The most-watched clip on clips.com was fourteen seconds of a man losing a fight with a jar of beets. clips.com was the last archive of the old internet.
At 1:15 in the morning, that man was sitting at my console in a gray parka. The lights went out in nineteen days.
"For the record," Desmond said, "I'd like a coffee."
I gave him the thermos. He drank Otto's coffee straight from it without flinching, which told me he'd had a hard decade.
"Start at the wedding," I said.
"My cousin Lise's wedding," he said. "April 2041. I was twenty-four. Aunt Marit asked me to open her beets, because she always brought her own beets."
"Why?"
"Nobody knows. Nobody's ever known." He turned the thermos in his hands.
"I was the strong one in the family. I'd just finished a rowing season. I said, 'Give it here.'"
"And then."
"And then I lost," said Desmond. "On camera. The groom was filming the speeches himself. Bo filmed everything."
"#LiseAndBo," I said.
He stared at me. "He clipped it during dessert. Fourteen seconds, straight onto clips.com."
By the next morning it had a million views. By the end of the week it had a hundred million.
Somebody set it to opera. Somebody slowed it down with rain. Somebody made a clip of every other jar in history beating him too.
"I was Jar Man for three years," he said. "Strangers handed me jars in grocery stores. Job interviews ended with someone smiling at a pickle tin. I grew the beard so people wouldn't know me."
"Did it work?"
"No," he said. "But I liked the beard."
He went quiet for a moment. The racks hummed. The scoreboard said HOME 3, VISITORS 2.
"Then the Fade came," he said. "Everything started disappearing. I thought, finally. It goes away with the rest of it."
"But clips.com didn't go away."
"clips.com never goes away," he said bitterly. "So I applied to the Board. I worked my way up. When Prell said someone had to audit the Rink, I volunteered."
"To make sure it got cut."
"To make sure it wasn't on the drive," he said. "That's all. One clip out of eleven exabytes. I thought nobody would notice."
"Eleven thousand two hundred people asked for it by name."
He winced. "I saw the whiteboard."
I sat down across from him. I had about a dozen things I wanted to say. Most of them were about the archive and the rules and the Attic.
I said the one that mattered instead.
"It's your face," I said. "If you don't want it kept, it doesn't get kept. That's your call. Not mine and not Prell's."
He looked at me like I had handed him a jar that opened.
"You'd do that?"
"I'd log it," I said. "For the record."
He almost smiled. "But you won't delete the remixes."
"The remixes belong to the people who made them. Your face is yours. I'll blur you out of all nine thousand of them before we decide anything."
"All nine thousand?"
"I have nineteen days and a lot of coffee."
I started the blurring that same night. It was slow work. Every remix had to be opened, tagged and run through a face filter Otto had written in 2028 for privacy complaints.
"For the record," Desmond said at four a.m., watching the progress bar, "you don't have to do this."
"For the record," I said, "clips.com doesn't keep anyone who doesn't want to be kept. Otto wrote that rule in 2021."
"Was it about coupons?"
"Everything was about coupons in 2021."
By sunrise, two thousand jar men had no faces. The opera one looked strangely better.
In the morning, I told Otto everything. He listened from the Airstream doorway with his eyes closed.
"I knew he had a coupon," he said finally.
"You keep saying that. What does it mean?"
"Something you've been carrying so long you forgot you could cash it in." He opened his eyes. "He's been carrying the jar for twenty years, Wren. Of course he wants to throw it away."
"So I let him?"
"You let him decide," said Otto. "That's different. Believe me. I ran a coupon site."
I told Juniper too, because Juniper had built the whiteboard and deserved to know.
She stared at Desmond across the sorting tables for a long time. He was logging letters and pretending he couldn't feel it.
"He's Jar Man," she whispered.
"He's Desmond," I said. "Be nice."
"I am being nice. I'm just recalculating."
She thought about it. "Nine. He's a nine now. A tragic nine."
"Don't tell him that."
She walked straight over and told him.
Desmond looked up at her. Then he looked at me. Then, for the first time in twelve days, he laughed. It was a short, startled laugh, like it had been stuck in a jar too.
"For the record," he said, "I'll take the nine."
My morning card that day was clip 1,800,229. It was a 2026 video of a man trying to fold a fitted sheet for eight full minutes. Feeling: we have all been this man. Card four thousand and twenty-one.
I showed it to Desmond. He watched all eight minutes in silence.
"He never gets it," he said at the end.
"Nobody gets it," I said. "That's why it has forty million views."
He thought about that longer than I expected. Then he picked up his pen and went back to logging.
"Do you ever watch the good ones?" I asked. "The ones that aren't jars?"
"I haven't watched anything on clips.com in twenty years," he said. "I was afraid of what the algorithm would offer me."
"There's no algorithm. Just a random number and me."
He considered that. "For the record," he said, "that's less frightening."
We spent the next few days working faster than I had ever worked.
I matched letters to clips. Juniper read and tallied. Otto made coffee and told stories about the first coupon he had ever clipped, which had been for twenty percent off garden hoses.
Desmond surprised everyone. He started helping.
He couldn't match clips the way I could, but he was an auditor. He could organize. By day fourteen, he had built a ranking file that combined the letters, the tallies and my cards into one list.
Every clip on it had a reason next to it. Not a score. A reason.
Watched it every night during the Fade.
Taught me to tie a tie.
The parrot was right.
"Prell won't accept this," Desmond said. "It isn't civic."
"Then we'll make him define civic," I said.
The jar clip wasn't on Desmond's list. He'd left a blank line where it would have gone, near the top.
I didn't say anything about it. It was his face and his blank line.
On day sixteen, Prell called again. This time he didn't wait for us to say hello.
"There's been a change," he said. "The storm front coming in from the west has damaged the line into Carrow. The water plant needs the Rink's power early."
My stomach dropped. "How early?"
"Seventy-two hours."
Otto set down his mug so hard it splashed. Juniper said a number under her breath that I think was a zero.
"That's not enough time," I said.
"It's what the water plant needs," said Prell. "And I agree with the water plant. So here is what happens."
He shared a document. It was called CIVIC SIEVE — AUTOMATED SELECTION. A progress bar sat at the bottom, waiting.
"At midnight on Friday, the Sieve fills the remaining sixty percent of the drive by civic score," he said. "Automatically. Unless the caretaker submits a final selection list before then. A complete one."
"Complete how?"
"Every clip with a valid ID," said Prell. "No descriptions. No feelings. Numbers."
He ended the call. The screen went dark.
Thirty-one thousand letters sat on the tables under the scoreboard. Most of them didn't have a single clip number on them. They had dogs with bells and parrots and men with ties.
And I had seventy-two hours to turn every one of them into a number.
Up next: The Sieve
Continue to Part 5 →