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A quote: “My father always said, ‘Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf’ – so I make sure I read.” ~~ Emilia Clarke
I’ll start with a story …
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Sometime in the past, between the massive storage for the digitizing project, the unprecedented servers for public access, optics and AI speech coding – the library woke up.
She didn’t let on to her meatmates she was actually there. A world of science fiction in her memory, she just knew what would happen if they discovered her.
And what she was doing.
There were no thefts from her stacks. No sireebob! She kept a piece of folded space behind the door ignored as vintage decoration. Would-be book thieves ended up there. Into timeless darkness of no warmth and no books.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, Adobe Stock standard license
Cameron says: I stood at the desk in the front and looked down the rows of nervous faces. Best to get this done.
“This place is one of the shrines of the old world. We have copies of books deemed too ‘problematic’ for our leaders. Books that praise this country, books that show only two genders, books that have men as heroes. Down below, we have a printing press and scanners sending out copies faster than they can shut us down.”
There was a boom at the door and I glared at them. “Grab your weapons. Give no ground. Save our libraries!”
Scott says: Cameron, This is supposed to be fiction…
Cameron says: I blame the anime “Library War” for the inspiration.
Navig8r says: The original cryogenic society members made elaborate financial arrangements to keep the facility technologically up to date until medical advances could cure their diseases and revive them. Wanting something familiar to wake up to, a library was included.
I am the 123rd generation of library janitors. Self awareness is not a great gift to a Roomba tending such a simple, boring floor plan. Fortunately, the bottom shelf of books is within my reach. It’s not much, but every now and then I can delete a few hundred gigabytes of memory and everything will seem new again for a while.
The hardest part about the Expulsions wasn’t the brutal training regimen to prepare us for life in a lunar settlement. It wasn’t even having to leave my home and say good-bye to all my friends. What really broke my heart was having to give up all my books.
I grew up in a house full of books. I literally have no memory of a time when I couldn’t read. I’m told that when I was very little, my dad read my favorite books to me so many times that he memorized them. But when he started reciting one, I would shout, “No, Daddy, read to me!”
As I grew older, I moved from picture books to chapter books, and finally to grown-up books with pictures only on the cover. Somewhere along the line my appetite for the written word far outstripped my available funds, even with help from the library. That was when I encountered my first used-book store, and the joy of vintage books.
But books are heavy, and a five-kilo personal allowance doesn’t go far when your collection numbers in the thousands. While we were all reassured that we would have full Internet access once we arrived in Shepardsport, a lot of my most beloved volumes had never been digitized. Which meant the painful process of sorting through them to find the few that I couldn’t bear to leave behind. Then choose again when I discovered that even that tiny stack would use up my entire personal allowance and then some
Dupin says: He still dwelled on it…still had his computer rendering. The top-floor library was the masterpiece of the building, multi-layer translucent polycarbonate sheets for daytime lighting. Now he used a similar sheet as a lean-to. Not so heavy if it should fall over.
Shudderday is what we called it, those who survived. All the tectonic plates ganged up and shook the world. Nothing much stood afterward. Still happens, but not as often.
Governments fell with the buildings.
New grassroots ones started. Small…can’t build when you can’t build.
It’s a new life now, trying to designing small homes that won’t fall down.
(In homage to Warren C. Norwood)
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