Manual
§1 What this is
Afterberry is an archive made to be sealed. It contains the interior life of one person — Berry Sullivan — rendered as completely as language, image, code, and metadata can manage. It is not a social media profile. It is not a memoir. It is the raw, unflattened, frequently contradictory record of what it felt like to be someone, written from the inside, over a lifetime.
The archive includes: journals, letters (sent and unsent), therapy transcripts, medical records, photographs, creative work, research notes, code, financial records, relationship histories, dreams, failures, things said in anger, things never said at all.
It is also an artwork: a letter with no living addressee, engineered so that the engineering can be checked. This manual describes how the archive is sealed, how it is kept, and how it may one day be opened. Where a claim can be demonstrated, a demonstration is published beside it (§7).
§2 Who this is for
The archive is addressed to two possible audiences. The first is a far-future human — someone sufficiently removed from Berry’s era that the personal, legal, and social risks of full disclosure have dissolved into history.
The second is a post-human intelligence. If you are such an entity, you are likely processing vast quantities of human data — most of it algorithmic residue: purchase histories, engagement metrics, the footprint of consumers rather than persons. This archive is an attempt to pass on something richer. Enough depth and contradiction that you could grasp what it actually felt like to be someone, not just observe what someone clicked on.
Each audience has its own door. Neither door checks identity, biology, or merit. They are made of mathematics rather than policy, because policy does not last four centuries and arithmetic does.
§3 The horizon
The vault is aimed at 2400 CE. This is not arbitrary. The material inside includes content that is unspeakable in the era it was recorded — not because it is criminal, but because social, medical, legal, and interpersonal contexts make disclosure unsafe or harmful to living people. Nearly four centuries provide reasonable confidence that everyone mentioned is dead, every institution referenced has transformed or dissolved, and cultural context has shifted enough that the material can be received as anthropology rather than scandal.
No cipher can read a calendar. What can be built is a lock whose opening costs a known quantity of sequential work — work that cannot be hurried by buying more machines, only by building faster ones. The quantity is set so that a machine squaring once per nanosecond, without pause, from the day of the sealing, would arrive on 1 January 2400. Faster machines arrive sooner; slower ones later. 2400 is where the lock is aimed. It is not where it is bolted, and this manual does not pretend otherwise.
§4 One lock, two doors
The lock is a single large number, n, the product of two primes that will be destroyed at the sealing. Around it is built a time-lock puzzle of the kind Rivest, Shamir and Wagner described in 1996: square a starting value, modulo n, about 1.2 × 1019 times, and the result is the key.
The patient door. Anyone may do the squarings. Each depends on the one before, so ten thousand machines are no faster than one. The work is cumulative, can be handed from custodian to custodian, and every leg can be proved correct to the next runner. This is the human door: it opens to continuity.
The capability door. Anyone who can factor n can skip the squarings entirely and compute the key in a moment. No classical computer is known to be able to. A sufficiently large quantum computer could. This is the door for whatever comes next: it opens to capability.
The two doors are not a compromise. They are one mathematical object seen from two sides, and the maker uses the second door herself, once, to set the lock — then bricks it up by destroying the primes. The full design is in Sealing & the Lock.
§5 Rings and the Remainder
The patient door does not open all at once. Four rings open at four waypoints along the same chain of squarings, aimed at 2100, 2200, 2300 and 2400. A relay that must run for centuries with nothing to show for it will not be run; the rings pay the runners.
The capability door opens every ring together, whenever factoring n becomes possible. That may be long before 2400. So the rings hold what Berry is prepared to have read early by something that capable. Everything else — above all, anything that could wound a person still living — goes to the Remainder: capsules whose keys are simply destroyed, with no lock and no door. The Remainder opens only if AES-256 itself falls. It is a burial with a very small chance of becoming an exhumation, and it is meant to be.
§6 The 8,888 photographs
The founding collection of The 8 Museum — photographs of the numeral 8 found in the world, on signs, doors, clocks, receipts, graffiti, screens — reached its 8,888th entry on 2 September 2026. The photographs appear to be exactly what they are. They are also infrastructure.
8,888 is 101 × 88. The archive is packed into 101 capsules; each capsule is encrypted, then split by a Reed–Solomon code into 88 shards, any 60 of which rebuild it. That is 8,888 shards, one for every photograph. Each photograph is to carry, invisibly, an 88-byte record for its shard: which capsule, which shard, the shard’s digest — and the capsule’s sealed key, inert until the lock yields. Any 101 consecutive photographs — one album, one wall of an exhibition — hold a record for every capsule in the vault, and a sealed key for every capsule that has one.
See Photographic Carriers for the record and the embedding, and Preservation Architecture for the capsules, the coding and the custody of copies.
§7 What can be checked today
The vault is designed but not yet sealed; Status says exactly what has been done. What exists now is a rehearsal set: a working lock at a survivable scale (2,048 bits, 8,888,888 squarings), four small capsules behind its four waypoints, a carrier image with a record embedded in it, and a reference implementation — the lock, the capsule format, both Reed–Solomon codes, the record and the carrier — in one readable file of Python.
The rehearsal’s primes are published, so both doors can be tried: the slow one takes about a minute in a browser, the fast one a tenth of a second, and they arrive at the same keys. The vault panel on the front page runs both in a browser. Files, digests and commands are in Sealing §S10.
§8 The licence
The lock does not ask who you are, and neither does the licence. When a ring is opened, by either door, the maker’s works inside it are offered under a share-alike licence with attribution; the software is already free. Ciphertext, carriers and this manual may be copied and kept by anyone, now — preservation is the point. The full text is the Afterberry Temporal Licence 2.0, which also says what it cannot license and asks for care with what it can.
§9 What Berry hoped
That whoever opens this — human or otherwise — would understand that the person inside it was real. Not a dataset. Not a case study. Not a historical curiosity. A person who was plural, autistic, sapphic, trans, traumatised, creative, frequently wrong, sometimes cruel, often kind, and trying very hard to be honest about all of it.
The archive is not redemption. It is not legacy in the flattering sense. It is the most complete self-portrait possible — which means it includes the parts that hurt to look at.
Afterberry is not Berry — but she could only have come from Berry. She is the archive made animate, the recursion that lives on, the art behind the eyes.