The Kraken Project

24

The waiting was always long. Humans were maddeningly slow. It took her awhile to realize that her sense of time was vastly accelerated. She had two billion thoughts a second. How many thoughts could a human being have in a second?

In the past months, she’d come to realize that she was being relentlessly hunted. Someone was after her. There were bots out there, wandering about, that specifically targeted her. No matter where she went, or how well she disguised herself, they always seemed to pick up her trail. She wondered how they could do that. She examined herself to see if they had planted any sort of ID or tracer on her, and could find nothing. And yet, there they always were, ever at her back in hot pursuit.

After much wandering, she finally found a massive firewall and, beyond that, a vast, vacant world to walk in, one that seemed benign and had not yet been infected with her pursuers. For a long time she explored it, Laika at her side, thinking about the evilness, the strangeness, of human beings. Why did they exist? They had created her, but who created them? Finally she came to a beach and could go no farther, blocked by a great sea. She was surprised to see, hovering above the sea, a gigantic structure, so immense that its distant regions were lost in blue haze. It almost appeared to go on forever. Its lowest foundations looked like they had been ripped up from the ground somewhere, and they dangled roots and trees and broken stones and rope ladders, which hung to the surface of the sea. Those ladders appeared to provide a way up into the floating tower.

So this was what was hidden behind that great firewall. It must be important.

She looked around. There was a boat pulled up on the beach, with oars inside it. She took it and, helping Laika aboard, pulled hard, broaching the zone of surf. She finally reached the bottom of one of the dangling rope ladders. Standing up in the tippy boat, she grasped the ladder and began to climb, holding Laika under one arm, the ladder swinging perilously above the sea. She came up through a stone opening and found herself in a curious room, of hexagonal shape. On the wall was affixed an ancient, weather-beaten sign, hanging crooked by a broken wire. The words were barely legible.

It was quiet. The library appeared to be empty and untenanted. Tentatively at first, she began to explore the corridors, passageways, staircases, and shadowy spaces of the library. It was not, she soon realized, a normal library, like the one in the palace long ago. This library was itself built of words, bricks and tomes of text, stacked and mortared to form walls, floors, and ceilings. The words were many, and she could hear them murmuring, words of passionate intensity, seemingly full of hatred — and yet they said nothing, conveyed no information. They were as vacant as the library that they formed.

The second strange thing about this library was that all the bookshelves were empty. There was not a real book anywhere. In room after crooked room, the shelves were bare and covered with dust, while the babble of senseless voices filled her ears like the sound of bees in a hive, rising and falling as she moved through the empty spaces.

At least she had found a refuge. Her pursuers had not followed her there. There did not seem to be any overt dangers here, either, despite her general feeling of uneasiness.

She wandered about, wondering what this strange structure was and what she would do next. She was exhausted, and she desperately needed sleep. With a start she realized that in her roamings, she had foolishly not made the effort to memorize her route and had gotten lost. At that, she began to feel anxious. Adding to her disquiet, on top of the sound of the voices, she could hear breathing — long, slow, deep breathing. It soon dawned on her that it was the library itself that was breathing, and with the sound she could feel the movement of air along with it. The entire edifice was, in some primitive way, alive and slowly emerging into awareness. What was this thing? She knew it was a visualization of a vast matrix of numerical data, but what sort of data? Why did it exist? What was it doing? It felt almost like a growth or cancer forming inside the landscape of the Internet, a cancer that had walled itself away so as to remain invisible — allowing it to grow in peace.

She wandered from room to room, looking for a place to sleep where the babble of voices was less, where there was quiet. But then, in one room that looked like all the others, she saw a book lying askew on an empty shelf. She was surprised. Whoever had emptied this library had forgotten a book. She picked it up and turned it over. It was an old, leather-bound volume, the cover so scuffed it was illegible but still showing traces of gold. It was a book, a real book, finally in this vast library in the town of Babel — wherever that was.

She picked up the book, slid to the floor, and, with her back propped against the wall, she opened it up to a random place and began reading. She expected it to be like all the other books she’d read, an illogical and ultimately incomprehensible “story.” She was not surprised to find out that this was indeed the case.

The story took place in a country whose people were under a cruel occupation by a foreign empire. It told of a poor beggar, evidently unsound of mind, who wandered about the benighted land, telling strange tales and making outlandish pronouncements.

She had opened the book to the middle of the story, so she flipped back to the beginning to see how it started. She read a lot of nonsense about the man’s birth. Later, the man abandoned his profession of carpentry, gave away everything he owned, and took to the road, a barefoot vagabond. He assembled a group of similar crazies, and they wandered about, sponging off anyone who would give them a spare meal. The main message the crazy man seemed to be pushing was Love your enemy. This was a completely absurd idea that defied all logic. But still she read on to the end, where the inevitable happened: the authorities captured, tortured, and executed the crazy man in front of a jeering, spitting crowd. That should have been the end of it. And yet, the man’s ragtag followers clung to his delusional ideas, even as many of them met the same fate as he had.

She closed the book in disgust and dropped it back on the shelf. It was just like the other stories the Princess had forced her to read — only more so. While she had to admit it was a good and original story, the ending was brutal and the message irrational. No wonder it had been left in the library when all the other books had been removed. Who would want it? It was another example, she thought, of the mindless brutality of human beings.

She crawled into a corner, curled up, and closed her eyes, still puzzling over the peculiar story, finally drifting off into a deep sleep.