🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Society & Future | (4) SF-001-S
They gathered in the Plaza of Recall beneath the sky’s slow shimmer, where the last clouds of the year were always dyed saffron and plum. The air hummed faintly, as it always did when the archives were stirred.
Every citizen above the age of sixteen held a single token, carved from old bone and dyed with the fingerprint of the self. The young ones wore robes of quiet grey. The elders, whose memories bulged with decades of retained experience, wore blue with threads of silver. Many of them trembled slightly, as if already halfway erased.
At the center stood the Loom.
It looked nothing like a machine. More like a great flower made of glass and sound, its petals unfolding in endless time. Suspended above it was the Sphere of Memory, pulsing with the hues of what had been lived: wars, births, betrayals, feasts, more betrayals, laughter in kitchens, the smell of woodsmoke, the terror of falling, the ache of first silence, the joy of first touch.
The vote was not about events, not exactly. It was about feelings. About meaning. Each year, they chose which categories of memory would remain. Not specific recollections, but types. Shapes in the psyche.
This year, the categories were: Regret. Triumph. Grief. Wonder. Shame. Mercy.
The Speaker of the Loom, whose voice had no echo, rose and spoke the six aloud. Then silence.
Each person stepped forward when called and placed their token into one of the six basins. No words. No discussion. Only decision.
Yara stood near the back of the line. She was seventeen, and this was her first vote. Her hands shook slightly. Not with fear, but with the burden of knowing that what she chose would vanish from the minds of all, including herself.
She had spent weeks studying her family archive. Her mother’s face when her brother was taken. Her father’s trembling hands after the flood. The moment she herself had knelt beside a dying bird, watching its final tremble and feeling something enormous move inside her.
She stared at the basins. Grief shimmered faintly with an inner blue. Wonder sparkled like dust in light. Regret was matte and dull. Triumph pulsed, almost arrogantly. Shame seemed to flicker away from view when looked at directly. Mercy was silent.
She had intended to vote to preserve Wonder. That had been her plan. But as she stepped forward, the Loom turned slightly. Not physically. More like a shift within her perception.
And she heard, not with ears, but with something behind her sternum:
If you forget grief, will you remember what it means to hold another through it?
Her token warmed in her hand.
She placed it, at the last moment, into the basin of Grief.
Behind her, others stepped forward. A man with tears in his beard chose Mercy. A child barely tall enough to reach chose Shame. An old woman, trembling, placed her token into Wonder.
When the final token fell, the Loom stirred.
It rose into the sky, higher than thought, and began its Work. The Sphere above it dimmed, then sparked, then released a sound like memory evaporating.
All across the city, the selected category pulsed into permanence. The others unraveled. The forgotten feelings did not vanish all at once. They shimmered, faded, frayed. People would wake in the night and know something was missing, but not what. They would reach for words they no longer had. They would touch photographs with blank faces and feel a faint ache with no name.
But Grief remained.
The next morning, Yara visited her grandmother, who had voted forty-seven times. They sat beneath the plum blossom tree that no longer meant anything to most.
"Do you remember when he died?" Yara asked.
Her grandmother nodded. "I remember holding your mother in the hallway. Her face was blank. But her eyes..."
She closed them, smiling with sorrow.
"I'm glad you kept this one," she said.
Yara did not reply. She only placed her hand on the older woman’s, and together they remembered. Not what happened, but how it had felt.
Far above, the Loom folded back into the sky. Silent. Waiting.
Until next year.