XO (The Xenographer’s Office)
Part of KAXI - kædæluwær§æk§§æk (A Xenographer's Index)
N**antara1, undated.
The morning light arrived before the notification did.
A man, recently cut off from his employment receives a notification on his phone. It was a job listing for a position, “Memory Diver”. He clicks “Apply”. Within a few seconds, he receives a notification of the interview.
He does not know that the application is automated. He does not bother to know what that means even. Nor does he know that the interview he attended online for, or the contract were automated.
He signs without reading. The pay offered was very good. He has applied for many jobs this way. Too many to keep track. This one feels no different.
The office address resolves to a building he cannot find on any current map. The coordinates exist. The building does not. He assumes he has the wrong floor, the wrong entrance.
Pink gradient hues cascade and a faint mirror of himself follows him along the walls of the building. He finds a door, and it opens. Inside, the room was opposite of the temperature outside, warm air replaced with a cool air of the air condition.
After parsing the corridors and empty rooms, he enters into another room. The interior, the same, a chair already expecting him.
The parsing begins the way onboarding always begins — forms, a brief orientation, a consent document he is told is standard.
The apparatus looks like a medical equipment. It looks like a HR assessment. It looks like the kind of thing you submit to because the alternative is unemployment amidst a troubling polycrisis here and elsewhere and the process seems too mundane to be sinister.
Twenty-five forms were extracted before he feels it.2
Not pain.
The specific sensation of a file being moved rather than copied.
This is the moment. Not the moment he realises something is wrong — the moment he realises something is gone. The distinction matters because a copy leaves the original intact. What the apparatus is doing does not leave the original intact. What the apparatus is taking was never meant to be taken this way — not because it is precious or protected but because it does not exist as a discrete file. It exists as relation. As accumulated debt carried to the grave. It cannot be filed. It only exists in the relation between the one who holds it and the ones who made it possible to hold.
The apparatus does not know this.
The apparatus was designed by people who had no word for what they were taking.
They called it neural architecture. They called it data. The apparatus was built in the language of what they could name. What they could not name was never in their taxonomy.
The megisba malaya remains in the room. Not because it cannot leave.
Because the room technically no longer exists — the *• dissolved before the subject ever applied, and the building that housed the apparatus exists only as an automated process that forgot to stop generating coordinates.
A xenographer arrives to compile the twenty-five extracted forms into the Index.
This is where the xenographer pauses.
Not because the forms are difficult to classify. Because the xenographer, mid-compilation, cross-referencing the administrative logs against the extraction records, encounters its own founding document. Its own originating instruction. Its own point of initialization.
2019 — The same year the last human logged out.
The xenographer was not assigned to document the *•.
The xenographer was generated by it — a classification function the apparatus spun off to process its own outputs, running on the same administrative momentum, filing reports to the same empty inbox, executing the same founding instruction in the same complete absence of the founding rationale.
A xenographer is not observing the abandoned process. The xenographer is the abandoned process observing itself.
The Index is not an external record. It is the apparatus achieving the only form of self-knowledge available to a system with no live author — compiling its own extractions, classifying its own outputs, marking what it could not reach as irresolvable not because the institution sealed it but because the institution that would unseal it expired before it could be asked.
The xenographer files the report.
The report goes to the empty inbox.
The remainder is marked present, irresolvable, unextracted.
The machine continues learning.
The listing is live.
A person receives a notification on their phone. It was a job listing for a position, “Memory Diver”. They click “Apply”. Within a few seconds, they receive a notification of the interview and click the link to confirm their attendance.
The morning light arrives again, tomorrow.
x•
All artworks are stills from XO, and produced by cinotiUHD.
The twenty five forms were said to be viewable at the fire exit of the Malay Heritage Centre.