AntiHisTor is a world just a step aside from our own. Long Lives is the first set of ten short stories from that world. Each one usually runs to around 30 pages.
A new translation goes up on Substack every month - the first third of each story is free. Links appear here as each one is ready.
Two records of a single ambulance call with the same ID arrive at the central archive - in one the patient lives, in the other he is dead. Night analyst Viktor Brenn finds his own name in the log, and the only way to clear himself leads to an archivist who can read time in data.
Over the city spread the blue-black of the moments just before night ends. The hour you have to know the city to recognize - to sense that somewhere out of sight it has already begun to stir. This city on the Danube never slept, of course. The coming chill of morning only stiffened it into a slower pace and let at least those who had no reason to rush at daybreak catch their breath.
Viktor Brenn was never one to hurry, certainly not as he rode the lift down from the topmost third of the skyscraper and prepared to cross the bridge at his leisure, to leave the view of glittering prisms behind on the far side and lose himself in the lanes of the older part of town. But first he had to get past the river, hidden beneath banks of mist. Today he felt he had more than earned that soothing sight. He had spent twelve hours staring into the power-grid logs of the northern circuit to crack a three-percent anomaly, and in the end, just before his boss arrived, he had managed it.
He could drop the night's results triumphantly, if wearily, beside her morning coffee and clear out with that bombshell at his back. That was how it went: Viktor would do anything to dodge routine work, even if it meant digging up the dullest possible task, whenever no case in his speciality happened to turn up.
In the end the data always yielded up something everyone else had missed, and so he could justify his existence at the firm all over again. Every rank-and-file operator knew it was so. They all knew their incident-management firm owed half its survival to Viktor and his creative approach to interpreting the rules - and the terms of his contract along with them. And still they all resented him, muttering something about how Dana let him get away with everything for reasons other than economic ones. There is no environment on earth richer in gossip than an ops room peopled by mediocre young men convinced they are meant for better things and that the world has wronged them.
A three-percent discrepancy was within tolerance. But a constant deviation of that size was strange. While Viktor stayed put at the computers all night, a team of field technicians, acting on his tip, set about checking the physical infrastructure and found that one of the transformers on the third circuit had a faulty sensor. It reported the correct values while the real load kept climbing. Left unrepaired, within two months it would have overloaded and blacked out the whole district.
It was not one of the more adventurous cases, but public money always flowed with less reluctance than that of private clients. Traffic control centres, the emergency service, the power grid, the waterworks. That kept the firm afloat in stretches when no one-off, more lucrative project was anywhere on the horizon. And even from such colourless data Viktor could strike a spark of something that at least threatened to become a crisis - and so avert it.
He walked, out of habit, though today he wished he were home already. The mind always wilts as night ends, no matter how long one has been awake. Whether you rise at midnight or at noon, around five in the morning the body simply switches over and something has to end. And today, on top of that, the sheer number of figures he had double-checked had worn him down.
He expected no gratitude for another small rescue, not from the city that sprawled for kilometres around him, nor from his colleagues. He had ignored the two men he had shared the lift with moments earlier. And yet now, in the cold, something clicked in his head and he recalled what an unusual subject of conversation those two seemed to have had. The WOW signal? Who drags that out again after sixty years, or however long it's been?
Viktor had the impression that between those two - who off the clock could rarely manage a topic rising much above basic physiological needs - the word "civilization" had also drifted by. Extraterrestrial, presumably, given the context. But never mind. He was finally outside now, with a week off ahead of him. Perhaps, just this once, at the tail end of winter like this, he might get away somewhere out of the city.
Winbon
The capital of Austria and one of the largest cities in Erebia was founded on the Danube as the Reman camp Vindobona sometime in the 1st century before the Annulation. Over centuries of Germanic use the name wore down into its present form.
The left bank belongs to glass and steel, the right to cobblestones. Winbonians cross from one to the other without noticing they have changed centuries. After all, they have tried not to think about history ever since their monarchy vanished from the map of Erebia.
Current population? Some 2 million people you will never hear complain about anything out loud. But you can count on this: if they are complaining about you, they will take care that word reaches you.
Halfway across the bridge Viktor dug a pair of earphones out of his pocket. He could not keep to his resolution to spend the walk without any further distractions, wrapped in nothing but the murmur of the waking traffic around him. All that remained was to decide whether to put on music, or...
The music started before his phone had even finished pairing with the earphones, and his boss's face appeared on the display. Viktor sighed. Partly at the fact that someone wanted something from him. Partly at the reminder that he still did not know why he had given half a minute of his life to assigning that photo to her contact. He ought to delete it.
You'll thank me after my holiday, boss.
Come back.
The thanks will do just fine in the form of a rai—
Come. Back.
Is something off in the data?
No. We have a case.
At five in the morning? It must be something on par with a bank robbery. Can't this wait for someone who isn't already thirty minutes into his holiday?
Believe me, your holiday is going to go very differently from what you expected.
Viktor made his way through the morning bustle of the office, ignoring once again the looks he could feel without seeing. The day shift was a touch more set against him than the rest, since they were usually the ones left to tie up his most tiresome loose ends. The terminals glowed, the air was colder than usual - someone had forgotten to switch the air conditioning off its night-time economy setting. Dana stood in her office, staring at a monitor in that particular way that said, "I'm not even taking in what I'm looking at, I just don't want to look as though I'm waiting for you."
So what sort of case is it?
We got a request straight from the CDI.
Are we checking archive records now? Has the world run out of things to happen, so we're going round in circles?
Dana pressed two buttons on the remote - one closed her office door, the other threw the image from her computer straight onto the wall.
It's today's record. Two of them, rather, which is why they sent it to us. They arrived at the same moment, you see.
Any normal agent would have said, first thing, that it wasn't possible. For Viktor that impossibility was the very reason he was back, the reason it had to be him here, and the reason that, tired as he was, he wanted to be. He read the data on the wall quickly, laid out neatly - whether by the sender at the CDI or by Dana - so that the anomaly leapt straight out.
An ambulance crew had gone out at twenty past one in the morning to a heart attack in the Seventeenth District. The patient died. There were thirteen such cases a month on average - tragic, routine, recorded. This one was different, because the CDI held two versions of the same call-out. In one, the crew arrived in time, the patient was stabilized and handed over to the hospital. In the other, the ambulance stood at the station the whole while and the call-out never happened at all. Both versions carried valid archive hashes. Both had passed automatic validation. Both were locked.
Viktor sat down and read the output twice. Then once more. He did not ask which version was the true one, because that did not matter here. Let the doctors sort that out. He fixed his eyes on the sequence numbers.
Both messages have identical sequence IDs.
I noticed.
Sequence numbers are assigned by dispatch at the moment of sending. Linearly, one per message, no exceptions. This would mean either that dispatch sent the same message twice with different contents - which is impossible on the hardware - or that someone built the second message by hand. In the correct format, and knowing the current sequence number.
Even I can see what's wrong with that.
Viktor smirked at Dana. Of course, she was a manager, not a computer scientist. Then again, neither was he. There were programmers enough here without him.
Someone knows the system from the inside, Viktor.
That could be about a million people. The standards are public by law.
But the ability to alter them is not. Only the state has that, and even then only in theory.
Quite. Which is why it never happens.
The CDI's automatic intake did not check whether laws were obeyed. The system took in both records, verified them and locked them. The CDI has no other answer to give. Whatever passes validation once, stays. Such is the rule, adopted at a time when few suspected how soon it would come to cover records of who survived a heart attack and who did not.
ICA
"The city that forgets nothing" - what began as a folk saying became, under Mayor Magdalena Kranz, the slogan promoting the Information Continuity Act.
The law passed by a vote of 62–58 in 1994, on a proposal from the Data Integrity Commission, led by the lawyer K. Hebenreich and the computer scientist Inge Söllner - at a time, that is, when its immediate effect was to mandate backups onto the most advanced medium available: three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks.
This courage to meet the technological challenges of the age, married to the time-honoured diligence of the civil service, proved so compelling that a law originally Austrian became an all-Erebian one. Just in time for a series of scandals to strike Erebia, brought on by the switch to newer storage media and the careless disposal of the old.
Viktor switched from the CDI's archive logs to the live dispatch logs.
The synchronization window lasted ninety seconds. During it, dispatch sent records to the CDI and the CDI took them in - a standard handshake, automatic, flawless across millions of previous cases. The attacker knew this. The false message arrived at the precise moment when dispatch was still processing the real call-out. For a fraction of the window, dispatch received both messages at once, both with the same sequence ID, and for the system one conclusion followed: the ambulance is on its way. So it assigned the new case to a more distant rescue unit, and in the log it looked like a routine reallocation of capacity. Nothing to draw anyone's attention.
The more distant unit arrived a quarter of an hour later than the original one would have.
Someone knocked on the office door, did not wait for leave to enter and came barging in.
In five minutes.
Someone slowly backed out.
Meanwhile, out of the corner of his eye, in a small side window on the screen, Viktor was scrolling through figures on how steeply the chance of surviving a myocardial infarction falls with every minute without intervention.
Are you thinking murder?
Practically every day, especially when I see that slogan down by the bank, "less than the interest".
Could you take this seriously?
Viktor closed the smaller window and let the thing that had brought him back up here light the whole room.
I don't think anyone was after the poor wretch - him you could get rid of more easily. This was a hacking attack, not a murder.
But he'll go to prison because a man died.
I didn't need to be told that. But thanks for the vote of confidence that I'll find him.
This could turn very ugly. Very loud. The firm doesn't need the publicity.
Do I strike you as someone who rushes to the media?
Dana sighed.
No, you're the sort who'll be smirking round the corner while it's me explaining myself to them.
Viktor closed the remaining windows one by one. He could see the whole picture - the false synchronization message, the redirected call-out, the patient dead a quarter of an hour after a paramedic should have been on the way. The simplest and the worst explanation at once: the system had worked exactly as designed, and that was precisely why it had failed.
CDI
The Central Depository of Information came into being alongside the ICA in 1994, as its technical backbone - an archive into which records from the whole of the city's infrastructure flow automatically, without exception and without erasure. Alongside the active archive, tended by information curators, there is a department of inactive branches: records that are duplicates, or judged obsolete, are shunted into passive storage. By law accessible to anyone who asks.
The system does not judge the content of what it archives - only the format. If two messages pass validation, it stores both with equal care and equal archival value, without comment and without preference. In practice, then, the law guarantees not only the preservation of truth but also the preservation of a convincing lie, one that looked credible enough on the way in.
The CDI's first director was Joren Kalder, who began as an idealistic theorist and the author of the manifesto Divinity in the Network, which framed digital memory as a quasi-religious act. From a philosopher on the fringe of the legislative debate he grew, by degrees, into a practitioner at the head of an institution, which he led for 24 years. He left in 2017 convinced that he had handed it on in the best possible state. In her first year in office his successor, Sofia Renn, extended its archival obligations to three categories of record that Kalder had spent his whole career refusing to accept as relevant. On his views about that change, Kalder has kept the public regularly informed ever since, by way of the professional press.
Two locked records with the same result were in themselves a compliance incident, regardless of what lay behind them - Dana had to escalate it even if neither of them knew the cause. Viktor did not have to tell her anything. It was there on the screen. Dana took out her phone, and it was clear she would now spend a while calling people who would call other people, and out of it would come a form, and out of the form an audit.
Don't disappear on me just yet.
Dana tossed him the instruction sideways, the phone pinned to her ear by her shoulder, and by the end of the sentence dropped almost to a whisper, only to fire off a friendly greeting to the person on the other end, who was certainly no friend. Viktor decided to spare himself any remarks about the hypocrisy that helped keep him in his job, and, gazing out of the window at his bridge, he wondered what the audit would likely turn up first.
The security team needed less than an hour.
Viktor sat the whole time at a free terminal in the corner of the open-plan floor, not logged in, eyes shut and hands folded on the keyboard, while the day shift came filing in around him and no one paid him any more notice than usual. If anyone did notice him, they probably read his presence as the upshot of yet another of his scrapes, one he would turn, in his now somewhat worn-out fashion, into a triumph. A simulation of how they saw him ran somewhere in the background of Viktor's mind, and he gave it no active attention, let alone taking offence at his own projections.
He heard the office sounds as if from the far end of a tunnel - keys, footsteps, and the air conditioning that had finally switched over. Then the door of Dana's office opened and she called him back. He had expected them to go on working methodically, without any agitation or personal stake. The crack in her voice was all the more surprising for it. As though, on top of everything else, she had just learned some devastating piece of personal news. Or been betrayed by someone.
The image on the wall was different this time. A forensic readout, clear and unambiguous. A login to the dispatch synchronization interface at eighteen minutes past one in the morning - two minutes before the false message entered the system. Credentials: Viktor Brenn. IP address: the company VPN. Timestamp verified against three independent sources.
Not a word asking him to explain. Her look said all of it, and even that he didn't need to see.
Viktor looked at that line and realised that what he felt, above all, was tiredness. Not surprise - that would have required him to still harbour some illusion that the world runs on fairness. He knew what Dana would do before she opened her mouth. He had known it from the moment he saw his own login on the wall.
You're suspended. Effective immediately.
She said it simply because a thing like that cannot be handled by silence. But it was clear it was happening, and clear what followed from it: access revoked, an investigation under way, no contact with anyone at the firm. Viktor nodded. There was nothing to say. At this moment every word made things worse for them both. He laid his card on the desk, stood up and left without looking back.
In the corridor beyond the open-plan doors Viktor stopped and zipped his jacket all the way up. His hands, in his pockets, found something that had not been there before. A small flat object, a USB flash drive. He left it where it was. He did not slow down.
She must have slipped it to him before she called him back into the office. His card she had taken by the book. The drive she had given him because the audit's findings did not sit right with her, and Viktor was the only person she knew who could verify them. Dana was too disciplined to be guided by faith in anyone, but seasoned enough to know when the numbers did not add up.
Outside, he was met by the cold and by the light, which over that hour indoors had swelled from dusk to full morning. The city was working. Trams, pedestrians, vans backing into archways.
At the newsstand on the corner his eye ran across the headlines of the morning editions. One of them mentioned cosmic signals and an international team of scientists. He registered it only as a change from the usual, more earthbound fare - local politics, or the tabloids. But it did not occur to him to buy anything and read it. He walked on, because in his pocket he had something that needed a home, a monitor and a closed door. Everything else could wait at least until the afternoon.
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