Exchange of Realities

I’m not talking about game this week; I haven’t managed any good sentient location scenes there. Yet. So instead, I’m going to talk about something I wrote about.

It was a simple story; I called it “For Alexandria to Weep”. While I originally intended it to be a love story, it went sideways; either way, the narrator was, of all things, a sentient library.

Why did the library think? This is one of those special exceptions to having to explain why the thing’s sentient, since the story is primarily a what-if. Though I figured that out as well—a library’s thoughts are the sum of both the knowledge within its books and the order in which these books are arranged. Which leads to its own interesting points. For one thing, the intelligence depends on the books staying in order; you start messing up the organization too much, and there goes the coherence. The story began with me exploring that. Enough routine that they could figure out what my character was, and then the earthquake struck, and the coherence left. Not shorter sentences, per se, but fragments, strung together. Here a quote, there a quote, everywhere a quote, and as the books fell the disjointing increased, babbling tangling twisting, until all the books had fallen and the Library was reduced to word by word lucidity in a sea of lorem ipsum.

Then I got into the culture of libraries. From my experiences as an employee, I knew that libraries aggregated in systems. Not quite a hive mind, per se, but pretty close. Information and books circulate between the branches, boosted by the computer system. The libraries themselves are in constant contact, part of a greater whole, guided by the Main Branch. And then I got to what they wanted to do, or be, since existing for existing’s own sake is boring:

Every one of them is a child of that which the humans called Alexandria; babies, remnants, rivaling her size but never quite reaching her enlightenment. - a note from my writing journal

We all need to have role models. For the library, who else would it be but the Great Library of Alexandria?

With aspiration came fear. What’s the opposite of a library? A warehouse. No learning here, nor sharing; everything’s private, and what leaves doesn’t come back. There isn’t a soul to the places, just rows on rows of the same things over and over. Not something you want to consider yourself becoming.

And then I had to figure out the Library’s view of the patrons. They feed off of people’s reactions to their books, so there have to be patrons, and they have to be kept happy. But to a library, a patron’s pretty transitory. She might not come back, for one reason or another; she might change her interests, or stop reacting the same way. High-risk. Low-reward. So knowing them by name, getting attached—bad idea. Employees? The same story. And think of it this way: the employee is the library’s hand, doing something it just can’t physically do itself. Do you name your hands? I didn’t think so.

Then I cycled back to the importance of organization, and by the time I was done there I had my story.

Ever had an inspiration like that?