Nora Voss spent the first ten minutes of every shift cradled inside a half lit room that smelled faintly of coffee and recycled air. Light from a single monitor carved her face into grayscale planes while the rest of the lab remained an island of dimness and instruments. She ran spectral filters against municipal recordings the way others ran fingers along a keening seam; it was a private ritual performed to turn static into grammar. It was a job that required faith in tiny shapes and a stubborn belief that human intention would show itself in a waveform. When the audio was clean, voices arranged themselves into hesitation, a cadence, a signature; when it was dirty, the files were catalogued and shelved. Her employer, the city archive department, called in contractors for the worst of the backlogged tapes, and Nova Retrieval paid her rate. She thought of everyone who would never know what music they had been made of until she could separate it and lay it out in the light. On that morning, a courier had left a thin box on her desk with municipal stamps and a handwritten tag: corrupted files. Nora had worked with fragile magnetic tapes and degraded digital transfers; she had seen riffed carriers and splices that sounded like wind through ribs. But the box felt unusually quiet, as if someone had taken a breath from inside it and left the sigh for her to find. Inside were a handful of drives, a loop of a dated DAT tape, and a single flash card labeled with a barcode and the scrawled word 'corrupt.' She set a pot of water on to boil, though she would not be drinking any of it during the long slog of digitization, because caffeine made her edits tremble. She started with the DAT, threading it into the decades-old deck and listening for the thump where one track lost its adhesion to memory. At first it was just a ripple under the voiceprint, a low periodic modulation that might have been a meter or a machine.