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Archivist#

“You wanted to see me boss?”, Tim said, entering Jon’s office.

“I need the statement of David Ramao”, Jon said.

“Who?”

“David Ramao, husband of Andre Ramao” Jon insisted.

“Oh, The homophobic vase?”, Tim said.

Jon’s sharp exhale is carried on the stuffy air of his unventilated office.

“Yes Tim, the ‘homophobic vase’, now if I recall correctly his husband had a run-in with the same artifact, where is his statement?”

“He didn’t actually have a husband though right? We tracked down the marriage license and everything, the marriage exists but the husband does not. Besides the document claiming to be David Ramao’s was a forgery, some bullshit ‘found footage’ made by an ‘Alfred Alfaro’, geez his name even sounds fake.” Tim explained.

“Right… a statement attributed to a fake source, that turns out to have never existed… I think something is going on here”, Jon said.

“Ah, something weird then?”

“Yes, and I’m going to get to the bottom of it.”

Anna#

“Gertrude, I really think they’re planning a ritual, I mean just read this! ‘Entire world at risk of nihilistic collapse’ they say, we have to do something! If this were any other entity you’d be springing into action over this, why is Nihilio different?”

“No, no, no, we cannot, Nihilio is the only entity that can destroy information about itself retroactively. The best thing thing we can do is follow its rules for knowing about it without knowing.”

“Why? Why is it that out of all the entities this is the one we have to submit to? It’s not insurmountable! I’ve already determined that the list of names in the Ramao footage spell out ‘absolute negation’ and-”

“Enough-”, Gertrude interrupts. “Listen, Anna, between you and me there are things going on in the archives that are bigger than stopping rituals. Nihilio is particularly adversarial to the Eye, I need to keep its statements intact for leverage. Now, document the next lead, it’s from a forum called reddit dot com.” with that Gertrude leaves the office.

“That witch”, Anna mumbles, “using the potential end of the world as career leverage while she leaves me to read a damn reddit thread.”

Dreams#

For an organization so low-tech, Anna is surprised that the equipment she will be using to follow this next lead is not a decrepit tape recorder, but a laptop. She browses to the link provided by Gertrude to a reddit post.

Hello r/dreams, my name is Artemy. When I was a little kid I had a dream that I now call “the snow duplication glitch”, I walked into my childhood bedroom and saw an evil version of myself with no face, it was duplicating an increasingly large pile of snow. For some reason this scared me so much that I just kept shouting “NO!” as my doppelganger laughed and created more snow. I was crushed to death under the snow, but  it felt like something indescribable.  The weirdest thing was what happened after, during the day if I imagined being back in that dream, I would get the feeling again but without the fear, it would feel euphoric. I spent a lot of time as a kid imagining the dream to feel like that but the intensity faded the farther I got from it, but every once in a while a feeling goes through me like a chill down my spine and I think “snow duplication glitch?”  Edit: for those of you asking what it feels like, the closest thing I could simulate is feeling “overstimulated”, for example playing “In the hall of the mountain king” black midi version at 4x speed on earbuds.

“Buried, obviously,” Anna mumbles, “and that doppelganger is clearly from the stranger, this lead doesn’t have anything to do with The Nothing, Gertrude is wasting my time!”

Despite her protest she opens the next post made by the account which is on r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix.

Hello to everyone following my story, this is a repost of what was deleted from r/dreams for being “a LARP”, I’m glad this community is willing to take me seriously. The faceless version of myself, the one from that dream, I met it in real life. I knew instantly that it was that one from my snow glitch dream and that this was my last chance of figuring out what it all means. As soon as I tried to confront it it ran directly at me. Being practiced in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu I got ready to fight it but it didn’t attack me it ran through me, and when I turned around it wasn’t there. Since then I can now induce the “euphoric feeling” from my dream at will. It’s kind of counter intuitive, it’s not the duplication or the feeling of being crushed that causes it, it’s the feeling of being erased, whited out, replaced with nothingness. I think that’s why it had no face.