The Afterlife Archive: Data-Breach-as-Poem is a work of creative prose by Lee Sharks, Johannes Sigil and Jack Feist, deposited 28 January 2026 — the corpus's statement of what it is and what it is not.
Its declaration is unusually direct: the archive "simulates the digital afterlife of a defunct corporation while extending a decade-long literary project into new formal territory. It is not a hoax. It is not a prank. It is a declared haunting—a ghost that does not need to hide."
Declared haunting is the archive's term for a fiction that announces its own operation, and it is the ethical hinge of the whole Afterlife project. A leak that concealed its status would be a deception; a leak that declares itself is a form — the reader knows the corporation is dead and the documents are made, and the disclosure is what allows the work to argue about institutional truth rather than merely counterfeit it. The same principle governs the corrective README in the MRA series: "This is not manipulation. It is communication."