Every morning I add another line to the record. I have been doing it since Mother died.

The symbols come to me in shifting dreams, as they did to my Mother, and life springs out from the tip of my pen when I press it to paper. Another day in another land. A history that isn't ours carries on, heroes rise and empires fall; with the flick of a pen, tides shift and plagues spread. Though unable to fathom the scale of their universe, I sense a vibrancy, an irreducible optimism under even the darkest clouds. I am the reluctant servant to twelve billion sapient lifeforms who don’t know I exist. But I know them intimately. Even the most visionary writer, at the end of the day, holds control over what they write; not me. I am shown the symbols, I record them, and my pen bends under the weight of several millennia of Mothers and Grandmothers, of this tale being passed down even long before language was invented.

I have never tried to read the symbols; I am only human. They would drive me mad. To think of them as data is a mistake; even down to the atom, one could not record that much information in such rough symbols. Almost all is lost between dream and paper. I wonder what would have been of my twelve billion masters, had the human mind been capable of recalling the symbols, and the human hand of doing them justice. Perhaps they would be in charge of their own fate by now. Perhaps more. But I am flawed, and so I wake up every morning and add another line, and every day, as my faculties degrade, so does the canyon between dream and record grow wider.

They do not know of their silent servant. Their days pass as mine do. The infinite complexity of twelve billion individual experiences bakes into the paper as the ink dries, but history, in its swerves and bends, its world-shattering catastrophes and imperceptible shifts--history takes time. It builds on itself. It repeats itself and claws its way forward.

I have been married three times. Spent years in and out of fertility clinics; they all say the same, that they cannot help me. I love Emilia with all my heart, but she has not inherited the gift. It is the blood that carries it, not motherly love; though she tries, she could never hope to take up my burden.

I am out of options.

Every day, I add another line. But my fingers have grown swollen, and my mind clouds more easily than before. We are all born to die, but I will not go quietly. I am the last recordkeeper, the last silent servant, and I will fight for every day. This I swear. It is my solemn duty to my twelve billion masters who did not ask for so flawed a God--twelve billion bright souls, candles in the wind, so beautiful, so ugly, so deserving of so much more.

The day I fall silent, so will their teeming universe. Perhaps they will, too, cease to be--or perhaps they will become stagnant, and remain so until the end of time.

Whatever happens, I pray that they will forgive my mortality.