Saturday, April 7, 2012

Camera Scientia


The world had gone gray in two days. 
            That was all it took to suck out the bright dreams of the millennia.
            In the end, all our fine tinkering and tweaking meant nothing.  Everything we had pinned our hopes on was reduced to a kind of ashy sludge.
            That is why I found myself back at that decaying old building again.  I had stumbled across it the day before as I was wandering mindlessly through the goop.  It was an old brick building covered with ivy vines, falling down in chunks, being reclaimed by nature.  Like an archeologist at a lost temple I had groped around until I could feel the flat surface of a door behind the foliage.  But it was late and the light was fading and it would soon be time to hide from the nightgangs, so I vowed to return the next day to explore it.
            As it turned out, the metal door was off its hinges and could no longer be budged but I was just thin enough to slip through the crack of the opening.  On the other side of the door there was a huge room lined with shelves.  Moss was growing on the walls and water and crud covered the floor.  I could hear a constant dripping sound of a flood in the making.  The place was like a vast empty cave sliced through with shafts of dusty sunlight coming from windows at the top.
            The shelves, miles of them it seemed, were tightly and neatly packed with tall thin rectangular plates, stiff as lizards in a display case.  I had no idea what they were but I walked along the line and danced my fingers over them the way a child would the pickets of a fence.
            If I had been able to access the Web, I might have discovered what this place was.  But the thought at that moment filled me with sadness.  I well remembered when anything you needed to know was available at the touch of a whim.  All instantly gettable, useable, haveable.  I remember sitting before a touchscreen and swimming through mounds of data at a glance.
            Was all that really gone now?
            In the beginning, the beginning of the end that is, we assumed that because the Web and the Wiki were not objects, they could never be destroyed.  They would go on forever.
            The Goo destroyed all of it in only two days.
            Forty-eight hours was all it took for everything that had been scanned, digitized, and mounted on the Web to be lost. 
            I stopped before one of the plates and noticed the letters DAB written on it.  Dab.  What could that mean?
            Of course, as usual the problem had been foreseen but not the calamity.  What everyone informally called the Goo had been technically known for years as the graygoo problem.  But before it became real it was just a hypothetical, a mindgame for the techniks. 
            It began with the nano revolution and a means of ridding the world of its trash.  Nanobot assemblers had been created to break down used materials and reform the pieces into new useable things.  The world was drowning in dead technology and so these tiny bots – smaller than a wheeze – were designed as metal and plastic and silicon eaters, breaking these substances down into microscopic particles and reforming these into new materials.
            It all sounded so simple.
            Like an army of cyber-ants, they pursued their mindless tasks, self-limiting, self-generating, eating and building.  It was beautiful to behold.  Until it all went haywire.  Haywire, after all, was the far point of the human storyline.  And as inevitably as a last word in a story, the nanobot control mechanism failed.  The bots began to replicate wildly…68 billion offspring in ten hours.  In one full day their total population weighed half that of the earth itself.  And this vast wave like microlocusts ate through everything – every box, casing, wire, microchip – leaving only a dullish mush in its wake.
            All of the plates on the shelves as I walked by them had three letter words on them.  DIM, DOE, DUD.  It occurred to me that they might be icons of some kind and so I tried to wave my hand before them, to address them in my machine voice, to touch the words.  I tired everything I could think of but they never came to life.
            “May I help you?” said a voice coming from somewhere behind me.
            I wasn’t sure if I really heard that voice or not.  In a world where nothing existed anymore, memory and fancy and migraine were all mixed together.  But when I turned around I saw an old woman in a plain brown suit standing stiffly.  When I say old, I mean unnaturally old.  She had gray hair, which I had only seen in pictures, and glasses which I had only read about.  Her skin folded around the bones of her face.  I think they used to call these wrinkles.
            “You startled me,” I said.
            “I do not get many visitors here any more.  None in fact.”
            “What is this place?”
            “This is a camera scientia,” she said in a thin but firm voice.
            “I don’t know what that is, I’m sorry.”
            But she smirked as though she were teasing me.
            “It means a room of knowledge in Latin.  This is a reading room.”
            “A reading room for Web access?”
            “No.  These are volumes with pages that can be read.”
            She walked over to where I was standing, put her hand on the edge of one of the plates, and pulled it right out off the shelf.  In a graceful move she was now holding a box in her veiny hands. 
            I laughed when she did it.  I had not realized until that moment that the plates were the ends of these boxes, each one a separate object that could be picked up and handled.  I simply thought they were interface icons.
            “You could open these and read them,” she said miming a strange gesture that I did not recognize.  They used to have these places called libraries…”
            “We still have them,” I said.  For the moment I had forgotten that the Goo had eaten all that.
            “No, the word is used differently now.  The libraries I refer to were actual places.  Like this room but great buildings filled with books.  They don’t exist anymore because all those books were scanned and discarded.”
            “But you still have these here?”
            “They were supposed to me converted too but the Goo hit before it could be done.  This room is one of the few places left on earth with such a collection.  Such as it is.”
            “And you live here?”
            “I feel as though I have lived here for decades, perhaps centuries.  I was an attendant when the room was still open.”
            “What do these words mean…DIM and DIN and DIS?”
            “Are you really interested?” she said wearily.  “The world has really left all this in the dust.”
            “There is nothing left to do but find something to be interested in,” I said and until I did, I had no idea why I was there at all.
            “There is really only one book here; it just has many volumes.  130,000 to be exact.  This is the Grand Encyclopedia.  It is an amassment of all human knowledge up to the point that it was compiled in the late 21st century.  Those words appear on each volume to help you look up information.”
            “Like a keyword?”
            “No, like a categorical term.  You don’t access information here, you read about things.”
            “I don’t understand.”
            “Take that volume there with the word DIM on the spine.  I don’t know for certain but I would guess that you might open that volume and find out information about the dime, which was a form of currency once, or a dimeter, which was a rhythm for poetics, or a dimple or a…”
            “But why would you want to look up things in order?  It would take a terribly long time to get to the part you needed.”
            “You would know what you needed first by the name and then look it up under that category.  If you were interested in dinosaurs, you would go down to the volume with DIN, for example.”
            I understood what she was saying, I myself was intrigued by dinosaurs, but it didn’t exactly make any sense to me.  Everything I would need to know about triceratops would be instantly linked and assessed for me.  Compiled according to my tastes and talents.  This looking up under a category seemed an immense waste of time.
            But again I had conveniently forgotten.  All that was gone.  The Goo had eaten the triceratops along with everything else.
            As though reading my mind, the attendant said:
            “I know it may seem inefficient to someone of your age but the irony is that all that perfectly structured information you use so quickly is gone now.  Although I knew something was wrong.”
            “You did?”
            “I could see it happening in language.  Words were disappearing.”
            “You mean there were more words once than there are now?”
            “Not more of them, just better ones.  More beautiful ones, expressive ones.  Subtle words, ironic words.  All slowly vanishing as though being erased from discourse.  And all we were left with was a technocratic tongue, a harsh blatancy.  Flat and dull as a stale pancake.  The word for the sensation of warm water moving between the toes for instance?”
            “I don’t know it.”
            “You see what I mean?  There once was a word of that.  I’m certain of it.  Or the color between sunset orange and the red of teenage lust.”
            Thinking she was only being poetic, I turned back to the endless shelves with their pert volumes all at attention.
            “I never knew such a thing existed,” I said.
            “No one knows what there is outside of the Web.  That was all that we have anymore before the Goo and now we don’t even have that.  But there have actually been many such projects in the world.  The Encyclopedie, the Britannica, the Earth Book.  And of course the Humanitas Futilitas, the great encyclopedia of human folly, the biggest book ever conceived, so big that it was physically impossible to open.” 
            But she winked at me when she said this and I knew that it was meant as a joke.
            “And Alexandria,” she added.
            “That’s a girl’s name.”
            “It was a great city in Ancient Egypt.  A man by the name of Ptolemy I built a great library there in 286 BC.”
            “I’m sorry I don’t know what that means.”
            “A very long time ago.  It had hundreds of thousands of texts carrying all of civilized knowledge.”
            “Where is that now?”
            “Gone, all gone.  In 641 AD invaders fed all of it – bound volumes and papyrus scrolls – into the furnaces that fed the public baths.  The work burned for six months.”
            “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
            “Because knowledge of the world is crucial but only if your enemies don’t have it.”
            “Are we the enemies of the Goo?”
            “It appears that we are. 

            I was intrigued by it all.  Why?  There was nothing left to care about.  Only the must of time yawning.  What did I hope to accomplish by standing there?  Unfound truths, secrets of lost worlds, the whispers of the past?  Who can say?  I had time on my hands – unmoving time like the riverwater that was sludge – and nothing else calling out to me but those mute tomes.
            “Can I try one,” I asked and took one off the shelf just as I had seen her do.
            “I’m afraid you’re a bit too late for that.”
            I put my fingers at the rim and tried to pry it open.
            “You would normally open it from the other edge,” she said, “but…”
            So I turned it around and saw that the other edge was not sealed but open.  I curled my fingers around the top surface and struggled with that for a few moments without effect.
            “I’m sorry but they cannot be opened,” she said.
            “None of these volumes can be opened?”
            “Not a single one.”
            “Why not?”
            “The Goo.”
            “But these are not technologic.  The Goo eats machines.”
            “It seems that it has developed a hunger for the ink used in the printing of these books.  The residue has fused the pages together on all these volumes.”
            “The techniks said that the Goo might be able to evolve into new forms,” I said.
            “And so it has.  Something to do with the petroleum in the ink.  Let’s just hope that it does not start to develop a taste for flesh…”
            I was disappointed but I overcame it when I saw that she was too and far more profoundly.  After all, I had only had my curiosity dashed but her whole world was destroyed.
            “Had you read all these before the Goo?”
            “Oh no, not all of them.  But some.”
            “And you remember what’s in them?”
            “I have a good memory so I have a broad sense of what might be there.”
            “Can you tell me things?”
            “I don’t understand what you mean.”
            “Tell me what was in these volumes.”
            “What kinds of things?”
            “It doesn’t matter.  Anything.  Anything you remember.”
            “Why would you want me to do that?”
            It was a good question and I did not have a particularly good answer for it.  I knew what I knew and so did she.  But my world was gray and I was alone and the days seemed to stretch before me like an endless withering. 
            “Why not?” I answered brightly and I could see that this silly response tickled her.
            “But where to begin such a project?” she asked.
            “At the beginning perhaps?” I suggested and pointing all the way down and down and down to the very first volume at the front end of the room.  At AAA.”
            “There was an organization that helped people who drank too much,” she said with a mix of pride and doubt on her face.  “I suppose it could be done.”
            I stayed with her for quite a while.  I don’t know how long.  Hours stretched into the kind of timeless time that children have when they are building forts.  I suppose that is just like what we were doing there as we sat on the floor, our knees almost touching.  Building a fort against the onslaught.  Just two women talking. 
            But it was wonderful time as I listened to her explanations of aardvark and abacus and soon adder and Addison.  The world felt new to us then, not dying but simply hibernating, waiting for the next iteration of vitality to take hold.  Knowing it would in time.
            In fact we were all the way up to air-conditioning when I first noticed the dull gray rash on my arm…

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