Some people theorize the place was built as a storage facility for aeroplanes or dirigibles, machines that, if the old stories are to be believed, once flew above the earth. Others insist it was used for the making of motion pictures, another lost technology, in which human beings somehow transformed themselves into figures of light and danced on giant white walls in front of audiences. Still others postulate it was a temple for some vanished religion. In the end, however, the only thing certain about the building that houses the Registry of Forgotten Objects is that its original purpose has disappeared from history, just like those of the artifacts inside. Objects made of wood. Objects made of steel, iron, tin, lead, or other metals. Objects made of glass, pottery, or plastic. Objects made of feathers.

Objects made of unclassifiable materials. Objects made of pulleys, gears, chains, springs, switches, dials, valves, pumps, and innumerable components that no longer possess a name. Much of the Registry''s holdings are from the Mechanical Age and the Electrical Age, but the collection also contains countless artifacts from the Great Forgetting, that cataclysmic period when certain machines, now extinct, are said to have subsumed all human knowledge. The relics that survive--keyboards, screens, and small wafers of semiconductor material--are as mysterious as they are mundane. How these apparatuses worked, and what became of the data they hoarded away, is lost to time. The Registry is surrounded by nine immense rings of barbed wire, arranged in a spiraling sequence that impels prospective patrons toward the front gate. If it could be seen from above, the long line of applicants for admission would resemble the countless coiled snakes that sun themselves in this arid terrain. The first person in line is a gaunt woman with sunken eyes and a heavy satchel over her shoulder.

The second person is an old man cradling a cylindrical object in his arms. Although they''ve spent many days standing side by side, many nights listening to each other''s fitful sleep, the two strangers rarely exchange words, in part because they come from such disparate regions that they do not speak the same dialect, and in part because there is so little to say. Like everyone here, they have the same hope, the same all-consuming dream: entry. Although the man and woman bear no resemblance, their expressions have merged during the long wait into a common look of fatigue, boredom, and intense anticipation--one they share with the third person in line, the fourth, the hundredth, the thousandth, the ten thousandth. The Registry itself, which stretches across this rock-strewn landscape for hundreds of yards, is an arched building of crumbling concrete, shaped like a tube sliced lengthwise in half. At one end rises a great semicircular wall of translucent glass, three hundred feet tall at its highest point, which allows archivists and researchers to work without candles on all but the most overcast days. At the other end--an expansive part of the Registry, off-limits to the public--there''s only darkness. Running the length of the building on either side, one hundred feet above ground level, are rows of porthole windows, two lines of dimly lit dots that converge but never connect before they fade into the distance, giving patrons the impression of staring into an infinite tunnel.

From the front of the line, the gaunt woman and the old man can make out these endless columns of light through the massive glass doors. Attempting to trace them to their vanishing point, the woman thinks of a future without hunger, fear, or want. The man thinks of a past, stretching on and on behind him before disappearing into that black place where memory begins. He does not measure time in weeks or months or years, concepts he knows nothing about, but in the tired faces of people he has come across in his travels, tired faces like that of the woman in front of him, glimpsed in passing, blurring into one another, nameless figures from some dream. Nothing is solid except the cylindrical object in his arms, which he feels sure is of ancient origin. It alone makes the past seem substantial.