Chapter 5:An Impossible Timestamp
1079 Words
The next morning,Abigail didn’t open her laptop immediately,she sat for a full minute staring at it as if it might already know what she had discovered yesterday.
The thought made her exhale sharply
“Get a grip,” she muttered.
Her grandmother’s voice echoed in her memory,curiosity is fine but obsession is expensive Abigail opened the laptop anyway.
By 9:10 a.m she was back in archives,the building was louder today,not noisy but active,phones kept ringing,keyboards clicking,elevators opening and closing in steady rhythm.
Life moving forward like nothing beneath it was worth questioning but Abigail wasn’t fooled.
She logged into the archive system and immediately pulled up File 11-A73 again,the same mismatch appeared
Physical file:clean and consistent.
Digital record:wrong classification.
Still wrong.
Still there.
She leaned closer.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Why?”
A shadow fell across her desk.
“You’re early again.”
Abigail didn’t look up.
“Habit.”
Ben placed a coffee beside her keyboard.
“Or anxiety.”
“Same thing sometimes.”
He noticed her screen.
“That file again?”
“Yes.”
Ben sighed.
“I told you archive systems from that period were messy,migration errors
Data loss
Ghost records”
“Ghost records?”she repeated.
He shrugged.
“That’s what IT calls entries that got duplicated or corrupted during system upgrades they exist twice,or not at all.”
Abigail turned slightly.
“This one exists too cleanly to be a ghost.”
Ben gave her a long look.
“You’re really interested in this.”
“I just want to understand it.”
“People here usually don’t want to understand archives,” he said.
“They just want to survive them.”
Abigail almost smiled.
“Then I’m already different.”
Ben didn’t respond to that.
He simply walked away slowly,glancing back once like he wasn’t sure whether to warn her again.
At 11:47 a.m Clara Bennett called her over Abigail followed her into a small glass office with no warmth,no decoration,just efficiency.
“You’ve been reviewing the same file for two days,” Clara said.
Abigail didn’t deny it.
“Yes.”
Clara studied her.
“Why?”
“There’s a mismatch in classification.”
“And?”
“It repeats across other files from the same year.”
That got Clara’s attention.
A small pause.
“Show me.”
Abigail turned her laptop toward her and scrolled highlighting the inconsistencies Clara leaned in slightly,her expression didn’t change but something in her eyes sharpened,then she straightened.
“How many files?”
“Seven confirmed. Possibly more.”
Clara nodded once.
Then closed the laptop.
“Stop.”
Abigail blinked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Stop digging into those records.”
The tone wasn’t angry.
It was final.
Abigail frowned.
“Why?”
Clara held her gaze.
“Because your job is digitization,not investigation.”
“But this could indicate a systemic error”
“Abigail.”
The use of her name cut through her sentence Clara’s voice lowered slightly.
“Some systems are not meant to be corrected by trainees.”
Silence stretched between them.
Abigail swallowed.
“Was that an order?”
“Yes.”
Clara stepped back.
“Finish your assigned workload,leave historical inconsistencies alone.”
Then she added softly but firmer:
“Some files exist exactly as they are for a reason.”
And she left the office.
Back at her desk,Abigail didn’t move for several seconds,her fingers hovered over the keyboard,not typing,not searching,just still.
That reaction didn’t make sense.
If it was just an error,why shut it down?
If it was harmless, why the warning?
She opened her notebook slowly.
Under previous notes,she added:
Supervisor instructed to stop investigation.
Then paused,that wasn’t normal,not for a trainee,not for a simple archive task.Something about this was bigger than she understood.
At 2:30 p.m Maya messaged her.
Lunch? You’ve been ghosting.
Abigail stared at the message for a moment.
Then replied: I've been busy,archives are weird, Maya's response came almost instantly
Everything about that company is weird.
That’s why they pay well.
Abigail almost smiled..almost but her attention drifted back to the file open on her screen and she didn’t reply further.
At 4:12 p.m she made a decision,not a dramatic one,just a careful one.
She stopped using the main system,Instead, she began cross checking offline archives
Older scanned documents.
Backups.
Historical logs.
If someone wanted something hidden,they usually didn’t erase everything,they just buried it deeper.
The work took time,more time than she expected,her eyes strained from scanning page after page,her coffee went cold,her fingers ached slightly from typing,but then
A pattern appeared.
Different files.
Same year.
Same irregular timestamp structure.
But now she saw something else.
Not just errors.
But clustering.
The inconsistencies weren’t random.
They aligned around a specific quarter.
A specific timeframe.
Abigail sat back slowly.
Her heartbeat picked up.
“Okay,” she whispered again.
But this time it wasn’t confusion.
It was recognition.
Something had happened that year.
Something large enough to affect multiple records.
Something someone had tried to smooth over in digital history,not erase,just… soften.
Make it look like it had always been that way.
She reached for her notebook.
Wrote carefully:Irregularities cluster:Q2–Q3(Year redacted in system logs)
Then stopped.
Her pen hovered.
A thought formed she didn’t like.
If this was intentional…
Then it wasn’t a mistake.
It was a cover up.
The thought should have made her close the file.
Instead it made her open another one.
She looked at the screen.
And for the first time since joining Ashford Global,she didn’t feel like a trainee.She felt like someone standing at the edge of something she hadn’t been invited to see.
That evening, lights dimmed across the archive floor again,employees left in small groups,the building slowly emptied itself of noise but Abigail stayed,long after Ben had gone,long after Maya had stopped texting,long after the city outside turned gold and then dark.
She opened File 11-A73 one more time.
And this time,she didn’t just look at it.
She listened to it,not literally but in the way patterns speak when you finally notice them.
The wrong timestamp.
The duplicated structure.
The repeated anomalies across multiple files.
All pointing somewhere.
Somewhere she couldn’t yet see.
Her screen dimmed slightly.
She didn’t move to wake it.
Because in her mind, something had already shifted.
This wasn’t just a job anymore.
It was a question.
And questions, she knew, had a way of finding answers whether people wanted them or not.
- Writer
