Uncertain

Unker 10 was used to the questioning look about his funky name. Luckily, the entrance security was more interested in watching holoposts than cross-checking Unker’s doctored DNA-ID readout and was waved through. It seemed too easy for a place that had the reputation as the Fort Knox of antediluvian information.

Very quickly, though, Unker discovered that getting in wasn’t really the barrier. Making sense of the place was. The fabled archives were an endless warren of stacks and file vaults. Actual physical documents. Hard to conceive of so many tangible records, but here they were at the tips of Unker’s long, smooth, ridgeless fingers. To think this was how the world once stored its information. Where to even begin?

Granted there had once been systems to organize and catalog printed docs and texts, but the space and manpower it must’ve taken. In a world grown short of both, Unker could hardly fathom how these salvaged items from the permafloods had been granted this precious high and dry real estate. It meant this labyrinth of flimsy, perishable paper had value. High value.

Especially to Unker 10. Long ago, a fate healer had sussed out this source and prophesied a revelatory journey for answers. Answers to personal mysteries that preceded the permafloods, that preceded the digital age, that preceded Unker’s impossibly long and flawed life.

Unker was finally here. In. Now what? How to solve the puzzle, make sense of the maze, and decode his strange existence?

After many months in the archives, Unker slowly became a creature of the labyrinthe stacks and vaults. The secretive serenity of whispers and murmurs and maybes. Everywhere the bare bones of information, the dismembered skeletons of facts. Could it be put back together? Could Unker’s origins?

Then a real clue found in an antediluvian government dossier: yellowed, brittle, dust in the making. Just as the fate healer had foreseen, the mystery of Unker’s being was a grave pronouncement. Yet, even more, a strange pronunciation. For, the dossier contained a highly classified military report with a photo of Unker’s unmistakeable features. And this telling litany:

Age: Uncertain

Sex: Uncertain

Race: Uncertain

DNA-ID: Uncertain

Augmentations: Uncertain

Loyalties: Uncertain

Threat Level: Uncertain

Name: Uncertain

For the first time, in an already too-long life, Unker 10 became more certain.