She hadn’t asked for the list.
Madison was old enough to be patient. Curious as she was, her days of all-night research sessions were long past. She’d managed to calm some of the questions in her mind enough to get a decent night sleep.
Even found time to make some toast, which she ate as she opened the message.
It wasn’t a long list. A little under a hundred terms. Related metadata tags, “deprecated”, “archive nonviable”, “psych destabilization risk (minor)”.
She ran a couple of filters. Every entry shared one tag:
Sentiment/Seasonal/Obsolete/Emotive
Unfamiliar words.
“Mistletoe”, “Sleigh”, “Frostbite”
And without any further annotation, “snow”.
They weren’t blacklist tags. More a quiet…downranking. The whole file had a kind of quiet authority, tidily classifying all these words as related to feelings you weren’t supposed to feel.
She left the apartment, took a walk. Strolled to the edge of the cultural sector.
The Archive of Sensory Epochs wasn’t an imposing building. Three stories, drab, unassuming, even compared to some of the nearby derelicts and ruins. Technically a public building, nobody visited, it was semi-defunct but for a small group of volunteers and obsessive hobbyists. Not much interest in a collection of half-reconstructed data objects and experiential media.
It was one of Madison’s favorite places.
Keying in her access pass, the door buzzed and dragged itself open. Always cool inside, just plain concrete floors and the humming of memory cores safely stored behind glass.
She waved at Sal, already here, crouched near a media cabinet that flickered with warning lights. A small toolbox by his feet.
“Is that on the blink again?” Madison asked.
Sal didn’t look up. “I don’t think it’s broken, I think it just has opinions.”
Madison chuckled, “Hah, I’m sure.”
She set her bag down by one of the modular chairs and wandered over to the console near the memory cores. Sal finally rose, groaning, even Madison heard his knees crack.
“Working on anything specific?” he asked.
“Looking for a word.”
A raised eyebrow glance across, “Just one?”
“Yeah. It’s stuck with me. It matters.”
Sal watched her quietly as she pulled up the search interface and tapped at the keys.
Search>
snow
show deprecated
include sensory / emotive / unstable
The results came back. 18 entries. Ten of them unreadable, five partially corrupted. Three more of them tagged as available for manual review. She opened the first one.
It was a video. Grayscale. A group of children in some kind of strange padded suits, running around on a white background. They were…throwing something at each other, laughing while they did. Some kind of white…particles…flickered around them. The video jittered, dropped some frames, distortion and static. Then it restarted on a loop, back to the beginning.
Turned up the volume…nothing, no sound.
The second file was in better shape, a digitized picture book.
An illustration showed a forest of leafless trees, but with their branches all laced with white. Beneath them were animals, but animals wearing heavy clothes, scarves. Bizarre. Some partially reconstructed text.
“When the snow falls, the world gets quiet. Everything slows down. Sometimes you can hear things you usually can’t. Other times everything sounds muffled.
And on another page.
Snow is cold. It melts when you touch it and try to hold it. But if there’s enough of it, you can build shapes. Some people even use it to make…[data lost]
She looked at the page for a good long while. The world gets quiet. It struck her, the certainty. The book assumed that children would know these things.
And a third file.
This was a little stranger, a little darker. A climate broadcast, broken into fragments. There was a presenter making gestures at a color-coded map, and a few words escaping the static and interference. “Record snowfall,” “severe weather,” “transport gridlock.”
All this fuss for a word that didn’t have a trace left in speech today. So much weight.
So it wasn’t just a missing word in the lexicon. There were all kinds of associations that disappeared with it. Cold and ice. Stillness. Play, and also danger. Wonder, and also chaos.
Not sure where to go next, she flipped backward through the list of files. Looking at half-corrupted media bundles and data clusters.
There was a vaguely indexed bundle, EDU_KIDS_ENV_226. A broken thumbnail as a preview flickered, and she paused. Same feel as that first video - gray, white, leafless trees. No other tags.
She opened it.
The load time lagged, must be a bigger file, gave her some hope. And a brief description in the half-light of the terminal screen.
Simulation: Temperate Deciduous Biome/Climate Study (Interactive)/Epoch Preserved
A simulation. Not locked or restricted, just something forgotten.
”Can I access this?” she called to Sal.
He looked up from his panel. “A sim? Just for that one word?”
“It’s still listed.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s going to work.”
“No reason I can’t give it a try.”
He sighed. “I mean, sure. Don’t complain if everything renders low-res and gives you a headache for a week.” He glanced at his own terminal. “Booth 3.”
Madison padded over to the small grouping of VR booths. Worn, rarely used, but well maintained. She stepped into the capsule like cubicle and slid the door shut.
A few seconds of waiting and the terminal screen blinked.
Ready…
She paused for a moment, trying to imagine the quiet.
Then she tapped “launch.”
This is Part 2 of a three-part story.
Part 3: Whiteout will be published next Friday (Sept 26).