The screen went black for a full ten seconds. Then text appeared, white on black, typed in a terminal font: COPY SUCCESSFUL. BUT ORIGINAL CANNOT BE OVERWRITTEN. ELIAS_BASE.EXE STILL RUNNING IN LOCATION. DO YOU WISH TO DELETE? Y/N The video ended.
Mira screamed at the screen. “No, no, no, you idiot—”
But the totem had already begun to hum.
The video skipped. Now Elias was frantic, digging at the base of the totem with a rusted shovel. “I’m going to carve myself into it,” he said. “Voluntarily. If the totem stores people, maybe I can be stored and then… retrieved. Like data. Like a backup. I’ll leave a copy of myself here and go home. Two Eliases. Two of me. One to stay, one to live. Don’t you see? It’s immortality.”
Mira sat in the dark of her apartment, breathing shallow. The file’s timestamp was last modified—she checked the properties— today . Not 2023. Today. And the IP address embedded in the file’s metadata resolved to a set of GPS coordinates. The dry lakebed. The totem. Still there. Still recording. Totem.2023.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.YK-CM-.mp4
She didn’t click it. Not yet.
Elias walked into frame, gaunt, bearded, wearing a torn canvas jacket she’d never seen before. He looked older than 28. He looked ancient. “The locals don’t speak of this place,” he said, pointing behind him at the totem. “They call it the Recording . Every seventh year, the wind carries memories into the wood. Not just memories— copies . Pieces of people who’ve passed through the valley. I don’t know how it works. But look.” The screen went black for a full ten seconds
He touched one of the faces—Mira’s crying face. The wood rippled like water. Suddenly the video glitched: pixelated squares bloomed across the screen, and when the image returned, Elias was sitting on the ground, weeping. “It showed me your tenth birthday,” he whispered. “When you dropped the cake. Mom yelling. You hiding in the closet. I wasn’t even there that day, Mira. But the totem knew. It absorbed it from you, from miles away. That means—that means you’ve been here. Maybe in a dream. Maybe in a past life. I don’t know.”
The one that hadn’t been there in Elias’s video. ELIAS_BASE
She had found it on an old external hard drive at a flea market, buried under corrupted JPEGs and forgotten MP3s. The label on the drive was handwritten in fading marker: Elias — do not erase . Elias was her older brother, who had vanished four years ago while backpacking through the southern deserts. The police called it a voluntary disappearance. Mira called it impossible.