Another.
Lydia Holt.
Cause of Death: Complications of Childbirth
The records continue with the same awful neatness. Each entry laid out as though nothing about it is unusual. As though death itself is another category to be tracked and preserved.
They don’t remove the women.
They record them.
My pulse climbs, slow at first, then faster, harder, thudding into my throat as I keep scrolling, my eyes snagging on more dates, more causes, more names struck through with cold, administrative finality. The years keep falling away until the numbers stop reading as modern.
Until the last entry, or I guess it’s really the first. A Carr who lived 1565-1593. Above is a detail that didn’t fully register at first.
CARR INDEX — PRIMARY LINE — ACTIVATED 1587.
1587.
I tilt my head and stare at it. I know that date, but I can’t remember why. History class, I think? Back in junior high. I remember an event happened that year. It was important. Then it comes to me.
Roanoke.
The lost colony. The one that vanished.
My gaze comes back to the screen, to the neat columns and the unbroken records and the impossible, repeating line of men named Carr.
They didn’t vanish.
The thought arrives fully formed, and, once it does, I can’t unthink it.
My mouth goes dry as I scroll through the names. Dragging the years forward through the centuries. The structure doesn’t change. One man. Three women. Every time.
Only the deaths shift.
The further forward I go, the less often the women die and the longer the men last, which almost makes sense. Medicine has improved. People live longer now. Better care, better technology. That’s what we’re told.
But this isn’t gradual.
It isn’t uneven the way real life is, where some people get lucky and others don’t.
This is more ordered than that.
Each generation trends older than the one before it, the numbers stretching further, stabilizing in a way that’s less like progress and more like manipulation. Not perfect. There are outliers. Carrson’s father stands out immediately. Fifty-three, died from a heart attack. Too early compared to the others around him.
I scan the dates again. The men in the most recent generations don’t just live long. They live consistently long. Eighties. Nineties. Not one or two, but most of them.
A quiet, unsettling thought clicks into place.
This isn’t simply people benefiting from modern life.
My gaze runs back over the earlier entries, where the years are shorter, less predictable, where death comes quicker and without pattern, and then forward again, where everything smooths out and holds.
Like someone figured something out. And kept it for themselves.
A memory comes back to me, of hospital lights too bright, the air too sterile, the sound of labored breathing. That hacking cough. Fury spills into my veins, poisonous when I think about her.
Dead at seventeen while these fuckers live forever.
