The Library

latr.fm

Every morning at ten to ten, Dot powered on. Its hands lay flat against the thick glass of the reading room window, which let the photoreceptors on its palms feast on the sun. The window overlooked a modest lot where cars had once parked in orderly fashion, side by side. Now the asphalt was veined with fissures, tufted with dandelions that had nudged and elbowed and bullied their way up from below.

Dot pulled its hands from the window. The synthetic skin suctioned off with a short, wet noise, one that Dot’s colleague, Alex, would have described as rude. The sound echoed around the reading room and pinballed through the rows of empty shelves.

With nothing to reshelve or sort or alphabetize, the android defaulted to maintenance tasks: it swept the floor and carpet (no power, no vacuum); checksummed its internal library database (no updates since the Internet went down); dusted and wiped surfaces; checked the after-hours book drop, which was always empty—except for the time a mangy cat had climbed in through the slot. Dot named it Snowbell, from Stuart Little. For three days, the stray made the library its home, splitting its time between jumping across shelves and curling up into a tight ovoid for a nap. On the fourth morning, when no meows had greeted the day, Dot carried out a thorough search of the library before resigning itself to the fact Snowbell was gone.

Dot got a duster and headed for the stacks. The heart of the library was once crammed so tight with books that patrons often had trouble pulling out the titles they wanted. The bare shelves were now like the rib cage of a once-great leviathan, picked clean by scavengers to a dull, glaucous grey.

To reach the top shelf, Dot telescoped its legs, which made its skirt appear comically short; this had always made Alex snicker. It brushed the surface, spurring motes of dust into a languid ballet.

Its left elbow clicked. Not the first time this week. Dot had run several diagnostic scans, but they came back clean. Perhaps it was nothing. But if the issue was mechanical? That spelled trouble. Like a human, it couldn’t kiss its elbow, much less repair it.

The android scanned itself again, but was interrupted by a muted thump-thump that reverberated through the library. It increased power to its hearing sensor. A few seconds later came a more insistent thump-thump-thump.

Someone was knocking on the front door.

The door had a top and bottom plexiglass pane separated by a thick middle rail. The upper pane was marred by three bullet fractals, left by an armed scavenger who’d come in the dead of winter, convinced there were still books inside and refusing to take no for an answer.

Now there stood a woman, hands cupped against the glass, framing her face as she peered inside the library.

“Hi!” she said.

Dot assessed the patron. Two tight braids of red hair peeked out from under a black knit cap; streaks of dirt lined her angular and generously freckled face; her jacket was a high-end hiking raincoat with a strip of duct tape across the right arm; her jeans looked new, save for a large mud stain on the right knee. Her mismatched hiking boots gave Dot pause; this was atypical.

Behind the woman, Main Street was a bleak landscape: a doorless pick-up truck, a rusted shopping cart with missing front wheels, and the boarded-up yoga studio across the street, the plywood sheets warped from exposure to the elements.

“Hey! Can you let me in?”

“I’m sorry,” Dot said, raising its voice to be heard through the door, “But the library opens at eleven.”

“OK… So how soon is eleven?”

“In fifty-three minutes.”

She smirked. “I guess I’ll wait.”

The woman shrugged off her backpack—it had thick shoulder straps and an external carbon-fibre frame—and dropped it beside her.

She looked at Dot’s forearm, where its model ID, .dewey, was tattooed. Alex, who well knew what the period represented, had playfully nicknamed it Dot.

“You’re a Cedalion Android, aren’t you? Second Gen?”

“Correct. Decimal Dewey model.”

“Right,” said the woman. “So you can reprogram your low-level parameters?”

“Yes.”

“Well, considering the world has basically, you know…” The woman swept her right arm, encompassing the street behind her. The gesture was abstract, but Dot understood the woman’s meaning. “Maybe you could open a little early today?”

“I could,” said Dot, clocking the woman’s disposition to bend the rules as a probable flaw in her character. “But I’m not sure I can help you. There are no books left.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“How come?”

“They’ve all been checked out. Or stolen.”

“Huh. Nice to know there are lots of readers around here.”

Dot wasn’t certain if the woman was using irony, but suspected she was.

“I believe the books were mainly used as combustibles.”

The woman tilted her head. “People… burned the books?”

Was the woman playing dumb to make Dot believe she had no such designs?

“Winters are cold here,” the android said flatly, the closest approximation to disdain its programming would allow.

“Why didn’t you stop them?”

“I’m a librarian. My job is to help patrons, and that includes lending books.”

“Even if they’re going to burn them?”

“They promised they would not.”

“Well, I guess it’s easy to lie to an android.”

“That’s true,” it responded. Was the woman dissembling? Trying to cozy up to Dot? “So you see, I can’t help you.”

“Actually, I think you can…”

The woman opened her backpack and rummaged through it.

Dot speculated that the woman was about to produce a weapon to threaten or intimidate it into opening the door. Which Dot would not do; it had been fooled once by a man named Larry who had asked to use the washroom, only to camp out in the reading room for almost three weeks. This was an egregious violation of the library’s rule about patrons staying past opening hours, but Dot’s core programming forbade it from physically removing Larry. It wasn’t until he foolishly confessed his contempt for rhyming poetry that Dot was finally able to get Larry to leave by loudly reciting Edward Lear’s The Book of Nonsense during closing hours.

In the hope of dissuading the woman from whatever she had in mind, Dot said, “Good luck with your travels.”

To no avail: the woman had found what she was looking for in her backpack. With an audible and somewhat theatrical “Ah-ha!”, she pulled out a book.

“I’d like to return this,” she said.

Dot reached for the door bolt.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” the woman said. She stood at the circulation desk, looking over at the barren shelves.

“I was not kidding,” the android responded.

It had been two years, two months, seventeen hours, and four minutes since Dot had last held a book—a physical book!—in its hands. It was a paperback, sun-faded, the corners nubbed and dog-eared. The cover illustration was a rabbit, in profile, its ears at a slight acute angle, resting in a bleached yellow field. The book’s once-orange spine was now a pale ochre, marred by white striations along its entire length. Its considerable incurve caused the pages to bulge outward, like plumage flourished in a mating ritual, the book eager to fling itself at the nearest reader. By some miracle, the glue still held the pages together. A well-loved book, Alex would have called it.

“Yeah, sorry about the… condition,” said the woman. “I, uh, read it a lot.”

Dot gently riffled through the pages. “At least you didn’t write in it.”

“Pfft. I’m not a monster.”

Dot detected levity in the woman’s voice. Humour?

It flipped the book around. There was the circulation sticker with the library’s name, address, and a bar code. Dot scanned it with its finger.

“The book is twenty years, five months, and six days late.”

“OK.”

“There’s a late fee of five thousand two hundred and thirty-six credits.”

“You know money doesn’t matter anymore…?”

Dot paused then said, “I’ll let it slide this one time. Thank you for returning the book.”

“Yeah, sure. Now can I get a receipt or something? Something with my name and address, maybe?”

“We only provide receipts when you check out a book.”

“Well, then, I’d like to check it out again.”

“Unfortunately, there’s a hold on this title. But if the patron doesn’t pick it up in the next three days, you’ll be able to take it out again.”

“Uh… Seriously?”

Dot nodded. Was there levity in its voice? No there was not.

It took a slip of paper and a pen to make a hold label for patron 5203. Its elbow clicked again.

“Furthermore, I should mention your library card is expired. You can renew it by bringing a piece of mail to confirm your current address.”

“Ah, so you do have my address on file!”

“Of course.”

“Can I have it, please?”

“I can’t give out personal information without —”

“OK, just my name then?”

Dot paused in its writing.

“You don’t know your own name?”

The woman looked away then shook her head. “It’s a long story, but… I forgot it. Or rather, I was forced… I was made to forget it.”

“I don’t understand how that is possible,” said Dot.

“Be grateful you don’t,” she said.

Dot noticed the woman’s irises were grey-green. It had never seen such an unusual and striking eye colour in a human. Alex had once told it that eye contact was a sign of honesty.

Dot said, “The last person to check out Watership Down was Sophie Doyle.”

“Sophie,” said the woman. At first, she appeared unfazed. But then her lips parted, and her eyes lost their focus, swimming under a grey-green ocean, and shifted to the far-away stare Dot had seen many times in patrons—and in Alex—during the days and weeks after the world shed its veneer of civilization and turned on itself.

“That sounds…” she started, then stopped as a sob caught in her throat. “Sophie. Yes.”

“I’d be happy to provide your address if you have a piece of identification.”

The woman looked down and her shoulders heaved. Had Dot made her cry? But then she looked up, shaking her head and chuckling.

“Which, obviously, I don’t have. But you could use your empathy exception to bypass the privacy lock,” the woman said.

“For someone who doesn’t know their own name,” Dot said, “you know a lot about androids.”

“That’s true,” she said, offering no further insight.

“The address I have for Sophie Doyle is 22 Victoria Street, Maple Grove.”

The woman nodded. The information appeared to make sense to her.

“Great. Thanks.”

“You’re most welcome.”

Dot slipped the hold label between the pages of the book, nudging it near the spine so the digits peeked above the cover.

The woman repeated the address to herself, sotto voce. She picked up her backpack, slung it over her shoulder, and adjusted the left strap.

“The library is open until nine o’clock today,” said Dot, putting the book on the hold shelf. “You’re welcome to stay until then.”

“Nah. Gotta go. Lots to remember. Besides,” she said with a grin, “there’s nothing to read here.”

“I’d be happy to recite any book I have on file. I have Tales from Watership Down, for example.”

The woman stared, eyes wide, at the android.

“It’s the sequel to Watership Down,” Dot explained.

“You have books… on file? In your memory banks?”

“Yes. Unfortunately, I was only able to download two million, one hundred and thirty thousand, four hundred and twelve titles before the Internet went dark.”

“Wow, OK,” the woman said. She looked down, then nodded as if in response to her own thought. “Maybe I’ll come back later.”

Dot experienced a noticeable increase in its CPU’s instruction cycles. Was it the prospect of the woman returning, which would give Dot the chance to continue fulfilling its purpose as a librarian? Or was it that cruel word, maybe? Would Dot—as it had done with Alex, with Snowbell—scour every room, every closet, every shelf, every nook and cranny of the library in the faint hope of finding company?

The woman headed for the front door. Was there a loophole that would let Dot ask to go with her? It tried several thousand exception permutations, but was unable to circumvent its duty-of-work protocol.

There was nothing Dot could do but say, “Have a wonderful day, and thank you for visiting the Maple Grove Public Library.”

The woman stopped. She looked at the barren shelves behind Dot.

“You know this is now just an empty building, right? The library is you.”

Dot took in the woman’s words, intrigued by this notion that a library was defined as its contents rather than an edifice. In fact, if Dot was the library, then wherever it went—

“May I accompany you?” Dot asked.

The woman put her hands on her hips. “Really?”

“Really.”

“I didn’t think your protocol would allow… Never mind. I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said, and extended her hand. “I’d love that. I’m Sophie Doyle, apparently.”

Dot shook her hand with a firm grip, as Alex had taught it to do. Its elbow click-clicked.

“Decimal Dewey.”

“That’s a mouthful,” said Sophie. “Meantime, we’re gonna have to figure out what’s going on with your elbow.”

“Yes please,” said the android. “And you can call me Dot, if you like.”

Sophie smiled. “Let’s go, Dot.”

The two went out through the front doors, which Dot left unlocked. If patron 5203 ever dropped by, their book would be waiting for them, the last vestige of what was once a library.

Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

The thing that amazes me about this story is how seemingly little effort it takes to drip exposition to us, giving just enough for us to fill in the blank parts with our imagination. We don’t know what “this” is, when Sophie gestures to the street. We don’t know what’s happened to her to make her lose her memory. We don’t know who Alex was. But it doesn’t matter because this is a sweet story about two friends with a similar passion finding each other.

I can see creative writing teachers using this story in the future to show writers how they can lead their readers to make assumptions about their stories-not to eventually fool them with some kind of twist, but giving a minimalist framework that the reader can build their own backdrop around.

As the Twilight Zone showed up decades ago, readers have a fixation regarding books and the end of the world. They can be used for kindling, or to stack to shore up a wobbly table, or brick up a hole, but the hardcore reader is horrified at the concept of using a book for anything but a sacred container of a story. Maybe we’ll get through our TBR piles when the world ends, so long as we don’t break out glasses. Or get cold.

Yeah, I’m sorry, I might burn a book if it’s that or freeze to death. Sorry, Dot.

And our closing quotation this week is from Patti Smith, who said, “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”

Thanks for joining us, and stay safe, stay kind, and have fun.