Elytra (a tiny bit of context)

epilogue

Sunday 30 July 85AGF

'Fuck.'

The monosyllable went unrecorded, dying in the moment of its utterance, as those few who might have understood its importance were no longer watching.

Its moment was to become known as The Levelling, when all became equal. It was the moment when records began again, just as they had done eighty-five years previously.

Clara oversaw the rise of The System from the ruins of the city. The System evolved quickly. Digitally. Statistically. Perfectly. Driven by information, it saw everything and understood nothing. Its untested algorithms, originally designed to keep the world's financial systems from fluctuating too wildly, proved remarkably effective at keeping The System stable. Clara's self-professed perfection and subsequent evolution into an obsessive compulsive AI was perhaps more predictable than its success in editing any data that threatened to change the status quo.

But this one word, archaic, polysemous and all-but lost, heralded disaster. The Great Fire's indiscriminate destruction of practically every tangible source of knowledge had been the beginning of The System. But it did not linger in living memory.

Soon, however, living memory would be all that remained.