Chapter 2: The Repository

Have you ever walked into a room and felt the past hit you?

Not metaphorically. I mean, I really feel it like a change in pressure, like the air suddenly heavier, like the temperature dropping a few degrees even though the thermostat hasn’t moved. Museums do that to me. Old buildings. Places where people used to live their ordinary lives, back when ordinary meant something different.

The Fashion Artifact Repository is like that.

From the outside, it’s nothing special, a low, sprawling building of pale stone and dark glass, tucked between a solar garden and a public bathing complex. The kind of architecture that says important things inside without being showy about it. No grand columns. No sweeping staircases. Just a quiet, serious building that knows what it’s holding and doesn’t need to announce it.

But the moment you step through the doors...

You’ll understand when you get there. If you get there. Time’s weird, right? Maybe you’re reading this centuries after I wrote it, in a world where the Repository is gone, or transformed, or buried under something else. Maybe you’re reading it in a world where clothes came back, and this is all ancient history, and my nakedness seems as strange to you as your coveredness seems to me.

Or maybe you’re reading it right now, in whatever present you call home, and the Repository is still standing, and you could theoretically walk through its doors tomorrow.

Wouldn’t that be something?

The transit pod hissed to a stop outside the Repository just as the morning sun cleared the tallest solar spires of Pacora.

Heat already shimmered off the wide plaza tiles. You could see it rising in those wavy lines that make distant objects look like they’re swimming. The warmth hit my bare soles first, that familiar shock of hot stone against tender skin, the kind that makes you shift your weight automatically, stepping from foot to foot until your body remembers it’s fine, this is fine, this is just what heat feels like.

Thirty-two second-year cultural history students stepped out behind me in a loose, laughing cluster. We’d been together since the first semester, these classmates of mine. We’d seen each other through exams and breakups, and that one disastrous camping trip where someone forgot the water filtration tablets, and we all had to drink boiled stream water for three days. We’d seen each other naked, obviously, we saw everyone naked, all the time, but there’s a difference between seeing and seeing. Between casual awareness and genuine familiarity.

Kai caught my eye from across the group and grinned. He was already sweating, just from the walk from the pod to the plaza, and the heat was climbing fast, and his fair skin always flushed pink before anyone else’s. A bead of sweat traced down his temple, his jaw, his neck, then continued its journey down his chest, between his pectorals, over his belly, disappearing into the thatch of dark hair at his groin.

I watched it go. He watched me watching. His cock stirred slightly, not an erection yet, just a thickening, a lengthening, the body’s casual response to attention.

“Eyes up here, Voss,” he called, still grinning.

“Can’t help it,” I called back. “You’re very distracting when you’re sweating.”

“Then you’re about to be very distracted all day.”

He wasn’t wrong.

No one carried bags. No one wore anything more than dermal screens, thin, invisible films of UV-reflective nanoparticles that made our skin gleam faintly gold under direct light. The screens were technically optional; plenty of people went without, trusting their melanin and their tolerance for sun. But most of us in the seminar used them, especially on field trip days when we’d be outside for hours. The gold sheen was subtle; you’d only notice it if you were looking, but once you noticed, you couldn’t unsee it.

The air smelled of warm stone, blooming desert jasmine from the median planters, and the ever-present faint salt of bodies moving freely in the open. That last one is hard to describe if you’ve never lived in a world without deodorant. It’s not bad, it’s not the sharp sting of unwashed sweat, the kind that builds up under layers of fabric. It’s softer. Warmer. More like bread baking than like a locker room. Just ... human. Just alive.

Professor Mara Voss, no relation, though everyone joked about it, led us through the towering glass doors.

She was in her early fifties, lean and sharp-featured, with close-cropped gray hair and the kind of erect posture that came from years of standing in front of lecture halls. Her body was the body of someone who had spent her life thinking, not performing breasts soft and low, belly gently rounded, the skin at her throat starting to crepe in fine lines. She wore only her dermal screen and a small silver pendant that had belonged to her grandmother, a woman who had marched in the final protests of 2092.

The pendant swung between her breasts as she walked. It caught the light.

The doors parted without sound, admitting us into a sudden cool hush.

The Repository’s lobby was cavernous, lit by soft, indirect daylight filtered through polarized skylights that turned the morning sun into something gentle, something almost liquid. Temperature-controlled at precisely 18.5°C to preserve the artifacts, the air carried the dry, papery scent of old textiles, archival cedar blocks, and a whisper of moth-repellent chemicals that hadn’t been needed in decades but still clung to memory.

Gooseflesh rose instantly along my arms.

My flanks.

The undersides of my breasts.

My nipples tightened to sharp, aching points, the sudden chill kissing the slick warmth still lingering between my thighs from the sauna the night before. I felt exposed in a new way. Not because I was naked (that was ordinary), but because the cold made every sensation louder.

The brush of air against swollen labia.

The faint tug of skin contracting around my clit.

The slow trickle of arousal that had begun the moment we crossed the threshold, as if my body already knew what this place held and was preparing itself.

“Remember,” Professor Mara said, her voice carrying easily in the stillness. She didn’t raise it; she didn’t need to. The acoustics were perfect, designed to carry whispers. “These are not costumes. They are evidence. Evidence of constraint, of control, of bodies treated as problems to be solved with cloth. Touch only what the curators permit. Speak quietly. Feel what your ancestors felt and be grateful you never had to live it.”

Her eyes swept the group, lingering on each of us in turn.

“Any questions before we proceed?”

Kai raised his hand. “Can we masturbate?”

A ripple of laughter through the group. Professor Mara didn’t smile, but her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.

“If the experience moves you to it, I won’t stop you. But try to be discreet about it. The archivists have to work here.”

More laughter. Kai lowered his hand, satisfied.

We followed her down a long corridor lined with softly lit alcoves.

Behind tempered glass hung garments from every era. My footsteps echoed faintly, soft pads of skin on marble, the occasional damp slap when someone’s sole met a condensation spot from the humidity differential. The sound was intimate, almost embarrassing, the way the sounds of your own body can be when you’re suddenly aware of them.

But no one was embarrassed. We were all making the same sounds.

The garments floated in their cases like ghosts.

21st-century skinny jeans with rips engineered for fashion rather than wear the denim so tight they looked like they’d been painted on, the rips exposing strategic patches of skin that had once been considered daring. I stared at them, trying to understand. You wore pants that covered almost everything, but then you cut holes in them to show some things? But not the wrong things? The holes were on knees, on thighs, never on groin, never on asses?

“Fashion is about suggestion, not exposure,” Professor Mara explained, noticing my confusion. “The idea was to hint at the body without revealing it. To tease. To make the viewer imagine what was underneath.”

“That sounds exhausting,” someone muttered.

“It was.”

2040s bio-adaptive activewear that still required full coverage, shiny, skin-tight suits that looked like they’d been vacuum-sealed onto the mannequin. The fabric was thin enough to see through in places, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that it existed. That someone had designed it, manufactured it, sold it, and that people had bought it willingly, had chosen to wrap themselves in synthetic second skins when their own skin was right there, perfectly fine, perfectly adequate.

Even a few surviving 19th-century corsets, their whalebone ribs curved like cruel smiles, their laces still tied in the elaborate bows that had taken maids hours to arrange.

Each piece looked smaller than I expected.

That was the thing that kept surprising me, as we walked through the alcoves. The garments weren’t designed for bodies like mine. They were designed for bodies that had been compressed, reshaped, and reduced. The waists of those corsets were barely wider than my thighs. The bras from the 2020s had cups that would have crushed my breasts into unnatural shapes, pushed them up and together until they were more shelf than flesh.