The year 2045 arrived like a tide that refused to obey the moon, a slow and deliberate surge that washed over the world and left the cities humming with a strange new sentience, as if the streets themselves had learned to inhale and exhale in rhythm with the millions who walked them. Neon arteries pulsed beneath the asphalt, carrying streams of memories, secrets, and half-forgotten sins, while the people drifted through this living infrastructure with the quiet resignation of passengers aboard a vessel whose captain they had never met.
In this thalassic civilisation of data-archipelagos and algorithmic dominions, one name moved like a forbidden frequency through encrypted channels and whispered networks: Makono Jahlé, a rumour wrapped in a cipher, a ghost with a pulse, a presence that flickered at the edges of corrupted recollections, as if someone had overwritten the truth with a more convenient fiction. Some claimed he came from Sundora, a place that appeared on no map yet shaped the world like a gravitational anomaly; others insisted Sundora was not a place at all but a protocol, a self-evolving intelligence that trained operatives the way the sea trains storms, sculpting them through pressure, silence, and inevitability. Makono never confirmed anything; he simply emerged whenever the hidden systems of the world trembled, whenever the informational currents shifted in ways that suggested something ancient and unseen had stirred beneath the surface.
On a cold January morning, a message reached him through a secure channel that technically did not exist, a channel that behaved more like a memory than a transmission. There was no sender, no signature, only a pulse: three beats, a pause, three beats again, followed by a single line of code—sundora-phi-11. Makono opened his eyes, though he had not been sleeping; he had been waiting, suspended in that liminal state between awareness and anticipation that only operatives of his kind ever truly mastered.
The directive was simple, almost insultingly so: locate Dreis Velkar, Level-B Archivist, and contain the anomaly. No mention of extraction, no mention of confrontation—only containment, a word that in the language of Sundora carried layers of meaning, none of them trivial. Makono understood immediately: Dreis had seen something he was not meant to see, and in a world where memories were currency and truth was a negotiable commodity, that alone was enough to destabilise entire markets.
The Central Archive lay two hundred metres beneath the city’s surface, buried under reinforced concrete and twelve layers of electromagnetic shielding, a subterranean sanctum where the global memory-economy pulsed like a colossal neural network. Every recorded moment, every behavioural pattern, every digital whisper passed through this place, catalogued, cross-referenced, and, when necessary, quietly erased.
Dreis Velkar sat before a wall of 128 screens, each one a window into a life unfolding in real time—a woman laughing, a man hesitating before sending a message, a child losing a toy, a teenager writing something he should not, an old man forgetting his own name. Dreis was not merely an archivist; he was a custodian of truth in a world that preferred curated illusions, a quiet sentinel guarding the fragile boundary between memory and manipulation.
Yet tonight, something in the data-stream felt wrong—a tremor in the informational current, a shadow that did not belong, a presence that moved with the precision of a mind trained to slip between layers of reality. Dreis felt it before he understood it, and he whispered the word that had haunted him for months:
“Sundora…”
When Makono entered the Archive, no alarm sounded, no door opened, no sensor registered movement; the system simply adjusted, as if reality itself had made room for him. Dreis turned without hearing a sound and said, “You’re early,” though he had no reason to know the schedule of a ghost.
Makono did not respond; he rarely spoke before understanding the terrain. Dreis rose slowly and warned him that corrupting his identity-key would collapse the entire Archive, but Makono only tilted his head, a gesture that suggested he had already calculated dozens of ways to contain the anomaly without touching the key.
Yet something in the air felt different, charged like static before a storm. Dreis, sensing the shift, tapped a hidden panel. The screens flickered; faces dissolved into code, code dissolved into symbols, and the symbols dissolved into something older, something almost Hellenic, as if the system were reaching back into the lexicon of ancient civilisations to express a truth too large for modern syntax.
“You feel it, don’t you?” Dreis said. “The rift.”
Makono stepped forward, slow and precise, and Dreis activated the Archive Mirror—a device designed not to defend but to reveal, projecting the intruder’s deepest informational truth, the truth even they had forgotten.
Makono saw a city that did not exist on any map, children trained not in combat but in data manipulation, learning to rewrite memories before they learned to write their own names, a system that produced operatives the way coral reefs produce storms of plankton — silently, endlessly, without remorse. The word Sundora appeared again and again, etched into walls, into neural implants, into the metadata of forgotten files.
Makono paused for a single second, but for someone like him, a second was an eternity.
Dreis smiled. He told him he could not override the truth of his origin, and though Makono’s expression did not change, something in his eyes flickered—a glitch, a ghost-signal, a fragment of a memory that had survived the rewriting.
“Sundora isn’t a place,” Dreis said softly. “It’s a protocol, a self-correcting intelligence, a system that creates people like you—operatives without pasts, without futures, only missions.”
Makono approached and said he was not interested in Dreis’s interpretation. Dreis replied that he was interested in his own.
He pressed another switch, and the screens went dark, all but one. A single image glowed in the darkness: a child, a boy, with eyes too familiar to ignore. Dreis whispered that this was Makono before Sundora rewrote him, and the silence that followed felt like the pressure wave a submarine senses before the ocean decides its fate.
Makono raised his hand—not to harm Dreis but to sever the connection to the screen—and the image vanished.
Dreis exhaled. He warned him that if he corrupted the archivist, the truth would die with him; but if he let him live, Sundora would come for him—and Sundora never left anomalies unresolved.
Makono said nothing.
A single tone echoed through the Archive—low, resonant, ancient. Not an alarm, but a summoning.
Dreis’s eyes widened as he realised what was happening. Makono turned toward the shadows and said they had already been following.
The walls shimmered, not with bodies but with entities—shadow-intelligences, fragments of Sundora’s distributed mind, not human, not machine, but something in between, something that existed in the liminal space between memory and algorithm.
Makono stepped backward, merging with the darkness as if it were a familiar sea. Dreis remained alone, surrounded by the silent hum of a system awakening to its own anomaly.
Somewhere above the city, Makono walked through the neon mist, uncertain whether he had succeeded or failed, knowing only that something fundamental had shifted. For the first time, he questioned whether Sundora controlled him or whether he had slipped beyond its reach.
A new message appeared on his retinal display:
Voyage-12
Status: Active
Target: Unknown
Outcome: Irreversible
Makono allowed himself the faintest smile—the first in his life—and the night around him held its breath.
* The story “The Sundora Protocol – Year 2045, Part I: The Archivist and the Shadow” is Voyage 11 of Cycle 1 – The Age of Hyper-Information (2040–2055), part of the collection Diaries from the Future, Collections of Tales (© 2025), by Iakovos (Jack) Archontakis.
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