Meadow came in Saturday afternoon, late, after everyone was gone. As soon as she logged into W.2, she began to twitch her fingers in that finger-puppet motion to make her avatar jog away from Burning Man. By the time it was dark, her knuckles ached, and she stopped to rest. Behind her, the huge bonfire they’d made of the wooden man was just an orange glow on the horizon. The next time she had her avatar turn around to look, even the glow was gone. When the moon came up, she saw that she had walked so far that the landscape had grown cruder than anything she had ever seen in W.2.
What few features there were—a cactus and a ridge—were no more detailed than a paint-by-number picture with only the more basic hues painted in. When the landscape began to lose its color, she knew she had definitely slipped, somehow, into a construction zone: a loop of code left incomplete, or that ceased to function after an upgrade and yet no programmer had ever taken the time to edit out. Her VR goggles didn’t work here, and she pulled them off. On-screen, the land around her avatar appeared as outlines.
She couldn’t fly any longer. And the navigation compass that always appeared in the corner of the W.2 interface wasn’t there. She didn’t dare log off out of fear that she wouldn’t be able to find her way back, so she only kept walking, wondering why she’d taken the advice of a stoner. “Out there,” she’d said. “They’re waiting for you.” What the heck did that mean? Neo-Hippie mumbo jumbo. Now here she was, heading deeper into the great nothing, afraid to log off, even though she was so tired she could fall asleep at her keyboard. After a while, she was falling asleep, nodding off like a student on an all-nighter. She rested her fingers and her avatar stopped walking. When she had it lie down, her screen filled with its view of the sky: black, twinkling points of light…. At least the stars were still there….
When she awoke, she was surprised to find herself at her desk in the lab. Sunday. She’d have the lab to herself. Only Gabe would be in to tend to her lice colonies but the Insectarium was two floors down so they wouldn’t see each other.
Rubbing her eyes, she turned back to her computer, remembering stars. Now, the sun was up; she could tell from the dawn-colored light of her screen, though she couldn’t make her avatar find the sunrise no matter which direction she turned. The uniform glow seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere.
She continued walking. All morning she walked—through what could have been an infinite, flat desert. She only stopped once, to go down the hall in the real world to use the john and get an apple out of the vending machine. But then she was back.
Sometime later she could make out a bump on the horizon.
Using the arrow keys, she walked toward it and as she neared, it grew like an island seen from far out at sea. Columbus’s first glimpse of the New World?
Had she walked all around the Earth? Maybe she’d gotten disoriented and ended up back at the Burning Man. Explorers sometimes ended up walking in a circle because one leg was invariably stronger, it was said. But no, she considered, swishing her fingers faster to hike at a brisker pace; the island or whatever it was grew rapidly as she neared. Soon, she could make out avatars milling about. There was something odd about them, though: their bodies were geometric figures. Rectangles or boxes…. No, they were books.
She felt oddly drawn to them. Partly it was the silence here; she hadn’t realized how thick the din was in other parts of W.2 until she arrived in this dead zone where a person could hear her own thoughts. But she was also drawn to their shapes, the book-shaped bodies comforting in some way she couldn’t articulate but gave her the peacefulness of gazing into a campfire, or watching waves. She could tell they must have felt it also by their manner. None of them were dancing or trying to sell anything. Mainly they seemed to be strolling about in twos and threes, arm-in-arm, the way people used to once take the air, conversing as though going for a walk after a heavy dinner, and she felt humble as she approached, as though guilty for the minutiae of her busy workaday life while they were—what? She couldn’t say, wasn’t sure what she was approaching, but the feeling she had was much like the one she had as a tourist entering a shrine or some sacred space, puzzled by what it was that surrounded her though understanding that those in its midst were under the sway of something larger than themselves.
Two of them stopped talking when they saw her and the thickest of them stepped forward—a body with the squat dimensions of an unabridged dictionary. He began to type and a moment later the words appeared in the communication bubble of her interface: “Did you come to join us or are you in exile?”
Meadow didn’t know how to answer. “What do you mean?” she said. But no words came out. Audio didn’t work here she remembered. That accounted for the odd silence. She positioned her hands on the keyboard to type but the keyboard felt odd, though also familiar, like a telegraph key to people used to phones—and it seemed a code between them. Here, ‘language’ meant ‘text.’
Before she could translate her words into keystrokes, though, text appeared in a speech bubble above the other avatar, a much thinner rectangle: “Come on, mate, let’s go. She’s just lost.” He motioned with his head, trying to get the squat one to walk off with him but the squat one maintained his stance, waiting.
He typed another question and a new speech bubble appeared above his head: “What are you looking for?”
This time Meadow was on it: “I’m not sure.”
The skinny one gave off a ‘sigh’ emoticon, then began to turn away as Meadow continued to type whatever came into her head, trying to hang onto whatever thread was between them. “Are you the Book People?” She tried to remember the science fiction novel that Gabe had at work—with its firemen who burned books, and readers who fled to live as a community of hermits out in the woods, each one memorizing a book in the hopes that one day they would be able to return to civilization with the knowledge they had saved from destruction by storing it in their memories. “Like from Fahrenheit 451?”
This question froze the thin one in his tracks. “Ha!” came an I-Told-You-So emoticon from the stout one. The thin one came back to them, his hands typing as he did so, “Most people who stumble upon us think we are boxes.”
“Or bricks.”
“Boxes of breakfast cereal. Or lost birthday presents. The Island of Misfit Toys.”
“You can say that again,” the stout one joked, kindly, and the thin one gave off a laugh emoticon. The stout one bowed to Meadow, and announced with faux gravity, “I am Remembrance of Things Past, Volume One. And this,” he said, introducing his thin friend, “is, in fact, Fahrenheit 451.”
He was the same edition she’d seen on Gabe’s desk; coincidence? —no, too much of a coincidence to be one, and she wondered how the system had known what she’d been thinking. The answer seemed out there, out in the community of book-shaped avatars milling around beyond them, coming into then going out of view in the pacific way of fireflies she’d once seen, silently pulsing in a forest on the other side of a river. So many, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. There must be thousands. Millions. Maybe more if they could go offline here. Wherever here was. “And you are?” the stout one was asking her.
She sent a ‘shoulder shrug’ emoticon then sat down. “I’m sorry; I’m not a book.”
“Well neither are we,” the stout one said, sitting down beside her, doing so by tipping his chest forward, exactly as someone would tip a book to put it on a shelf. “Not technically at least. Up there, in the other world, I’m a librarian. Fahrenheit, my friend here, is a firefighter who simply likes to read.”
“A lot,” he added.
He pointed at a slim rectangle walking by. “There goes The Wasteland, a professor of modernism in the other world.”
“So many, I had not thought death had undone so many,” The Wasteland called out jollily.
How did they always seem to know what she’d been thinking?
“Most of us have some connection to languages—English majors who end up as clerks in their father’s law firms; comparative lit PhDs who earn their daily crust by comparing real estate listings. There’s a surprising number of waiters among us. Fahrenheit thinks it’s because reading all that British lit makes them think like butlers. But I believe it’s a butler mentality that draws them to British lit. If there was anything that could be called Brit Lit; if there was anything like a British butler anymore. Have you read Remains of the Day? In any case, everyone likes to see themselves in a story. Then there are the unemployed philosophers and hikikomori who live in their mothers’ basements so they can spend their days here. But the vast majority of us can’t be that pure, so only come here when we can. What are you? Out there?” he asked, motioning up—upward but not Northward, was the line that came to mind.
“I’m a biologist.”
“A biologist! Ha!” Fahrenheit exclaimed. “We don’t see many of your kind down here. Not given the demand for your kind up there,” he added derisively.
“Don’t take him wrong,” Remembrance rushed in with. “We’re very pleased that you’ve come. We have a large number of historians of science: those who can quote Hippocrates in the Greek.”
“What he means,” Fahrenheit interrupted, “is that in our community, many readers only become interested in science once it ceases to be pragmatic knowledge; that is, once it has passed on into the realm of literature. The way Duchamp turned a urinal into art by disconnecting its pipes and putting it in a gallery. We also have lots of science fiction readers. But not actual readers of science.”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re surprised to hear this since the people you know only read things like The Journal of Paramecium….” Again, she wondered how he knew…. “In a field like yours, keeping up with the literature is a job in itself. It’s the same with doctors. Most of them are too busy seeing patients to be a book here. Those who aren’t have no use for collective wisdom. The past, I mean.”
“Is that what you do? Memorize books? Like the Book People in Fahrenheit 451?”
“Did you know that only 5% of all scientific articles continue to be read five years after they’re published? That’s the same life expectancy for deer living in the wild.”
“No sooner published than thrown onto the dust heap of history.”
“Dumpster, you mean.”
“That’s why having a reader such as yourself would be so valuable here.”
“‘Look, cried Montag,’” Fahrenheit declaimed, quoting from himself. “‘And the war began and ended in that instant.’”
Remembrance paused—frozen in mid-gesture as though waiting for the moment to pass—then continued. “Some of us still believe that our perspective can put off the day that Bradbury imagined. Or its many versions. Fire or Ice. In any case, unlike Bradbury’s Book People, our collective knowledge is in use now. Even as we speak,” he wrote, looking up to the sky as though god might be up there listening.
“Like a wiki?”
“More like the multi-lens eye of a fly, each a slightly different view of the world. A view that is diminished by one lens each time a book winks out of the world.
“That’s what drew so many of us to the cause to begin with. Some of us, like Iliad there,” he said, pointing out a thick volume going by, “have been here since the early days of cookies—when Internet pages first began reading the people reading them. First a narrow, low-res portrait of you would emerge—maybe centered on just a few questions—your love of animals, for example. But then, as more and more data points accreted, your profile would take on more definition…. Cat owners have different demographics than dog owners—an apartment in the city instead of a cabin in Oregon. They score differently on personality tests. They work out in gyms instead of take forest walks….”
Was he talking about her?
“…a high-res portrait emerges with your dog as less of a pet than a node in your life, your relation to your dog helping you find meaning in your own: you volunteer at Animal Ark…”
How could he know so much about her?
“…three days after the spaniel that you owned for 13 years died you bought a puppy, which you named Magnolia, after an aunt’s flowered hat, and took it to the vet regularly, even though the only time you’d been to the doctor yourself, according to medical records, was to get the anti-allergy medication you needed to have a dog in the house….
He was definitely talking about her, and it was creepy, like having a stranger describe the contents of her purse.
“Oh, and we can predict with 97% accuracy that you are depressive, even though you yourself are in denial.” As he spoke, Fahrenheit seemed to look away, as one who feels guilty….
“Of course, this portrait can only address the ‘what’ of a person,” Remembrance, said. “It has very little to say about the why—much like science has much to say about the ‘how’ of the universe, but leaves the question ‘why’ to people like us.”
“To be or not to be!” a volume cried out, strolling by, “One of the most succinct statements of the human dilemma!”
“Shakespeare’s first folio,” Remembrance explained, continuing, “Automated judgment is so ubiquitous that we take AI for granted, but it’s still horribly mechanical. Especially when it comes to being moved by Mozart’s Requiem, or feeling our own fleeting mortality at Hamlet’s graveyard speech….
“…we supply a sense of what the poem means to humans and the program makes us part of itself,” Fahrenheit said, still refusing to look directly at Meadow’s avatar.
“The poem is the software running on the wetware of our minds; our judgment becomes the variables of the software; in this way we become the ghost in the machine, if you will. Or, if you won’t, we ensure that a literary perspective will continue for at least as long as there are humans: The human perspective doesn’t lose out to the machine’s database because we are part of it.” Then he clapped his hands together and declared, “But you didn’t come here for that. None of us did. You’re here because you’re searching for—”
She cut him off. “Someone. I’m looking for someone.”
Her answer caused a shift in his demeanor. He and Fahrenheit shared a meaningful glance, then fell silent.
“I didn’t think you could help,” she said.
After a while, Remembrance said, “We are very sorry for your loss.”
How did he know?
“The failure of poetry is the greatest theme of poetry,” he replied, as though in answer. “That’s what most of these books here are about,” he said, “no matter what else they may be about.”
Then he stood, reaching out for her hand. She rose, taking it. Fahrenheit bowed in the manner of a servant letting a queen pass as Remembrance led her into the thicket of other books. The text bubbles appearing over other heads began to take up more and more of her screen: the conversations that the other books were having, all jumbled together—not as the competing shouts of a trading floor, but as voices in a conversation that knew there was time enough for everyone. They seemed to talk of everything and nothing—not as a business meeting or speech or lecture—but the way a conversation among friends meanders from one subject to another, jumping from philosophy to a conversation about a change in bus schedules; from the best place to get roast chicken to the meaning of art, never coming to any conclusion but in the end creating an aura that seemed meaningful if not meaning any one, or even a dozen things. The Elementary Particles went by, nodding hello. With the return of some definition, more of the books bore titles she could read. Alice in Wonderland. 2666. Satin Island. War and Peace and IN & OZ. Now that she was in their midst, she could tell they weren’t just randomly walking around as she had thought. Those along the fringe did seem to be going wherever they wanted, but most were moving in a great circle, those that she had thought had been walking against the flow were actually on the far side of the circle, continuing around to where she stood and she had the sense that if she could rise above them to have a bird’s-eye view, they would appear as a weather system, leisurely turning about an eye. And yet the longer they walked, the more familiar the titles became, books she knew, or had heard about, or had looked through in her youth but hadn’t thought about for years, as if somehow they were being attracted to her the way a Higgs particle gathers mass by moving through space.
“Nurse, you are the last who will know her,” one said, the poem the words came from remaining just beyond memory. “She is very old,” the book said, and she strained but failed to remember where she had heard the poem—like the voice of someone she had known in her youth but hadn’t seen in years and couldn’t quite place. Then he was gone.
Remembrance continued looking for someone in particular, Meadow could tell, seeing how he would pause from time to time to search the crowd of books the way someone in an airport might look for a loved one due to arrive. Many of the books would pause to let them pass, the way most cars paused to let a funeral procession through, but not all. Some impatiently went around them. Others sped up to cut in front of them.
Once she found her path blocked by a small book, a child among adults: The Little Prince. She wanted to stay and talk. But another explained, “I’m sorry. This one didn’t even know how to read.”
At this point, Beloved came over to her. She put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Then they found it: The book paused the moment it saw Remembrance. It was about to call out happily, but the sight of Meadow beside him gave it pause and a sympathetic expression replaced its cheer as though it understood immediately what her being here meant. The Collected Works of Homer it said across his chest, and as Meadow approached, he opened as a book opens. Elysian Fields it said across the first page and she understood this to be a door—a portal.
Remembrance allowed her hand to slide from his as she continued on into, then through the title page the way avatars were able to walk through walls, or the way Alice passed through the looking glass.
One leg inside the book, the rest of her body still outside, she paused, turning for one last look at Remembrance. Before entering completely, she asked, “Are you real?”
He brought his hand to his chin and thought a moment—or froze up; she couldn’t tell which it was as he stood there in mid-gesture the way an image on the web does until all of its data packets arrive via different servers, each byte taking differing paths to constitute the one image; when they did, he answered, “Depends what you mean by ‘real.’ And ‘you.’”
Another book who had paused beside him—Philosophical Investigations—added, “And ‘are.’”