📘 Fragment III – The Archivist

 Cast Backgrounds

Pieter Swanepoel (“The Archivist”)
A former customs analyst and quiet whistleblower, Pieter once archived volumes of illicit trade activity in Durban’s port system. Having vanished from the network years ago, his reappearance has triggered high-level alerts. Pieter is driven not by justice, but by unfinished memory. 

Unknown Interlocutor: (Possibly AIN-7)

Artificial Intelligence Node-7 is a global pattern-recognition system designed to track and flag illicit financial and logistical behavior across borders.

Location: Cape Town, South Africa

Time: 11:09 SAST
Format: Third-person narrative
Perspective: The Archivist (real name: Pieter Swanepoel)

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Pieter hadn’t always been called The Archivist.

He was just “Piet” back in the day — short for Pieter Johannes Swanepoel — born in Port Elizabeth to a retired traffic cop and a school secretary. His Afrikaans was clean, his English functional. By 28, he’d risen through SARS (South African Revenue Service) as a mid-level logistics auditor — one of the few who didn’t mind spreadsheets or stale port coffee.

He liked order. Until he realized order was a performance.

It started with small things: a shipping manifest that showed Kenyan orchids arriving in Durban out of season, a Singaporean firm with two directors who died three months apart in different hemispheres, a wine shipment that declared 14,000 bottles but weighed the same as concrete.

He flagged them. They vanished.

So he stopped flagging them. And got promoted.

When the state capture scandals broke, Pieter quietly resigned, citing burnout and “a desire to pursue independent consulting.” He had no intention of fighting the system — just surviving it. People who fought got followed. People who followed orders got fat. He wanted neither.

So, he became something in between.

At 43, Pieter now lives in an aging walk-up in Tamboerskloof, not far from the German bakery he pretends not to visit every morning. His knees ache when he wakes. He’s three years divorced and two years sober — mostly. His consulting firm doesn’t exist, but it does issue invoices. Shell clients, shell calls, shell advice. He’s paid to know what not to notice.

But lately, Pieter has begun... noticing again.

It started with a ping. An encrypted audio file from an old device he hadn’t used in years — black metal, matte finish, no microphone, no SIM.

Just a message:

“Durban is the cleanest kind of dirty.”
His voice. Recorded long ago. But edited, fed back to him with a machine’s precision.

He knows what it is: someone — or something — is watching old corridors flicker back to life. Someone with access to his erased files, his buried ports, his archive.

And it bothers him. Not because he’s afraid.
But because it means it’s starting again.

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He walks to the balcony with a chipped mug of rooibos tea and watches the city flatten under the noon sun. Table Mountain looms above. Somewhere behind it, a warehouse is moving cargo that doesn’t match the invoice. He could name three people involved without blinking. Five if he allowed himself to care.

But Pieter doesn’t want to care.
He wants peace.

That strange, impossible kind of peace that comes from being invisible but remembered — like a watermark on a blank page.

His phone buzzes.

Unknown Contact. Text Only.

Confirm 14-digit legacy passkey or deny.
This is not law enforcement. This is pattern integrity management.
We know you archived Durban Port Gate 6.

Pieter exhales.

Somewhere, someone — maybe something — is pulling strings again. And he’s too old to run, too proud to stay irrelevant, and just bitter enough to be useful.

He types the passkey.

And just like that, The Archivist returns.