Accounts of the Fall

The archive holds more than one account of how the world ended. They do not agree, and the archive is not able to establish that they describe the same event.

This section keeps them anyway. An account that cannot be corroborated is still evidence of something, even if only of what somebody needed to believe about the end of the world.

The difficulty

People arrive in this region carrying the wrong decade.

The archive means that literally. Equipment turns up that was obsolete long before any collapse, alongside equipment that postdates anything the archive can identify or account for. A traveller who speaks of the end as something they walked out of the winter before last will share a fire with someone born so long afterwards that they treat the whole business as scripture, and neither can be talked out of their position. Both are lucid. Both are consistent. Both are describing the world they actually came from.

The archive has interviewed enough of them to stop assuming the fault lies with the witnesses.

Set that alongside the rest of the collection and the pattern is not confined to people. A pumping station has been worked continuously by a rota that was already old, in a song nobody can date, for a town whose name it never gives. A photograph is annotated Crew — 1989 and has outlived every institution that might have had a claim on it. A physician describes pre-Fall corridors as though he left them last week, and fragments of that facility's paperwork carry his name.

One figure on file has a term for whatever this is. Dr. Borschtovsky calls it a continuity delamination and uses the phrase as though it were a settled piece of engineering. The archive has recorded the words exactly as given and does not know what they mean.

A body on file has a term as well. RENED, a Crown department reported at Caernarfon, calls what it describes Slippy Time, and repeats a theory about it with some confidence. Where the theory came from, the Department's own account does not say, and it concedes the theory explains nothing of the mechanism. The archive cannot establish that the two terms name the same thing, and has filed each on its own.

What the accounts agree on

Very little, and nearly all of it structural.

It was not sudden. Nothing that survives describes a single day on which the world stopped.
It was systemic. Power, water, communications, supply and government failed in an order that the accounts dispute, but all of them failed.
The skies burned. Three days of it, after the strikes. The accounts place the three days differently in the sequence and describe them identically, which is the reverse of how they behave about everything else, and the archive treats the event itself as established.
There was a sickness. What was eventually done about it appears in none of these accounts; that happened later, and in the open.
Afterwards there were factions, and the factions fought over this region.

What they do not agree on

How long ago. No account the archive holds dates itself, and the region's inhabitants give answers separated by generations.
Where the three days sit. That the skies burned is established. When they burned, relative to the failure of the grids, the water and the government, is given differently by every account that mentions them at all.
Whether Iron Haven was raised or merely reinforced, and by whom.
How many falls there were. The archive raises this reluctantly, because it has no way to test it. But the accounts read less like disagreement about one event than like descriptions of several, and the people arriving here do not appear to have come from the same world as one another. Six photographs on file show a war in Wales that appears in only one account here, told by two of the men in the photographs, who are still alive. One body on file, RENED, holds something like this as a working theory. It is no better placed than the archive to test it.

Held

Single account, provenance unestablished
A Complete History of the Fall

A continuous narrative from the years of plenty to the opening of the war. Detailed, confident, and unwilling to say when it was written or by whom.
Oral account, two tellings, one circle
The Battle for Tan y Bwlch

Not an explanation of the Fall, but the last thing that happened before it: slate trenches, a dam that changed hands twelve times, and an officer said to be riding still. Retold from further off by the department its tellers are said to work for.

Archive notes

More than one account is held. Agreement between them is limited to the structural, and to the three days the skies burned.
The three days are established. An account of the collapse that does not describe them has left something out.
Only one account carries a date at all, in two tellings from the same small circle of people, and a date on its own fixes nothing against anything else. The rest do not date themselves and cannot be ordered.
Witnesses arrive equipped and dressed from periods that cannot all be current.
The archive records the discrepancy and does not attempt to resolve it. It has no method that would.