The following short story is a companion piece to my short film DATUM. The film examines salt, the mineral on which the human body runs and upon which human trade and civilization is built. Interestingly, the main export of salt mines is road de-icing salt, which would render the mine obsolete if climate warms to the point that we no longer need road salt. The salt mine is an underground space of extraction entangled with predicting the conditions of the above ground. Set in an ambiguous future past, I imagine the retired salt mine overtaken by servers of a climate archive operation—DATUM (Decryption of Atmo-Temporal Umbra Megafacility). Originally, the facility’s aim was to turn databases of climatological data into accurate weather predictions, but once weather became fundamentally unpredictable, the facility began to use its 4D climatological simulation theatres to reenact vignettes of past climates. Secular pilgrims looking to connect with the irretrievably lost could retrieve their retroscopes here. 

________

Narrowed eyes illuminated by a bar of white light, the Archivist looked through a glowing microscope and dripped water on a salt crystal. A moment’s pause, and the drop absorbed the crystal lattice, breaking down its structure. A sensor head whirred over the drop to read the file, and lines of green text filled the monitor mounted overhead.

The Archivist swung back on her rolling chair leaving the computer to read the file recorded on the cold storage cube. The wheels of her chair left tracks in the thin dusting of salt that covered the floor, control panels, AV equipment, and pressurized tubes snaking across the walls. The tech room was shallow, with only enough room carved out to fit the cinema’s control panel, which at the time of installation had been the best hardware for running real-time, hyper-immersive climate simulations and forecasts.

A long electronic tone signaled the end of the decrypted data sequence, and the reader head returned to its dock. The Archivist squinted at the wall of green digits and identified the glitch. As expected, the glitch was drawn to this uncorrupted file like elk to a salt lick. A thin window above the control panel overlooked an 8-metre drop into the simulation hall, a walled-off section of a mine tunnel terminus. A discolored steel truss frame was screwed into the ceiling and held up two stereoscopic projectors, surround-sound speakers, a leaky sprinkler-precipitation system and a pair of industrial fans rotating lazily. 

By a sequence of movements, the Archivist had performed thousands of times, the simulation equipment jolted to life. A coughing mist of water followed by a foaming spray; the floor of the cinema filled with water. A stained projector screen retreated, allowing the room to expand and the stagnant air to move. Refrigerant engaged; delicate water crystals formed around the edge of the Archivist’s viewport. 

The Archivist let her hand linger on the control switches smoothened to the shape of her fingers, their markings rubbed off from years of use. Once she sought the glitch out, she would never return to her projectionist stand. Tonight, power would be shut off to the facility, and DATUM’s doors would close permanently. The world had changed irreversibly, and the Archivist surrendered herself to the uncertain current.

“I give it a month before we need to start thinking about reducing the scope of our operations.”

“They cut our funding?”

A group of figures in gray boiler suits had gathered in DATUM’s conference hall. Their voices echoed through architecture built for thousands of listeners, but only seven were present tonight, lingering on the unlit speaker stage. A glowing monitor displayed a chart concerning projections.

“We did secure the funds for this month, but some of our private donors have canceled their renewals.”

The Archivist hovered over a colleague’s shoulder, in the outer orbit of the core circle of speakers. The budget projections did not come as a surprise. Work at DATUM over the past few years had become increasingly precarious. The globally positioned weather sensors kept getting better, coverage was established across nearly the entire globe, and in-house weather models were more detailed than ever. There had never been more data available to study, but for some reason, the climate researchers at DATUM had never known as little about the weather as they did now.

“There are still a few government grants we can look into; we would be eligible for them now that our private funding is reduced.”

Earlier on, while simulating the wind speeds of a predicted typhoon over Okinawa, the Archivist had found the software crashing repeatedly. One frame displayed pouring rains, and, after a shudder in the projection, the subsequent frame showed the Okinawan seaside retreated by a few metres, and the vegetation as brown and desiccated. She paused the system, headed up to the control panel, and skimmed over the algorithm driving the simulation. The variable inputs seemed accurate. Perplexingly, the conflicting outputs read as plausible too. Mathematically, the possibility of a drought was the same as the possibility of a typhoon, and it seemed the theater attempted to display both possibilities superimposed. Running the visual outputs again, this time, the affected frame showed a frozen beach covered in a gentle dusting of snow.

“More bureaucracy to wade through. How is DATUM supposed to carry out objective climatological research if we open the operations to more governmental meddling?”

The military base stationed on Okinawa that had commissioned the analysis was notably agitated at their confusing final report. Displeasure among DATUM’s high-end clientele was becoming common. The Archivist found the link between power and weather fascinating. A ruler foreseeing a period of drought would be the difference between a nation perished and a peoples’ amplified faith in their leader. In other words, devotion is born of foresight. So is control.

“I think we surpassed ‘science for science’s sake’ right about when the Armed Forces bought us out under their Climate Resilience initiative. If your own military-industrial complex pumps so much carbon in the atmosphere that it starts to impose on your place of work, you have to at least look like you are trying to do something about it.”

The first networked computers that cropped up around the Second World War were made to forecast. MIT’s Whirlwind was built to perform real-time flight simulation for the air force, running aerodynamic systems to simulate accurate weather conditions. A cult of computational thinking claimed that reality could be broken down into a series of equations, the answers could predict an outcome definitively. How far into the future one could see was limited by how granularly one accounted for all possible variables. Authority worshiped the machine, for it interpreted a little bit more of the great unknowable. Claim over knowing became currency. Modern computation facilitated information hoarding, and, in turn, heightened the asymmetries of knowledge and oblivion. Before having a chance to happen, the future was already colonized by those vying for dominion over it.

“Have we determined the source of our software corruption yet? Funding or no funding, if we can’t get our computers to output anything intelligible, we might as well close down today.”

The Archivist spent her first years at DATUM running climate simulations and preparing long-term forecast reports, a labour that seemed never-ending at the time. She adjusted quickly to the crypt-like conditions of the former salt mine-turned-data-processing-facility: the sterile flood lights along cavernous hallways, the still air, the ever-present chill. The facility provided a palate-cleansing sensory deprivation and stillness to the chaos of her hyper-immersive work environment. 

In the virtual production studio, the Archivist collected climate records as the inputs for models of the Earth’s weather phenomena. The software was immersive — fires raged, hurricanes ravaged, squalls poured down, heat waves scorched. Standing in the center of it all with a controller in hand, The Archivist fast forwarded, rolled the clip back, adjusted variables and re-simulated. It was crucial to maintain an embodied relationship with weather, to truly feel it. Climate was distant and inconsequential when one had not sweltered, gasping for air in a relentless humidity, or fell to the ground as violent winds tore at one’s clothes. 

“Maybe we can’t. What if we reached the limit to how much we can know?”

The hundreds of square kilometres of abandoned salt mine that DATUM occupied grew full of mute servers calculating and blinking away in the pitch black, backing up the world, save file by save file. A digital twin of the world incubated on DATUM’s servers deep underground. There was no nook of the physical world that hadn’t been recorded, and a healthy donation to DATUM would grant access to this body of data. At least, that was the reputation DATUM held before its decline.

The mid-2020s saw a chain of broken climate records.. The tropics spiked into the 50 degrees Celsius during the day and stayed there for 15 consecutive record-breaking months. East Asia saw temperatures in the 30 degrees Celsius over dark hours, and the Svalbard Seed Vault defrosted out of its permafrost case. Droughts and subsequent wildfires ravaged the Americas. Dry climates turned humid, humid climates became more humid, and buildings began to rot from the inside out. Frequent clear weather turbulence would foreshadow the increasingly unpredictable trajectory of the Earth’s climate.

The Archivist lingered at the back of Server Hall A, by the two thick fire rated doors. A few panels of the raised server-room flooring were lifted, exposing thick bunches of coiled cords. The units of identical servers stretched into an obscurity beyond what the Archivist could see. A cold floodlight illuminated the hall’s exit, washing out the glum faces of the last facility managers who hurried in. Groups of technicians chattered in a low murmur; some were quiet with their hands in the pockets of their gray slacks.

A woman took her seat in the glass antechamber, the one that looked like a public parking ticket-booth and began entering commands into the main terminal. The small LEDs on the front face of the server array glinted in the darkness and then blinked out. A few creaky revolutions of the fans and the room rung with silence. The brain behind DATUM’s simulations was powered down permanently. This entity consumed records and data, and produced logical plans of action. It had earned DATUM its acclaim and global authority, but had transmitted its final forecast tonight.

The Archivist felt a twinge of melancholy for the machine. The machine was built to sort time into a sequential triad of past, present and future. When the categories collapsed into themselves, could a forecast be made in the never ending now?

________

The Archivist barreled past the salt pillars, their striations flickering in her peripheral vision. Strapped into one of the staff movers, she was returning a final set of records to cold storage in the abandoned mine shafts. The motion-sensor flood lights shuddered on in anticipation of her arrival. Drawing its operations to a close, the once noisy tunnel junction active with moving machines and shouting workers fell silent. The cavernous corridors came to the forefront of the Archivist’s thoughts in quiet reverence. Albeit stuffed with techno-detritus, the heavy mineral around her was ancient.

The closing of DATUM coincided with a climatic critical mass and a temporal deterioration. One could no longer predict; it was as if the laws of thermodynamics ceased to follow any currently known laws. Neither folkloric intelligence nor DATUM’s servers running at full capacity could predict the next typhoon in time for evacuation, a drought in time for resource allocation, or a power outage in time for generator backups.

The Archive here remained uniquely in stasis. Whereas the glitch permeated every working file, the data in storage remained untouched. The preserving properties of salt combined with highly efficient DNA storage methods meant that every part of the mine was used for record storage dating back centuries and beyond. Every ebb and flow of primordial ooze left behind a thin line that could be read in section as a data entry about the weather of that day. The eight-meter pillars rushing past the Archive were made of pure data. 

Having arrived at a nondescript junction marked with nothing but a string of numbers, the Archivist decelerated and brought the rattling vehicle to a halt. Tossing Gore-Tex boots out the vehicle door, she traced along the salt pillar to find the right access line. An array of cuboid crystals were slotted in the column by way of steel drawer mechanisms. The contents of this archive were not meant for manipulation, to be wrung and stretched into a narrative as a means to an end. The data in the archive was at its terminus, to be stored, left undisturbed. The salt walls preserving its contents for eternity. A relic in a crypt. 

The Archivist held the data cube in her hands and concentrated on the stasis around her. A momentary concentration betrayed something unexpected. A kind of activity that had gone unnoticed in the commotion of DATUM’s information- extractivist industry. A vibration reverberating through every solid and void where something once used to be.

The Archivist let her left hand be her guide through the passageway, running along a groove she had traced into the wall over her tenure. Her palm gritty against the mineral wall, she focused on the beat of her feet on the roughly carved steps, lit by the occasional exit sign. This descent was her personal ritual. The pulse of her feet, a professional dance, reverberated in her mind as she made her way deeper underground. Her scattered thoughts converged on a sinuous rail in a single file.

Darkness, ambiguous topography, solitude, silence. Sensorally deprived, the mind switched to an alternate way of perceiving. Since antiquity, the descent into a cave gave topological geometry to a primarily psychic journey. For the Archivist, it was her daily commute. The cave was a portal to something beyond human, beyond knowing. It had been her job to eradicate the unknowable. Tonight, she sought to merely greet it.

Booting up the simulation on the projectors for the final time, the Archivist found herself standing at the edge of water, a chilling wind pinching her forehead. In the scene, white flecks rose from the ground and shot up into a gray sky.

Palming a clunky handheld controller suspended by a cord around her neck, the Archivist began to scrub through keyframes, searching for the anomaly that flagged an error message on her reader. The flecks froze mid-air. She relished in the moment of solitude in a vast, digital landscape. She set off  along the border of the water, wading through suspended snowflakes, the rough lake stones giving way under her feet. Most likely the glitch would emerge where more than one fluid system overlapped, a threshold space.

Without warning, the glowing orb illuminating the mid-day scene shot behind her head in a wide arc. The shadowless landscape fell into dusk. An inertia in her mind, she felt the simulated gravity spin on its axis, pulling her body backward. Motion sickness. Nausea. The sky turned a CMYK magenta, and the global coordinate overlay toggled on in neon green lines. The glitch had found her. The projection around her flickered and the dingy mine shaft erupted for a moment, but the simulation had no plans on shutting off. She strained her eyes to see through the blaring fuchsia skyline, the snow tinted a dangerous pink hue. 

As if the surface tension had given way, a seam shot across the dome of the digital sky and fell open. She saw a river of images flood out of the seam. An obsidian gel, flowing across rough rocky ridges. A bright orange orb growing brighter until all silhouettes merged into light. Deep ocean, solitary waves coursing across dark water. She felt the whiplash of eons collapsed and compressed. 

The Archivist recognized the glitch that had plagued all of DATUM’s files, that glitch that came back stronger every time it was rooted out. The glitch that rendered DATUM’s work unintelligible, confused the technicians, and tortured the researchers. She let it unfold in its entire dimension, unclaimed by logic and a need for clarity. A rift that cut through superimposed layers of information arranged in a continuous present. Non-Euclidean vignettes of a prehistoric atmosphere, of industry and extractivism, of data matrices and bloated files turned messy through rushed work.

Something was here in the theater with the Archivist, something she could not recognize or behold. Something that lived in multiplicity, data as its atoms, oblivion as its time. She had caught a glimpse, and could manage no more. She only wished someone could see those magenta skies shown only to her.