In the House Where the Future Was Stored

In the House Where the Future Was Stored

By ZIA ULLAH KHAN

There was a house at the edge of the collapsed city, half-swallowed by ivy and time, where no one lived and nothing aged. It was said that the house could speak, though no one knew the language anymore. Its windows were clouded like old eyes, and the door never creaked, though it hadn’t been oiled in decades.

Inside that house, the future slept in drawers.

Not clocks, not calendars, but futures—stacked like folded linens, sealed in silver envelopes and stasis glass. Some pulsed faintly, like hearts. Some flickered like candlelight about to die. Some were too bright to look at directly. They were shelved in alphabetical order by a librarian who no longer existed, archived by hands made of memory.

People had once come here in droves. Back when belief in destiny was still fashionable, before war and flood and data collapse erased the certainties of tomorrow. Now, the world ran on instinct and guesswork, a broken compass spinning in a storm.

But on the sixty-third day of the Season of Collapse, someone returned.

Her name was Eliah. She wore a coat stitched from old maps and a satchel full of sand, though no one knew why. Her face had that soft blurriness that comes from too much remembering.

She arrived at twilight, just before the sun dipped low enough to wake the lights inside the house. They did not flicker on. They simply were, like they had been waiting for her.

Eliah stepped into the foyer, where dust fell like snow and the air smelled like thunder.

A low hum rose from the floorboards.

The house remembered her.

Her footsteps did not echo. Instead, they were absorbed into the quiet like secrets. She passed the room of mechanical birds, the hallway of sleeping typewriters, and the fireplace that still burned, even without wood. She stopped before the archive chamber—a round room with a domed glass ceiling through which no stars could be seen.

In the center of the room stood the Repository.

It resembled a tree, but its bark was metallic and iridescent, and its branches held no leaves—only capsules, curled like unborn ideas, each one glowing with its own temperature of truth.

Eliah reached into her satchel and pulled out a name.

Literally—a strip of encoded fiber that shimmered with the letters AUREN VELL.

Her brother.

Gone for six years. Or maybe one. Time bent differently after the Burn.

She held the name to her lips, then to the trunk of the Repository.

The bark opened with a sigh.

Inside, a future waited.

Auren’s capsule was cool to the touch. She slid it from the branch like plucking fruit, and the room dimmed in reverence.

She sat cross-legged beneath the Repository and activated the viewing panel. Holographic mist bloomed into form above the capsule.

In this future, Auren stood before a great ocean of glass. He was older, wearing the uniform of the Skybound Engineers, a smile etched with storms. Around him, machines hummed like insects. He was building something—something large and alive, made of mirrors and breath.

He spoke to someone behind the lens. "Eliah, if you’re seeing this, I found a place for us. It's not what we dreamed, but it's real. We can grow things here again. Come find me. I left a trail in the spectrum..."

The projection distorted briefly, then continued. Auren looked down, face serious. “I stored this future in the house. I wasn’t sure if I’d make it back to you, or if time would hold up its end of the bargain. But if you're here... then something worked.”

The image flickered, then faded, leaving only the dim blue glow of the capsule.

Eliah didn’t cry. She had lost that reflex sometime around the Third Blackout, when the sky turned to static and food turned to ash.

Instead, she stood.

Walked.

She moved to the corridor marked Unlabeled—a space where futures too unstable for filing were left to echo alone. She passed a row of sealed doors until one pulsed at her presence.

Without hesitation, she opened it.

Inside, hundreds of capsules floated in midair like drifting lanterns. Most were cracked or empty. One hovered down to meet her palm.

It opened.

And there, shimmering faintly, was a future in which she followed Auren’s trail—through the Dead Frequencies, across the Faulted Plains, and into the Outer Haze. In this future, she survived. They survived.

But it was blurry at the edges. Uncertain.

A maybe-future.

She looked up. “What do I have to give?”

The house whispered around her.

Your certainty.

Eliah nodded. “Take it.”

And the house did.

In exchange, it gave her possibility.

When Eliah stepped out of the house at dawn, the sky looked different. Not healed, but curious. A small bird followed her. She didn’t recognize the species—it may have been invented while she was inside.

She walked east, toward where the horizon curved sharper than before. Toward where frequencies waited to be cracked. Toward the last coordinates her brother ever spoke aloud.

Behind her, the house stood silent once more.

The drawers closed.

The tree curled its branches inward.

And the future—somewhere—shivered into motion.