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A municipal records technician discovers systematic deletions that erase people from civic memory. As she follows a trail tied to her missing brother, she must decide whether exposing a corporate‑backed program will restore truth—or make new casualties.
The municipal records room smelled of toner and old paper, a scent Evelyn Hart had learned to read like a mood. In the morning light, the fluorescent fixtures hummed with the same small, mechanical insistence that had governed her life for the last seven years: precise, predictable, unremarkable. She liked the steadiness of it. It let her order the world into rows—births, deaths, property transfers—each sheet of paper a tiny fact that resisted the erosion of memory.
She had started before dawn because mornings were quiet and the city’s systems ran their housekeeping tasks then. Her routine was ritual and safeguard: reconcile the daily ingestion with the offline backups, run integrity checks, cross‑reference recent edits against the immutable plates tucked in the physical vault. Today she moved through the motions with the focused, automatic attention of someone who had learned that small oversights became big holes. Her coffee cooled at the edge of her desk where sticky notes clustered like tiny emergency plans. She scanned the reconciliation list, eyes habitually snapping to anomalies.
The anomaly didn’t look like much on the surface: an entry that should have been a clear, simple birth certificate for Samuel Hart marked instead as "UNAVAILABLE." The code, a terse four‑character flag she’d seen in odd cases before, usually meant the material had been lost or mutilated in transit—a physical problem. But there was no accompanying disposition note, no incident report in the folder. Someone had replaced a record with a stuttering placeholder and closed the door on why.
Evelyn clicked into the audit trail without thinking. The municipal system kept a fastidious record of hands that touched files—usernames, timestamps, city badge numbers. What showed up there was a smear. Lines of activity had been redacted, black bars where names should be, timestamps partially replaced with an asterisked code. The last visible action was an update from an external authorization: SERVICE-EXT:vcg-01. She frowned and pulled up the raw metadata. It was trimmed, but under the truncation she could see a string that read like a label for something foreign and administrative—"vantage_svc_auth"—followed by a hashed token.