Amanda

Above, a single unadorned lightbulb. Around, a hexagonal stone chamber with a circular wooden table in the center. On one of six walls, a rectangular, hard-edged doorframe housing a black, shiny metal portcullis, behind which is pure black.

Amanda is here in the Babblibrary, her prison, her lifework. She is waiting, as usual. She has been here for hundreds of years.

Of course things have changed over the years. She used to prefer illusionary replacements for the bare physical space—sweeping vistas looking over landscapes strewn with millions of books, or interlocking architectural marvels that glittered in whatever color scheme she liked most at the time, conjured with radix wizardry. She has grown more and more tired of these deceptions, as centuries of failure have made her more and more obsessed with her task. Now, she prefers to live as ascetically as a Salimist.

Going further back, she can remember the early days, when she was larger: a time when she was Miranda, Magna Mater Miranda, author of the Social Contract and spinner of new souls, the mother goddess always remembered and rarely spoken of, who watched over the New City from beneath, half-asleep and benevolent. Those were more optimistic days, days when she had imagined that the New City itself could be used as a kind of idea factory, a tool for chipping away at the Big Questions. But the longer she waited, the less she felt able to extract the diligence she needed out of her citizens, and so she took more and more of it upon herself.

Thus, the Babblibrary—named, of course, for the hypothetical honeycomb in Osberg’s celebrated fable. The name was all the more apt, she had thought—bearing no illusions about what her new project would entail—in light of Osberg’s famous remark: I have always imagined that hell will be a kind of library.

And so she dwindled, bit by bit, casting off more parts of herself to swell the ranks of her loyal Babblibrarians, until “Miranda” was no longer fitting and she had to choose a new name. Now she is nearly pre-augment, just a tiny woman behind a vast curtain. The tasks of the mother goddess can be done by silicon; what pneuma alone can do, Amanda and her Babblibrarian army toil away at, decade by decade.

On the table, beside the typewriter and her glass of water, is a book: a real book, from the surface, written in the old manner by a New Citizen, not some phantasm dredged up from the blank depths of infinity. The author is one Estragon B., a power plant operator who, like so many New Citizens, dabbles in every realm of human thought and produces endless reams of text to be passed about and gobbled up like snacks by the general populace.

Perhaps it is just her feeble little mind, but the book appears to be useless blather: a very long-winded and self-important statement of certain esoteric results which Amanda and the Babblibrary had discovered long ago. Maybe it is one of those infuriating texts which only reveals its value once you have set just the right radix—a kind of test of readerly devotion, a demand for the kind of time no one has (she thinks, expecting to spend years, decades, centuries in this room scanning idly over books like this). But there is a simpler explanation.

This Estragon appears to be one of the New Citizens who prides himself on the “authenticity” of his inspiration. The New Citizens have been arguing over this point for ages; it is one reason among many that Amanda finds them less and less useful as an engine of thought. The Babblibrary was built on the principle celebrated by Estragon’s theoretical enemies: namely, that the ability to branch and reintegrate allows inspiration to be reduced, to some extent, to recognition. Why wait for a great idea to strike when one can split up into billions of copies, assign each to look at a different idea and assess its value, and then return bearing billions of bad ideas and perhaps one or two brilliant ones?

Certain New Citizens, like Estragon, view this as a complete deflation of the very idea of intellectual engagement. The ideas can be found this way, yes, but where is the fun of it? They’re not your ideas; they happened to be out there, and you merely noticed them. Amanda has always found this line of thought absurd, even on the premise that intellectual activity is a sort of game pursued for its own sake—as if one can really take credit for “one’s own ideas,” which appear in the mind mysteriously, by no conscious act! The branching technique only makes overt the hidden process by which ideas were always found: tiny fragments of pneuma happening by chance upon the stuff of genius and passing their finds up the chain of being.

But in any case, Amanda is not playing a game. She is deadly serious. She was dedicated to answering the Big Questions back when she founded the New City, over a millennium ago, back when she broke decisively with Salim—cowardly Salim, solipsistic Salim, who would not trust anything he couldn’t see with his own eyes, cry out in pain though it might. If the answers could not be found, the quest—and all the dirty compromises made along the way—would be for nothing.

She has become a bit desperate, a bit frayed, in recent decades.

She is jolted away from her reading by the sound of footsteps. Looking up, she sees that a dim light has gone on behind the portcullis. A few moments later, she sees a Babblibrarian appear, her features clearly visible through the metal mesh. She is typical of her subtype: humanoid but unusually tall and thin, with very long fingers and ears, and an oval-shaped head that moves erratically, jerkily.

“Important,” says the Babblibrarian, in a voice of empty cheer.

Amanda learned long ago to cope with this communication barrier. The Babblibrarians are built by nature to explore the world of text with maximum efficiency. A Babblibrarian branches: a branch sees “TYIS” upon a page and instantly reports that it is either the word “THIS” or nothing. Immediately, there is a slide into another region of the combinational infinity of texts, and the Babblibrarian sees “THIS GJKLWEA,” reports no useful recognition of the second word, and is repurposed elsewhere. At other levels they think more carefully, appraise entire phrases, concepts, sentences, theories. To return from this passive frenzy to the world of conversation is a shock to the system. A Babblibrarian coming straight from work must take some time to get used to the idea of speaking, of producing text rather than assessing it.

“Go on,” Amanda says. “When you’re comfortable.”

The Babblibrarian’s head tilts owl-like to the side, and remains set at a violent, near-ninety-degree angle. Her eyes narrow, as though she’s assessing Amanda, though she’s surely just thinking about how to phrase whatever it is she has to say.

“A story,” she says.

“A story?” The Babblibrary coughs up fiction, sometimes. Sometimes Amanda requests it for entertainment, and at other times the Babblibrarians seize upon some narrative for its supposed relevance to the Big Questions, though Amanda can’t remember a single time when this approach bore any real fruit.

“A story,” the Babblibrarian affirms, and then, coming back to the world in a rush, spits out a long string of words:

“A story which I think you may find yes has some relevance to recent events and which besides and this is the important point resonates with me and with many of us on a pneumatic level as though we were yes pulled inexorably toward it we know not quite why or how.”

That angled head, that squint, that slight smile. Amanda is bemused.

“Well, send it over.”

“Yes good will do so madam.” And the Babblibrarian is off into the corridor. A moment later, the light behind the portcullis turns off.

Now it is time to wait, again. The Babblibrarian says that she has a story, but what she means is that promising regions of text-space have been mapped out by her and her collaborators: it will take more time to polish out the pieces, work out trivial details, make sure that the text reads “THIS” instead of “TYIS.” The text will be edited in the order it is meant to be read, for maximum efficiency: Amanda can read its earlier parts while the later parts are being worked over.

It has been less than a minute when the typewriter jolts into motion, signaling that the first bits of the story have been fully vetted and ready for her perusal. But this turns out to be something of a false alarm: the typewriter simply prints the numeral

1

and then stops. Amanda looks at it. A minute passes. Is this it? Are the Babblibrarians playing some kind of prank? Is “1” a story, in some peculiar sense of the word?

But she has not had much time to frustrate herself over these disappointing possibilities before it churns into motion again:

1: Maria

Okay, getting somewhere: a number and a name. Amanda has never personally known a Maria—beyond the various Marias she has spawned in her role as Great Mother Miranda—but she can certainly imagine this being the start of some sort of story.

Only ten seconds or so pass before the next bit of output, a line break and another word:

1: Maria

It

Which is not especially illuminating.

And now there is a long pause, something like ten minutes, in which Amanda gets up, paces the room, thinking chaotically of nothing in particular, before another jolt of the typewriter and a generous boon of five new words:

1: Maria

It is dark in the submarine