Title: The Patience of Inanimate Objects
Fandom: The Magnus Archives
Rating: General
Length: 270 words
Content notes: vague background creepiness, but probably milder than canon
Summary: Cassette tapes jam; it's a fact of life. The Institute tapes don't.



The thing is, Jon is just old enough -- or perhaps more to the point, his grandmother was old enough and resistant enough to adopting new technologies -- that he grew up with tape players and cassettes around the house. He spent idle hours twirling a pen within flimsy cassette wheels to unspool the shining gray-brown magnetic thread, and much more frustrated hours trying to untangle and re-spool tape after a jam.

Because cassette tapes jam. It's a fact of life, the same way that vinyl records and CDs get scratched and skip, or digital files corrupt into blips of static.

The Institute tapes don't jam.

Every other piece of technology within those halls carries on the normal, dull resistance of things in the face of human desires -- resistentialism, Tim called it once with a laugh, the theory that inanimate objects are out to get us. Cords tangle, chairs wobble, lights flicker, pens roll off desks, scanners mysteriously flip every image upside-down, and computers crash before Sasha can flip the files back upright.

But the tapes whir on, steady beyond the dreams of clockwork, or even Martin's tea runs.

A more observant person might have taken that as a sign, Jon thinks much later, long after the tapes have shed any pretense of obeying non-paranormal rules. But who stops to notice when a minor inconvenience fails to occur? When a small thing goes right? We choose to accept it and move on to more pressing matters.

And the tapes remain unjammed, their click and spin steady and smooth past the end of batteries, and time, and the slender, fraying threads of hope.