The tape was mainly just a hissing static. There were voices underneath the interference, mostly too warped for anyone to follow. But there was one discernable word, repeated, in bright, insistent tones.
“Snow… snow…”
It was just a small fragment of a pre-collapse media archive. Its tag was only mildly helpful, “VINTAGE-CULT-DATA: MID-20-CENT HOLIDAY // WESTERN // CORRUPT-AUDIOSTREAM.ogg.” Dr. Madison Duquelle had only tried to access it as a formality. The faded recovery logs said it was culturally nonviable, no useful synaptic patterning or benefit to lexicon restoration.
But Madison was a completionist. So she listened to it twice.
The voice captured her. A woman, maybe voices layered, she carried something that sounded unfamiliar. It was…cheery. Not like a ceremonial celebration, but more like a kind of happy frivolity. Outside of a simulation error, it wasn’t the kind of thing she heard very often.
She turned off the magnifier interface, sat back and rubbed her eyes. The archive was dim, sun was setting outside. She looked at the notes she’d scribbled while listening, snoh? snou? sno…?
Her training pushed her to look for roots. Some kind of contextual frame, even if tenous. But this word offered nothing. Just a soft, looping, vowel.
Snow?
Tapping in a quick search, the monitor threw up nothing useful. No prior association. No modern synonym. No commonly known shared roots.
That was unusual. Weird, even. Dead words, even epochal terms, tended to decay slowly. They lost meaning over decades, and you could usually trace things back. But snow? It’s like it’d dropped out of the sky.
She turned her chair more firmly towards the terminal, paying more attention. Dug into the root index and ran a deeper scrape.
NO MATCH FOUND
SUGGESTED RELATED: “snare”, “soot”, “sneeze”
A frown. Definitely weird. If it was a totally null result, then she was looking at something older than even the standard cutoff dates. Or something had been erased. The computer was reduced to just guessing.
She ran another trace on the word against the archives, including recent, unindexed. There was a corrupted video. A fragmentary piece of paper. No context, just the word listed as extrapolated from recovered metadata. "sno/snoh/snow/snough”. No definition.
She went back to her clip, ran it again, started playing with the playback fidelity. She was rusty, audio recovery had never been her best skill. Wincing a bit as a bad adjustment near deafened her with feedback.
Took the best part of another hour, and then a woman’s voice emerged with some more clarity. Crisp pronunciation, a kind of theatricality to her speech that she recognized from other Old Epoch songs.
“Sno-o-o-w… It won’t be long before we’re all be there with—”
The track stuttered a little. Then, the line she’d heard before, but clearer now. Definitely several voices, male and female, in a soft harmony.
“Snow… snow…”
The singers held the note for a moment, briefly beautiful. Then the playback broke, the moment lost in some timing collapse, a warping of the pitch, static.
“I want to wash my hands, my face and hair with—”
More static. And then that looping word one more time.
“Snow… snow…”
Madison sat for a little while. She felt a little vertigo. It’d been a while since she’d heard something she didn’t have some reference point to understand.
Across the aisle, Ted Marrion, the archive’s media stabilization and protection lead, poked his head up from behind a battered transcode array. “You playing with some kind of ghost sounds, Duquelle?”
“It’s some kind of language fragment,” Madison said absently.
“Epochal?”
“Possibly. Probably. Odd, though. It’s like a lexical orphan. No connections or pathways. No redundant semantics. Like it was plucked out of nowhere.”
Marrion leaned back in his seat. “Yeah…I’ve seen that happen sometimes. Usually with some kind of emotive. Got flagged after the collapse as a sentiment hazard.”
She looked over at him, “Suppressed?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think so. Not actively. Just…deprecated. Not worth saving when you need room for useful things. When they were getting overwhelmed with people trying to live in the past, crying over all those pictures of green trees and animals with eyelashes.” He waved his hand vaguely. “People weren’t good at rebuilding when they kept drowning in longing for what was before."
Madison turned the phrase over a few times in her mind. Drowning in longing. Was it that dramatic? Maybe it had been true once.
She pulled down more logs and started sorting by some of the more unstable emotional terms and metadata. It’d get flagged by the registry somewhere. She was old enough that the department didn’t really care. She could investigate what she wanted, not like she’d published anything in years anyway.
Saved a local copy of the file just to be safe. Mislabeled it, tagged it for her review.
Later that night, in her small apartment a short way from the archives, she scrolled through some of the historical phrasebooks.
No snow. No derivatives. a clean gap. She turned off the screen.
An hour later, she was brushing her teeth. Her terminal chimed once, quietly. One message, low priority, delivered to her workspace.
“Supplemental index: Restricted Terms Archive // Emotional Stability Framework”
This is Part 1 of a three-part story.
Part 2: Archive will be published next Friday (Sept 19).