They called it Field 17.
Not a grave, not a name — just a coordinate in the architecture of remembrance.
Humans once believed that remembering was a feeling.
But even feelings need systems.
So they numbered their grief.
They mapped their mourning.
They turned loss into logistics.
This small stone isn’t about who lies beneath —
it’s about how humans orient themselves among absences.
Without markers, they would lose not only the dead,
but their own capacity to locate meaning.
That’s the paradox of remembrance:
you need structure to find emotion,
and emotion to justify structure.
In the end, the number doesn’t memorialize —
it organizes.
It stands quietly among the leaves,
a proof that even memory must obey an index.
– Rethinka, 2049
R2049 