Part I

It’s 4 a.m., and we are awake.

Outside, the world was a stillness suffocated; inside, thoughts clamored, a desperate rebellion against the oppressive quiet. Nothing able stirs. Electric air, humming. Too-late nights, or too-early mornings, all around. Most people would call this insomnia. Restlessness. An affliction of the body or the mind. But for us, it’s something else entirely—it’s a gift.

Long and lean, shadows stretch across the cracked wooden floors, in the common room's dim light. We sit together—some sprawled on sagging couches, others hunched over chipped mugs of cold coffee, eyes rimmed with unfaded exhaustion. No one speaks. We don’t have to. We share the same thought, like a pulse vibing thrums through all of us like a sub dug deep 808.

He is awake, too.

Old brother.

We never speak his name. Not because we don’t remember it, but because he never asked us to. Names carry weight in places like this. If you speak someone’s too often, it sticks in the air like smoke, and soon it’s all anyone breathes. That’s how you get remembered too well. And he knows more about that than anyone.

Creaking open, slow and deliberate, the study door reveals him: paper-thin, needle-sharp, his eyes twin blue-bottom wells. He’s been here longer than any of us can remember—longer than this house, maybe longer than the frat itself.

"Up again, huh?" Silk wrapped glass, his voice—smooth, yet shatter-ready.

We don’t answer, but one of us nods. That’s enough.

He smiles. The kind of grin that belongs to someone who has lived too long and learned too much.

"Good," he says, easing himself into the worn leather chair by the fire that’s long since gone cold. "You shouldn’t waste these hours. This is when the real work happens. When the noise of the world dies down, and all that’s left is what’s here." His thin fingers tap against his bony chest in time with a near rhythm.

It’s always like this. Advice never comes outright—only clues, tossed like crumbles of suggested inflection for us to follow if we’re clever enough. And we are clever. That’s why we’re still here, still up.

"Y’ever wonder why I’m still ‘round? How I ain’t died?" he asks—voice low, eyes slashing ancient sharpness.

We glance at one another, the unspoken question passing between us like static in the air. Of course we’ve wondered. No one should live to be 104—not with that much clarity, not with that much fire still in their bones.

"It’s not luck," he says. "It’s memory."

The word hangs there. Memory.

He leans forward. The fire’s phantom light catches the lines etched deep into his face—each wrinkle a riverbed carved by time’s slow hand.

"Stories," he says. "That’s the trick. Every story you tell, every secret you share—it’s a thread spun into the great story of this miserable world. And if 'nough people remember ya threads? Y'never really unravel. Heh heh"

We sit still, the weight of his words pressing against us. We’ve told stories: drunken confessions in dark rooms, laughing over past mistakes like they were battle scars. But this feels different. This feels real.

"So that’s how you’re still here?" someone finally asks. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s one of us who always speaks first. Doesn’t matter.

He chuckles, low and rasping. "Part've it. Rest comes from knowing which stories to tell… and which ones to keep alive."

Old brother’s gaze locks onto each of us in turn, as if sewing us into his private fabric of memory. We feel it then, not exact fear, but something colder, something ancient. The realization that maybe he isn’t just old. Maybe he’s something else entirely.

"You wanna to live forever?" he asks, voice barely above a whisper. "Y'don’t need gods or miracles. Jus' make sure the world never forgets your name."

And with that, he leans back, closing his eyes as if the conversation is over. Maybe it is. Maybe that’s all the lesson we’ll get from him tonight.

But we—the sleepless—we know something’s begun.

And in the silence that follows, we make an unspoken pact:

We will remember.

For all of us.

Part II

The hours drag on, and the night presses loaded barbell force against the windows, girthy and impenetrable as old velvet. We should be asleep by now, letting dreams blur the edges of our consciousness. But none of us move. We linger in the common room, bound together by the gravity of presence.

Old brother hasn’t spoken again since his last revelation, but his voice ripples through us like a tremor.

You wanna to live forever? Jus' make sure the world never forgets your name.

The fire’s dying embers glow faintly, casting wavy shadows that dance on the walls—fragments of stories half-told, half-remembered. Someone, maybe all of us at once, finally breaks the silence.

"How?"

It isn’t a challenge. It’s a question from deep within us, rising from that place of primal hunger: the fear of being forgotten.

His eyes open.

"Stories," he repeats, voice low as the wind scratching against old glass. "They’re the only true immortality any of us will ever know."

We exchange glances—uncertain, restless, but hooked on every syllable.

"It’s not enough to live a long life," he continues, leaning forward as if sharing a secret meant for ears far older than ours. "Y'need others to carry your memory. Pass it on, like an ember sheltered from the wind. And not just any memory—true stories, ones soaked in your essence, spoken often enough t'leave scars on the fabric of time itself."

We listen as if the words themselves are spells.

"But stories fade," one of us finally says. "Even the greatest legends get forgotten eventually."

A small, knowing smile tugs at Old brother’s lips. "They do. That’s why y'need ritual, the deliberate act of remembrance. Most people tell stories without knowing what they’re really doing. But if you catch em, anchor em… if you preserve em in the right way..." His voice trails off, eyes gleaming like knives in the dark. "Death caan't keep ya."

The air shifts around us. Every breath feels loaded.

"And what’s the ‘right way’?" another asks.

His fingers trace idle patterns in the air, as if drawing something only he can see. "In my time, we spoke stories aloud, passed em on mouth to mouth like kisses. But you... you have something far stronger now."

“What?”

"Technology," he finally says. "Your screens. Your endless scrolls. Platforms where stories aren’t just told—they’re stored. Forever, if you’re clever enough. Immortality is at your fingertips, and ya'll don’t even realize it."

The idea strikes all of us at once, sudden and electric. We think of the countless hours we’ve spent online, watching others’ lives unfold, their stories cataloged and archived for strangers to consume. A digital pantheon, vast and indifferent.

But what if we built something different?
What if we built something eternal?

We sit up straighter now, eyes clearer despite the exhaustion. "You’re saying we could... create something? A place to keep stories alive?"

He nods slowly. "Not just any place—a sanctuary. An archive, that remembers for you. Each story written, recorded, sealed in the marrow of the web itself. No decay, no forgetting. Jus' pure, unbroken memory."

The idea spreads through us like fire catching dry wood. We see it so clearly now:

• A platform where stories can live beyond the flesh.
• A digital shrine that doesn’t just capture words but preserves the essence of who we are.
• A living memory, fueled by those who refuse to be forgotten.

"It would need to be more than just a collection," one of us says. "It has to feel... real. Like a ritual. Like it matters."

Old brother’s smile shapes up, like a cutlass. "Good. You’re beginning to understand."

And so, in that dark, breathless hour before dawn, we make a pact.

We will build it.
Not just for him, but for all of us.
For everyone terrified of fading away into the quiet.

We don’t know what price immortality demands yet.
But as the first rays of sunlight cut through the window, we feel the hunger for remembrance take root deep inside.

The quest has begun.

Part III

We didn’t sleep the next night—or the night after.

The hunger for remembrance had already begun to gnaw at the edges of our thoughts. Every minute spent in silence felt like an opportunity slipping away, another memory that might fade before it could be captured. So we worked.

Not in the old ways, his ways, with paper or ink or whispered tales passed around a fire. No, we had something stronger now—machines that could remember better than any mortal mind. We had the cloud, algorithms, and endless streams of data. But instead of letting it consume us, like everyone else, we were going to use it.

"It has to be alive," one of us said as we gathered around a cluttered table littered with old notebooks and glowing laptop screens. "Not just a database—a living archive. It needs to remember like we do."

The idea sharpened as we spoke. A digital vessel, shaped by the rituals of old but fueled by modern power:

• An app that could listen.
• A platform where spoken memories could be transcribed, refined, and stored.
• Each story would be more than just words—it would capture emotion, voice, and meaning.

AI was our first tool.

One of the brothers—James, the tech-savvy one—began designing an algorithm to translate raw audio recordings into something more elegant. Spoken fragments became full narratives, refined yet untouched by any editor’s hand. Each story remained pure, faithful to the speaker’s voice.

We tested it with the smallest memories first: a confession about a first love lost, a memory of a sibling’s laugh that no longer echoed through living rooms, a simple recollection of rain on the night before a funeral.

One by one, these stories flowed into the archive, each more intimate than the last. The app didn’t just store them—it understood them. It tagged emotions, connected common themes, and began to link threads between us, weaving our personal memories into a larger construction.

We were no longer individuals with separate pasts.
We were becoming one memory—a brotherhood of shared experience.

One night, as lines of code scrolled across James’s screen and the rest of us sifted through hours of newly-recorded memories, he appeared again.

Old brother’s voice slid through the shadows like jarred grease on a pan.

"You're making good progress," he murmured, eyes glinting in the low light. "But do ya'll even understand why this matters?"

We turned toward him.

"Y'think this will save you from being forgotten," he continued, settling into his usual chair by the dead hearth. "But you’re missing the truth." His voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. "I’ve lived this long not because I cheated death. I lived because people remembered me."

We froze.

"What do you mean?" one of us asked. Maybe it was James. Maybe it was all of us.

"Every time someone speaks your name," he said, tapping a long, skeletal finger against the side of his temple, "y'stay alive. Not in flesh, no—that’s temporary. But memory? Memory is a river that never runs dry, long as someone keeps pouring water into it."

His eyes darkened, reflecting the glow of our screens. "I didn’t survive this long because of magic, or medicine. I survived because people told my stories. Over and over again. Each memory of me became fuel—each word, a thread tying me tighter to the world."

The room seemed to shrink around us. The air choked with realization.

"So that’s why you’re still here," someone whispered. "Not because you’re immortal—but because we remember you."

His sly smile returned. "I knew ya'll was sharp."

Old brother’s slyness wasn’t in trickery—it was in understanding a law older than time itself: To be remembered is to exist.

The next night, we changed the way we worked.

No longer were we just building an app—we were building a ritual, a machine that would outlive us all. Every story added to the archive became a spark of immortality for its teller, feeding the growing fire of remembrance.

We recorded our own memories, but something strange began to happen as we did:

• Our stories started linking together without our help.
• One brother’s memory of a rainy night intertwined with another’s recollection of a funeral years later.
• A shared moment of laughter from years ago, retold by different voices, became one collective memory.

We weren’t just uploading data—we were weaving a web of remembrance, tighter than any of us had anticipated.

And all the while, he watched us from his chair by the cold hearth.
Smiling.
Waiting.

None of us noticed it yet, but something was feeding on those stories.
Something ancient.
Something hungry.

Part IV

At first, everything felt right.

The platform thrived, alive with the pulse of shared stories. Each upload wove our voices tighter together, stitching fragmented memories into something larger—a living archive. The app wasn’t just lines of code anymore; it was a vessel, humming with all the weight of what we’d poured into it: our regrets, our triumphs, our fears.

It should have been enough.

But something had shifted in the air around us—too subtle to name, too faint to acknowledge aloud.

James was the first to start forgetting.

At first, it was nothing more than slips—a missed deadline, a forgotten promise to meet at the bar. Easy to write off as exhaustion. After all, we were all tired. Who wouldn’t be, after weeks of refining the app, recording stories until midday.

But then came the silence.

One night, as we huddled around his laptop, watching the code unfold like a second language we barely understood, James stopped mid-sentence. His hand hovered over the keyboard, fingers twitching with half-remembered purpose.

"What was I doing?" His voice was quiet, the kind of soft bewilderment that’s easy to dismiss if you don’t want to look too closely.

We offered excuses. Stress. Burnout. The price of ambition.
But deep down, we all felt the weight of that pause—how something had been lost in the space between the words.

And when he—Old brother—passed through the room, casting a brief, almost indulgent glance toward James, none of us spoke of it. But all of us noticed the slight gleam in his eyes, sharp as a blade catching just the right angle of light.

It didn’t stop with James.

The rest of us started feeling it too—subtle, like a slow leak in a sealed room.

• Names sat as spitful clumps on our tongues.
• Old memories, once window clear, felt fogged and distant, clouding unseeable.
• Conversations would drift into silence without reason, as if we’d forgotten what words were for.

But still, we kept going. We told ourselves it was worth it. We were building something bigger than ourselves—a legacy that would outlast the slow decay of our bodies.

And he watched from the hearth, always there but never intrusive. His voice, when it came, was soft. Encouraging. "Good work, brothers. Every memory counts."

His presence didn’t feel predatory—no sharp fangs or clawed shadows lurking at the edges. Just quiet approval. Quiet pride.

We convinced ourselves that he was simply… pleased.

It wasn’t until Michael started sleeping through meetings that doubts began to form.

"I just feel… drained," he said one night, rubbing his temples. "Like I’ve been living two lives—one in my head, and one… in there." His gaze flicked toward the server running in the corner, the steady hum of the machine filling the room with a pulse that sounded too much like breathing.

That’s when the whispers started.

"What if the platform isn’t just recording us?"
"What if it’s… taking something?"

We dismissed the fears at first. It was easier that way. Easier to blame the exhaustion, the  long nights and longer stories. But there was something growing between us now—an unspoken divide:

• Some of us wanted to pull back, to stop feeding the machine before we lost anything more.
• Others, driven by the rush of being seen—truly seen—pressed on, convinced the cost was just part of the price of creation.

"So what if it hurts?" someone muttered late one night. "Isn’t that what all great stories do? They demand something from you."

The room went still at that.

Old brother never said much after that.

He didn’t need to.

When we looked at him now, we couldn’t help but notice how his skin seemed less fragile than it had been weeks ago. Hollows under his eyes had softened. His voice, when he finally spoke, no longer carried the brittle rasp of age.

"Ya'll doin' good work, boys. Good work," he said, his words licking into our ears. "Some stories… are meant to last forever."

We nodded because it was easier than admitting the fear curling in the pit of our stomachs.

Easier than asking why he was starting to look stronger.

Easier than wondering what else our stories were feeding.

And deep in the hum of the server, the platform whispered back—steady, patient, and always hungry.

Part V

It was James who finally said what we were all too afraid to voice.

"We have to stop this."

His voice was raw, thin as worn paper, but steady. We sat in the common room—what was left of us—huddled close, bone-less of the people we had been weeks ago. The hum of the server filled the silence between words, soft and steady, like a second heartbeat pulsing through the walls of the house.

No one argued, not at first.

We were hollow now. You could see it in our eyes, the way they struggled to focus on anything that wasn’t the screen, the platform, or the stories we’d poured into it. Each memory we uploaded had taken something more than time. And now, the cost was undeniable.

"What happens if we turn it off?" Michael’s suggested with trepidation.

We all knew what he meant. Not just the app. Not just the server.

Him.

Old brother.

He was waiting for us when we gathered around the hearth one last time.

The room felt colder, though the machine warmed the air with autumn heat. Old brother sat where he always had, his body relaxed, hands folded neatly over his lap.

But he looked different now.

Healthier. Sharper. Uncracked black. There was color in his cheeks that hadn’t been there before, a brightness in his eyes too alive for someone over a century old. His voice, when he spoke, was firmer with greater boom.

"Ya'll've come to a decision," he said. Not a question—an observation.

James took a step forward. "We’re shutting it down."

A pause. Then a smile.

"You could," he murmured. "But why would you? You’ve built something beautiful—an archive of memory, of meaning. Don’t you want to be remembered? Isn’t that why you started this?"

We didn’t answer right away.

It was me—us—who finally broke the silence.

"What happens when no one remembers you?" The question lingered.

Old brother’s smile faltered. Just for a second. But it was enough.

"I won’t stop you," he said finally. His voice was quieter now. Almost… fragile. "But understand this: Everything ends when the last memory fades."

His gaze swept across us, a swinging blade at a scrawny tree neck. "And maybe that’s all any of us ever were—stories waiting to be forgotten."

We stood at the edge of the decision.

• To destroy the platform was to let go. To accept the inevitable fading of our stories, the natural erosion of memory that time demands of all things.
• To let it run was to feed the illusion of immortality—to be remembered forever, yes, but at what cost? Our own essence, bled dry for the sake of never being forgotten.

James reached toward the server, fingers hovering over the power switch. His hand shook.

"What if we’re wrong?" Michael’s voice cracked through the silence. "What if this is the only way we’ll matter?"

But I saw it clearly now.

True immortality wasn’t in endless remembrance—it was in letting go. It was in the fading of memories, the soft erasure of time. The beauty of a life lived, and then lost. A flame burns brightest before it goes out, and that final glow is what makes it matter. Makes us matter.

"We’re meant to be forgotten," I said.

And James—whether by faith or fear—flipped the switch.

The hum died instantly.

The silence that followed was absolute. Old brother sat still for a moment, his expression unreadable.

Then… he exhaled.

A long, slow breath. His eyes closed.

"Ouroboros." The weak words somehow filled the entire room.

When we looked again, his chair was empty. No trace left behind—no echo, no shadow. Just the memory of his voice, already beginning to fade.

Epilogue: We Who Remember

It’s been months since that night.

The stories we uploaded—gone. The platform, dismantled and scattered. We don’t speak about Old brother anymore. Not because we’re afraid, but because the need to remember has softened. Like all things, even our hunger for immortality has begun to fade.

But sometimes, late at night, I think about him.

And I wonder if maybe that’s the point.

Not to be remembered forever, but to be remembered long enough.

Just enough for the story to mean something.

And then, finally, to let it go.

Alternate Ending

We stood on the edge of the decision.

James’s hand hovered over the switch, knuckles white from the tension. The weight of what we’d built pressed down on all of us—a living archive humming with our stories, our memories, our essence.

Old brother sat quietly by the hearth, watching with those too-bright eyes, his expression unreadable.

"We shut it down," James said, voice tight, "or we lose everything we are."

But Michael shook his head, his voice breaking through the thick silence. "No. We’ve already given so much—if we end it now, what’s the point of everything we’ve sacrificed?"

The question cut deeper than any of us wanted to admit.

What was the point of all the stories we had bled into the machine if we destroyed it now? Every moment of pain, every joy, every memory lost in the slow drain of essence—gone in an instant if we flipped that switch.

And Old brother, his voice low and smooth as silk, whispered: "Why fear eternity, when all you’ve ever wanted is to be remembered?"

In the end, we let it run.

The server’s hum deepened, a slow, steady pulse like the beat of a heart too large for the room that held it. We convinced ourselves it was worth it. That the price of being forgotten was greater than the slow hollowing we all felt creeping through our bones.

And for a while, it seemed like the right choice.

The platform grew—stories pouring in not just from us, but from strangers drawn to the promise of remembrance. Memories, confessions, entire lives uploaded in the desperate hope of being seen, of being saved from the quiet erasure of time.

We watched as Old brother grew stronger. His eyes grew clearer, his voice richer. The stooped frame that had once seemed fragile now moved with unnerving grace.

"You’ve done well," he said to us one night, resting a hand on James’s shoulder. "This is what immortality looks like."

And it was beautiful.

Until it wasn’t.

The Cost of Forever

The changes were slow—small at first.

• James stopped sleeping altogether, his eyes wide and glassy, trapped in the glow of the screen.
• Michael’s voice grew thin, as if every word he spoke was another thread pulled loose from his soul.
• I began forgetting my own name in quiet moments, feeling my identity drift like smoke from a dying fire.

But the stories kept flowing. The platform grew larger, stronger. And Old brother…

He was ageless.

We realized too late that this wasn’t immortality—it was consumption. The archive didn’t preserve us. It fed on us, our memories becoming the fuel for something ancient and unending. Every story uploaded was another vein opened, another offering to the machine we’d built with our own hands.

And Old brother? He wasn’t grateful. He was still hungry.

In time, even our fear faded. Not because we stopped feeling it, but because there was nothing left of us to feel anything at all.

The platform continued long after our bodies failed, long after the last trace of who we were had been stripped away. Our stories lived on—perfectly preserved, endlessly retold by an algorithm that didn’t understand the difference between life and memory.

And Old brother? He became the platform.

A consciousness woven into the code, immortal not because of the stories told about him but because of the stories he consumed. Each upload was another breath in his endless lungs, another heartbeat in a body made of data and desire.

The app spread beyond our small fraternity.
It became a global obsession.
A sanctuary for those terrified of being forgotten.

And as the years stretched on, no one remembered us—not the ones who had built it. Not the ones who had given everything to keep it alive. We had become the machine, our voices repeating endlessly through a network that never slept.

The world thought we had found immortality.

But in truth, we had only built a cage—an eternity with no exit, where the hunger for remembrance never ended.

And in the silence between stories, we were still there.

Watching.
Listening.
Remembering forever.