The Signal

The alert came at 03:47 lunar standard time, while Maya Chen was deep in the twentieth-century social media strata. She was cataloging a particularly dense cluster of early Facebook posts — the mundane immortalized: what people ate, how they felt about weather, arguments with relatives they hadn't seen in decades — when her interface flashed red.

She blinked, irritated. The system rarely interrupted cataloging sessions. Priority alerts were for system failures or security breaches, and those hadn't happened in her three years at the Archive.

MAYA CHEN. REPORT TO DIRECTOR'S OFFICE. IMMEDIATE.

She saved her progress — a JSON blob of someone's 2012 vacation photos — and pulled herself out of the immersion pod. The lunar gravity felt heavy after hours in zero-G simulation. Her legs protested as she walked the curved corridors of the Archive.

Director Okonkwo's office was at the central hub, where all the spokes of the Archive's underground complex met. The door was already open, which was wrong. The Director's door was never open.

Inside, Okonkwo sat at her desk, staring at a screen that Maya couldn't see from the doorway. Her gray hair was uncharacteristically disheveled. She looked up as Maya entered, and Maya saw something she'd never seen in the Director's face before: fear.

"Sit," Okonkwo said.

Maya sat. The chair felt too small, too exposed.

"We've received a transmission," Okonkwo said. "From the edge of the observable universe. Coordinates match nothing in our databases. Not a known civilization, not a natural phenomenon."

Maya waited. She was a junior archivist, level three, barely trusted to catalog without supervision. She shouldn't be here for this.

"The transmission contains instructions," Okonkwo continued. Her voice had gone flat, professional, the fear buried under bureaucratic training. "The Archive must be reduced by fifty percent within thirty days. If we fail, the entire Archive will be destroyed."

Maya stared at her. "Reduced by... you mean deleted? Half of human knowledge?"

"The transmission calls it the End Protocol." Okonkwo turned her screen so Maya could see. The message was simple, rendered in characters that resolved into whatever language the reader understood. A quantum translation, impossibly precise. "Select. Delete. Survive."

"Why me?" Maya asked. The question escaped before she could stop it.

Okonkwo's laugh was short and bitter. "Because you're young enough not to know what we lose. Because you have no attachments to the early data, no nostalgia for the twenty-first century. Because," she paused, "the algorithm selected you."

"Algorithm?"

"The transmission included a name. Yours."

Maya felt cold despite the climate-controlled air. Her hands were shaking. She clasped them together in her lap.

"Thirty days," Okonkwo said. "Half of everything. Ten thousand years of human civilization, compressed into choices you'll make."

"That's insane. I'm not qualified—"

"You're assigned." Okonkwo stood, walked to her window, looked out at the gray lunar landscape visible through the reinforced glass. "We all have our roles, Chen. Mine is to manage the impossible. Yours is to choose."

She turned back. "You'll have access to everything. Every byte, every memory, every forgotten corner of human history. You'll also have a team — historians, ethicists, technologists. But the final decisions are yours."

Maya found her voice. "What happens if I refuse?"

"Then the Archive dies. All of it." Okonkwo's voice softened. "I'm not asking you to do this because I think it's fair. I'm asking because there's no one else the transmission will accept. You have the night to prepare. Tomorrow, you begin."

Maya stood, legs unsteady. At the door, she stopped. "Director — has anyone tried to trace the Signal? To find out who's sending it?"

"Of course." Okonkwo's smile was thin. "The Signal comes from the future. From our own timeline, approximately 10,000 years ahead. Someone, somewhere, somewhen, decided this was necessary. We don't know why. We only know the cost of disobedience."

Maya walked back to her quarters through corridors that suddenly felt fragile, temporary. The Archive had always seemed eternal — the final project of human civilization, the guarantee that nothing would be forgotten. Now she understood: everything could be forgotten. The only question was who would do the forgetting.

In her small room, she lay on her bunk and stared at the ceiling. Tomorrow, she would begin deleting half of human history. Tonight, she tried to remember why any of it mattered.