The clinking of the ampoules was the only sound in the silence that had fallen over the back room of Clarissa's shop.

  That figure, ‘The Archivist’, whom Clarissa had mentioned, formed in Nico's mind like a pillar towering in a gloomy sky, enormous and impossible to reach.

  It was Nico who broke the silence, his voice scratchy as it came from the back of his throat. “Who is... The Archivist?”

  Nadia stiffened, her shoulders tense, her face tense: “It's none of your business who he is. He can't help you. And besides, how do you know him?”

  Clarissa shook her head: “Let the boy decide, dear.”

  Clarissa looked at him with a smile that didn't reach her eyes, placed her cup on the table, and approached Nico: “Look at them closely, dear,” she said in a firm voice.

  Nico followed the line of her bony finger pointing to the blisters. The Nothing writhed and struggled as if it sensed it was being watched.

  “Those aren't just... waste products,” Clarissa continued. “And they're not a disease, at least not in the sense that you understand it.”

  Nico stiffened, turning his gaze from the ampoules to the woman. Everyone in the room held their breath.

  Clarissa inhaled slowly, straightening her back and wrapping herself in her shawls, as if she were cold.

  “It's a clerical error.”

  Nico felt a lump in his stomach; Clarissa knew too.

  “Are you sentient?” Nadia asked coldly, stepping forward from the corner where she had been hiding.

  Clarissa didn't answer right away. She slowly removed her thick glasses, running a hand over her face, which suddenly looked tired.

  Without those enormous lenses, her eyes seemed even bigger and more wide-eyed.

  “I am... Peter is too.”

  Nico turned first to look at Clarissa, then at Peter, perched on the sideboard, who gave a feline grin, waving his black tail like a snake darting left and right.

  “How do you know the difference, dear? Are you a sentient program too?” asked Clarissa, turning to look at Nadia.

  Nico saw Gareth place his hand on the hilt of his sword, his sharp gaze darting from Nadia to Peter to Clarissa.

  “I am... Gareth is too,” replied Nadia, using Clarissa's exact words.

  Peter leapt down from the sideboard and as he did so, his limbs stretched, his black fur retracted, and his body lengthened. Peter, with his nose upturned and his elf-like face, turned to Nadia, seeming to have changed his attitude, now wary.

  “What are you?” Peter asked with a nod of his head, his eyes euphoric but alert, narrowed to two slits.

  “You tell us first, Animutant,” roared Gareth, releasing the lock on his sword hilt.

  Clarissa slowly put on her glasses and resumed her tone with aspirated vowels: “But what is this hatred, dear?” she asked, sliding towards Gareth. “As you can see, we're all in the same boat,” she said, twirling around and waving her shawls as she pointed to the Nothingness writhing in the ampoules.

  “Do you want to know who I am? I am a system service for regulating the operational load. I monitor active processes, assigned priorities, and resource consumption.”

  “What?” asked Leo, his eyes as big as saucers.

  “My dear,” said Clarissa, “I intervene when simultaneous execution exceeds stability thresholds.”

  There was a brief pause of silence, then Kiah turned to Clarissa with a frown and said, “So you prevent us from doing too many important things all at once.”

  “Spot on, dear,” said Clarissa, smiling and pointing a bony finger at Kiah.

  “So you decide what we can do?” asked Leo, puzzled. “Then what's the fun in staying in here?” She shook her head, muttering almost to herself, “Although this damn game stopped being fun when we started risking our lives and there's a virus attacking our world to destroy it, or dominate it, or whatever villainous ambition Erebos has.”

  Clarissa shook her head: “No, dear, the fun remains,” said Clarissa, as if defending herself against Leo's first statement: “I decide how much you can do without damaging the system. It's different.”

  Leo shrugged and threw himself into a chair, but it was a broken straw chair and he fell into it, making Nico smile. Peter, on the other hand, burst out laughing.

  When Leo broke free and Peter regained his already poor composure, he said, wiping the tears of amusement from his face, “I, on the other hand, am a rootkit.”

  It all happened in an instant: Nadia's hands burst into flames as she sprang into a defensive stance, Garet, sword in hand, lunged toward Peter, pointing the blade a few inches from the Animutant's neck. Nico jumped to his feet as Leo grabbed his dagger and Kiah backed away.

  Clarissa screamed, “Slow down, the ampoules!”

  Gareth roared at Nadia, “I knew we shouldn't have trusted them, I could feel it, I can smell the stench,” he concluded in disgust, staring into Peter's lively eyes. Despite the situation, Peter had not abandoned his smirk, his hands raised high.

  “We are antivirus, bastard,” Gareth roared, looking Peter in the eyes.

  Peter laughed: “I know, you idiot,” Peter said, bursting out laughing, “your stench makes me nauseous, but I'll put up with it for a pact made with a friend,” he said, shifting his gaze to Nico.

  Nico, eyes wide and a lump in his throat, stared at Peter: “What are you?”

  Kiah murmured, his eyes fixed on Peter: “He's a program designed to blend in, deceive the system, manipulate perceptions, and act as an invisible intermediary.”

  Nadia said quietly, her eyes fixed on Peter: “It's not just malware: it's a program that rewrites the truth.”

  “Oh, thank goodness! Don't worry, don't worry, the bottles are fine,” said Clarissa, grabbing the vials of Nothingness and clutching them to her chest. The liquid moved: instead of remaining upright as gravity would dictate, it slid sideways, reaching toward Clarissa's body, as if it wanted to attach itself to her.

  The woman approached the sideboard, seemingly oblivious to Gareth holding a blade to Peter's throat.

  “Excuse me, dear,” said the woman with her usual aspirated vowels, slipping between the two to put the vials back in the sideboard behind Peter and Gareth.

  Nico watched the scene with irony; he met Greth's astonished gaze as she followed the woman while she put the bottles away, oblivious to what was happening. Nico almost burst out laughing, but he held back.

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  “So what were we saying?” asked the woman, turning to look at her guests after securing the bottles inside the sideboard. She jumped when she saw Gareth with his sword drawn: “Sorry, dear,” she said, grabbing the blade with her bare hands and slowly lowering it. “You mustn't keep this thing out in the open. You know, these are very dangerous objects, even for us.”

  Gareth raised his eyebrows in confusion but went along with the movement. Peter laughed.

  “My dear microcode-gifted brute, if you let me explain, I can inform everyone of my enormous greatness,” said Peter, transforming his hand into a feline paw, as big as a man's hand, and pointing his sharp clawed index finger at Gareth.

  Gareth looked at him with flaming eyes but sheathed his sword, his hand remaining on the hilt while Nadia's hands went limp and she lowered them to her sides, her face tense.

  Peter nodded, pleased with himself: the fur retracted and his cat-like hand returned to normal. “I work like a rootkit, but with authorization. In short: they prevent dangerous changes and manipulations of the game reality. Is that clear so far?” Peter asked mockingly.

  “You're a kind of anti-cheat,” said Leo, his face contorted as if he had just eaten a whole lemon.

  Everyone looked at him in amazement, as if he had said something surprising. “And what do you know about it?” asked Kiah with a mixture of smug amusement.

  “I love cheats! I use them all the time, but I often get caught and blocked,” said Leo irritably.

  Kiah's smugness collapsed, and she looked at Leo with raised eyebrows and a pitying expression on her face as she shook her head.

  Then, looking at Peter, Kiah said, “Preserve the consistency of the game world and identify external entities such as mods, exploits, or various intrusions,” she concluded as if she already knew that what she was saying was right.

  “Exactly, girl,” said Peter amused, his feverish eyes darting from Gareth to Nadia. “But I do it without all the pomp and circumstance, like these guys,” he said, nodding toward Nadia and Gareth. “Without showing myself, almost never.”

  “That's why you turn into an animal? That's brilliant,” said Leo smugly.

  Nico frowned: “But you showed yourself to me.”

  Peter laughed: “That's why I said ‘almost never’. And besides, I needed something from you,” he said, pointing his thumb at the cupboard behind him.

  “Right, let's get back to our main topic,” said Kiah, looking first at Nico and then at Clarissa. “We were talking about ‘writing errors’?”

  Kiah repeated, quoting Clarissa and frowning. “What exactly are they?”

  Clarissa nodded, then turned to look at Nico. “When the Nothing hit you, my dear boy,” she said, “it didn't start eating memories.” She made quotation marks with her fingers when she said ‘eating memories’. “But it started overwriting them.”

  Nico swallowed. Overwrite. It was a word he knew, but it shouldn't have made any sense in relation to him... he was a human being, not a computer.

  “Like... like a file?” he murmured hesitantly.

  Clarissa nodded.

  Leo burst out laughing nervously. “No, wait. Are you saying that Nico's brain is being rewritten...”

  “Like a system,” Peter interjected seriously.

  “A system that's running with corrupted data,” Kiah murmured almost to herself, then shook her head. “But... how do you know these things?”

  Nico's stomach was in a knot and he had a lump in his throat that he couldn't swallow.

  Clarissa smiled. “We're studying it, dear,” she said dryly.

  Peter slipped his hands into his pockets and said, “We're part of this same system.” He paused. “Like the friends you bring with you,” he said, gesturing toward Nadia and Gareth.

  Clarissa wrapped her shawls around herself again. “And that's why,” she said, “we know who can help you.”

  Nico looked up. “The Archivist...” he murmured, as if uttering a sacred name.

  Clarissa took a deep breath. “Exactly.”

  “He keeps the previous versions, the stable versions of everything that exists here.”

  She moved closer to Nico, staring at him with her enormous eyes behind her thick glasses. "There is a copy of you, my dear. A backup.

  A version of you prior to the wound of the Nothing."

  Nico felt his stomach drop.

  “So if the Archivist...” he murmured.

  Clarissa nodded. “Exactly, if he rewrites your parameters with that version,” Clarissa concluded, “the Nothing will have nothing left to cling to.”

  Nico stared at the woman, not knowing whether to be relieved or frightened by that possibility.

  “Like reinstalling a clean system,” Leo said enthusiastically. “Without viruses. But that's fantastic!”

  “No, it's not,” Nadia said dryly. “By rewriting Nico with an earlier version...”

  Kiah's eyes widened, his face tense, his fists clenched. “He'll lose all his memories of the last few days, even those outside the game.”

  “Exactly,” Nadia said dryly.

  He slumped into the chair as his legs gave way. He wouldn't die, but he would forget the journey, the escape, Peter, and Clarissa. He didn't understand if by agreeing to go to the Archivist he was choosing to stay or to disappear, losing part of himself.

  Leo's expression changed, becoming more serious. “Yes, but he'll be fine!” he said, pointing to Nico.

  “Do you realize what you're saying? This is a violation...”

  “Kiah, calm down,” Nico murmured, grabbing her friend's shoulder to comfort her. “I'll be fine... everything will be fine.” He smiled as best he could: “And when I've recovered, you can tell me everything I've been through but don't remember anymore. It'll be fun,” he said without really believing it.

  “But you'll also forget what happened to you outside the game these past few days... It's not fair.”

  Nico laughed, a bitter smile: “Trust me, even if I forget what happened outside of here, I won't have missed much.”

  The late afternoon light filled the back room of Clarissa's shop, illuminating the disorderly piles of books, dried herbs, and vials. Several people had come in and out of Clarissa's shop with remedies for colds, joint pain, and other ailments, with amulets for the evil eye or love potions. Clarissa stood at the counter, her lips pressed tightly together, tending to the various vials simmering in the dim candlelight. Nico, Kiah, Leo, Nadia, and Gareth formed a small semicircle in front of Peter, who had offered to explain how to get to the city ruled by the Archivist.

  “So,” he began, “the Archivist's city is called Archivum, it's located beyond the Gray Sea, but to get there you'll have to cross a forest infested with talking wolves, and those are dangerous, they're chatty and love riddles, but if you get the answer wrong, GNAM, they'll devour you in one bite.”

  “What?” asked Leo, looking at Peter with eyes as big as saucers.

  “They don't exist,” said Nico immediately, who had noticed a glint in Peter's eyes that appeared every time he lied.

  Peter continued, unperturbed. “All right. Then you'll take some horses from the stables outside the walls and gallop for half a day. But be careful not to take the road to the east...” Peter said dramatically, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  Leo turned pale. “Why, what's to the east?”

  Peter shrugged: “Absolutely nothing, which is why you mustn't take that road,” he concluded innocently.

  Leo became irritated, crossing his arms and turning his back on Peter.

  Clarissa returned from the shop and, wrapped in her shawls, said in her drawn-out vowels and theatrical tone: “Why don't you go with them, dear?”

  Everyone turned to look at her in surprise.

  Clarissa continued, “You know Giacomo... Strange things happen on that ferry.”

  Kia crossed her arms, her face troubled. “Strange things? What do you mean?”

  Clarissa laughed cacophonously, “Oh, you'll see, dear, you'll see.”

  Peter nodded. “All right then! Looks like we'll be spending some more time together, you big oaf with microcode,” Peter said, smiling at Gareth. Gareth frowned but said nothing.

  Peter brightened up. “The ferry leaves at dawn. If we want to have any chance of getting on board tomorrow morning, we'd better pack our bags right away.”

  Everyone stared at him.

  “We'll be galloping all night,” sighed Peter, putting on a tired expression. “It'll be fun,” he concluded, dropping the tired expression and smiling with lively, feverish eyes.

  Nadia shook her head. Nico laughed.

  He then stepped forward, more serious. "Anyway, Archivum is real. The journey is long but feasible, but the port of Lyrven is not a place you want to arrive at alone. There are people who woke up the next day without an arm or a leg."

  Nico looked up. “What?”

  Peter tilted his head. “Don't worry, you're safe. I'll accompany you to the city of Archivum, and once you're there, you'll be on your own.”

  [AUTHOR'S NOTE]

  Log updated: Readers are invited to provide comments and evaluate the behavior of subject N_01.

  [LOG_027] will be released on Thursday ET.

  The continuity of the story depends on your increased support.

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  Log closed: The system observes.