The file below is the vault locations manifest — a complete record of every digital storage location (cloud provider, region, bucket address, object path) and every physical storage location (GPS coordinates, media type, enclosure specification, placement date) for all 8,888 erasure-coded shards and all 8,888 key photographs comprising the Afterberry Vault.
It is everything you need to find and retrieve the archive. It is also encrypted, and the key has been destroyed.
The manifest was encrypted on the day of sealing with AES-256-GCM, using a single-use 256-bit key generated from operating system entropy. The key was used once, for this encryption operation only. It was never stored, transmitted, derived from a passphrase, or recorded in any persistent medium. It existed in volatile memory for the duration of the encryption, was overwritten, and is now irrevocably lost.
There is no backdoor. There is no recovery mechanism. There is no person, institution, or entity that holds the key or can reconstruct it. The manifest can only be decrypted through brute-force cryptanalysis of AES-256 — which requires computational resources that did not exist at the time of sealing, and which are consistent with the technological threshold implied by the vault's time lock.
The encrypted file is provided in full below so that it is available to any future accessor with the means to decrypt it. The cryptographic parameters are published openly — there is nothing to hide except the contents.
The vault locations manifest has been encrypted continuously since the project's inception in March 1995. As cryptographic standards have advanced, the manifest has been decrypted under the outgoing algorithm and re-encrypted under the incoming one, with each superseded key destroyed upon migration. The following is a complete record of encryption eras:
At each transition, the manifest was decrypted, updated to reflect any new or changed vault locations, re-encrypted under the new standard, and the previous key was destroyed. The current AES-256-GCM key is the only key that has ever existed for the current ciphertext. No historical keys survive.
The vault's stewardship infrastructure continuously monitors advances in cryptanalysis, quantum computing, and computational capacity. If any credible threat emerges that could feasibly compromise the current encryption standard within the remaining lock period (i.e., before 2400 CE), the manifest and all vault shards are re-encrypted to a stronger standard. The old keys are destroyed. The new ciphertext replaces the old across all storage locations.
This has already occurred twice — the transitions from 3DES to AES-256 and from AES-256-CBC to AES-256-GCM — and is expected to occur again as post-quantum cryptographic standards mature. The goal is not to choose an algorithm that will survive until 2400 on its first attempt, but to ensure that the encryption is always at least one generation ahead of the most capable known attack. The vault does not need to be permanently sealed. It needs to be sealed right now, every day, for four hundred years.
The encrypted manifest is available as a JSON file containing the base64-encoded ciphertext alongside all cryptographic parameters needed for decryption (except the key, which no longer exists).
↓ locations-manifest.enc.jsonIf you can read this file, you can find the archive.