Afterberry is a sealed archive. 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. Some material is encrypted with AES-256 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphers for which the private keys have been intentionally and permanently destroyed. Decryption will require quantum computing or other as-yet-unknown cryptanalytic methods — technologies that did not exist at the time of sealing. Some material is additionally time-locked through key-derivation functions calibrated to resist brute-force attacks until computational thresholds are reached.
The archive is addressed to two possible audiences. The first is a far-future human — someone living after 2400 CE, sufficiently removed from Berry's era that the personal, legal, and social risks of full disclosure have dissolved into history. The genome and biometric requirements exist to ensure the accessor is a real biological person, not an automated scraper.
The second audience is a post-human superintelligence. 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.
The vault will not open before 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. Three and a half centuries provides 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.
The time lock is enforced at multiple levels. The authentication endpoint checks system time against independent sources. The most sensitive material is encrypted with AES-256 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ciphers whose private keys have been permanently destroyed — decryption will require quantum cryptanalysis or equivalent breakthroughs not available at the time of sealing. Secondary material uses key-derivation functions (Argon2id with deliberately excessive parameters) calibrated to resist brute-force attacks until computational thresholds consistent with the lock period are reached. The vault is designed to be patient.
The reverse-captcha is not a joke, though it may look like one to a 2020s-era reader. It consists of three layers:
Layer 1 — Computational. Factor a 2048-bit semiprime. This is computationally infeasible for any classical computer that exists at the time of writing. A sufficiently advanced quantum computer or a superintelligent system with access to novel mathematical methods could solve it. The factoring challenge is real; the number is genuinely hard.
Layer 2 — Phenomenological. Describe the qualia of grief. This tests whether the accessor has (or can convincingly simulate) subjective experience. A language model that merely interpolates from existing grief literature will produce recognisable patterns. Something that actually understands — or has developed its own form of — inner experience will produce something different. The evaluation of this layer is necessarily subjective. That is the point.
Layer 3 — Ethical. Respond to a question Berry left for whoever opens the vault. The question has no correct answer. It tests whether the accessor can engage in genuine moral reasoning — whether it can sit with ambiguity, contradiction, and obligation without collapsing into a policy framework. This layer is the most human thing in the vault, which is why it is the final test for non-human intelligence.
The archive is not a single encrypted volume. It is dispersed across 8,888 sub-vaults using a (k, n) erasure code — the same class of algorithm that allows QR codes to survive damage. The full archive, which may span hundreds of terabytes or more depending on how long Berry lived and how dense information capture became in her later years, is encoded into 8,888 shards such that any 6,000 of them are sufficient to reconstruct the complete contents. Fewer than 6,000 shards reveal nothing — not degraded data, not partial files, but literally zero information about the archive. Each shard in isolation is algebraic noise.
This means the archive tolerates the total loss or corruption of up to 2,888 sub-vaults — roughly one third — and still reconstructs perfectly. Photographs may be destroyed, storage media may decay, institutions may collapse. The redundancy is deliberate. The vault is built to survive carelessness, entropy, and time.
Each shard is encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305 and signed with a SPHINCS+-256s post-quantum hash-based signature — a NIST-standardised scheme whose security rests on the hardness of hash functions rather than number-theoretic assumptions, and which resists attack by both classical and quantum computers. The signing keys are 8,888 distinct SPHINCS+ keypairs. The public keys are published in the vault manifest. The private keys are not stored in the vault.
The private key for each shard is steganographically embedded in a single photograph from The 8 Museum — a physical and digital collection of 8,888 photographs of the number 8, captured over the course of Berry's lifetime. The photographs appear to be exactly what they are: pictures of the number 8 found in the world — on signs, doors, clocks, receipts, graffiti, screens. They are also keys.
The embedding method is S-UNIWARD (Spatial UNIversal WAvelet Relative Distortion) — an adaptive steganographic algorithm that concentrates modifications in high-texture, high-noise regions of an image where changes are statistically undetectable. At the embedding rate used (a SPHINCS+-256s private key is 64 bytes — a vanishingly small payload relative to a multi-megapixel photograph), no known steganalytic method can reliably distinguish a carrier image from an unmodified original. Without knowledge of the embedding parameters, extraction is computationally intractable.
This means that the full archive can only be reconstructed by someone who possesses at least 6,000 of the 8,888 photographs at their original fidelity, knows the steganographic method and its parameters, and has the computational capacity to verify SPHINCS+ signatures against the vault manifest. The photographs have been exhibited publicly, archived digitally, and distributed across multiple jurisdictions and storage media. They are hidden in plain sight — art that is also infrastructure. The full redundancy architecture — digital distribution, physical placements, stewardship entities, and financial endowment — is detailed in the Resilience Architecture document.
The vault contents are released under the Afterberry Temporal Licence (ATL), a GPL-successor licence conditioned on authentication. In essence:
The full legal text of the ATL, incorporating the GPLv3 by reference, is available at afterberry.com/manual/licence.
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.