal since 2047. My hands get nervous."
"I didn't think it was you."
"It wasn't Juniper. She doesn't have credentials."
"I know."
Otto looked across the parking lot at the Board motel. The light in room six was still on.
"So it's the coupon man," he said.
"I don't know that."
"You do," said Otto. "You've just got it filed under maybe."
Desmond came in at nine, exactly on time. He clicked his recorder.
"For the record," he said, "it's nine a.m. and the coffee smells burned."
"For the record," said Juniper, "it's always burned. Three out of ten."
I watched him all morning. I'm not proud of that. It's simply what I'm built to do. I watched clips for a living, and he moved like a clip I had seen before.
He logged decisions. He made no comments. Every time someone said the word "jar," his shoulders went up half an inch.
At noon, he asked to see the integrity report. I showed it to him. ALL CLIPS PRESENT.
He read it for a long moment.
"For the record," he said quietly, "that's good news."
He didn't sound like it was good news.
I asked Juniper to pull everything clips.com had about April 2041. I didn't tell her why.
She came back after lunch with a printout and a look of deep satisfaction.
"April 2041 was a big month," she said. "Three hundred million uploads. A solar flare scare. A world-record omelet."
"What else?"
"The jar," she said. "Obviously. It went from zero to a hundred million views in five days."
She tapped the page. "Fastest clip in clips.com history. Ten out of ten for speed."
"Who uploaded it?"
"Account deleted in 2044. No name. Just a wedding hashtag. #LiseAndBo."
I wrote it on the back of my morning card. I had seen the name Lise once already that week. It was on the auditor's paperwork, under emergency contact.
That afternoon, Prell called again.
He didn't mention the deletions. Either he didn't know, or he didn't care. He wanted to talk about the survey.
"Thirty-one thousand letters," he said. "And you're planning to fill sixty percent of the Continuity Drive based on what? Popularity?"
"Based on what people told us they needed."
"People need water and medicine and the specifications for a drainage pump."
"You already have those," I said. "Forty percent of them. Locked."
"And you would rather spend the rest on a man and a jar?"
Across the room, Desmond's pen stopped moving.
"I'd rather spend it on what got people through the Fade," I said. "If that's a man and a jar, then yes."
Prell's mouth did something small and tight. "For the record," he said, "I find that frivolous."
"For the record," said Desmond, from the corner, "that's my line."
It was the first joke I'd heard him make. Juniper looked at him with real surprise. "Six," she whispered. "Easily six."
Before dark, I went out to the Airstream. Otto was sitting in a folding chair, watching the storm clouds build over the grain silos.
"If it's the auditor," I said, "what do I do?"
"Ask him what the coupon's for," said Otto.
"Otto. I need something better than coupons."
He considered the clouds for a while.
"When I started clips.com, people kept clipping things they hated," he said. "Bad reviews. Ex-partners' recipes. They wanted to keep the thing so they could stop thinking about it."
"And?"
"It never worked," said Otto. "Nothing you clip ever stops being yours."
That night I didn't go home. I made a nest out of mailbags in the referee's room, with a clear view of the main console through the glass.
I brought a thermos of Otto's coffee. I didn't drink it. I just held it, as a weapon or a comfort.
At eleven, Juniper sent me a message from the youth corps dormitory. Are you staking out the Rink? Rate it.
I wrote back: Two. Cold. Mailbags smell like envelopes.
She replied: Envelopes is a strong smell. Three.
I put the phone face down. Then I took out a blank card and wrote on it, just to keep my hands busy.
Night of day ten. Clip: none. Feeling: like a person waiting for a jar to open.
I didn't number it. It didn't count. Some cards are just for you.
At midnight, the racks changed pitch the way they always did, when the backup cycle started. Every clip on clips.com copied itself once, quietly, from one row to the next. Otto had built that too. "Two coupons are better than one," he'd said.
The scoreboard glowed overhead. The racks hummed. Somewhere in the hum were four thousand and twenty clips I knew by name. Somewhere else were eleven exabytes I would never meet.
At 1:09 a.m., the side door opened.
Someone came in quietly in a gray parka zipped to the collarbone. He sat down at the main console. He typed his credentials without looking at the keyboard.
I watched him open the Attic. I watched him select all nine thousand jar clips again.
His finger hovered over the button. He didn't press it.
Instead, he closed the Attic and opened the original clip. Clip 66,000,001. He played it.
Fourteen seconds. A wedding. An elderly aunt holding out a jar of pickled beets. A young man in a rented suit taking it with total confidence.
He failed. He tried again. He failed harder.
Desmond played it again. Then again.
I came out of the referee's room. I didn't try to be quiet. He didn't jump. He seemed to have expected someone eventually.
"You were deleting things in a building that's being switched off in nineteen days," I said.
"I wanted to be sure," he said.
"Sure of what?"
He paused the clip. The young man's face filled the screen, mid-strain, mostly jar.
You could see a little of the beard, though. It was younger, and less tidy. But it was the same beard.
Desmond looked up at the screen. Then he looked at me.
"That's me," he said.
Up next: Man Fails To Open Jar
Continue to Part 4 →