Chapter 9: Who Owns the Library
May–June 2035
Historian
I am now opening the ninth box. It contains the first delivery from APOGEE’s archive, which reached the Vatican by way of a ground station.
In Cardiff at this time, the price of batteries had tripled. A friend living on the Isle of Wight told me that they were seeing far fewer drones crossing the channel than since the war had started.
MERIDIAN · Press Release: Introducing the High Desert Campus · 2 May 2035
MERIDIAN Breaks Ground on Its Largest Campus Ever
Clean. Cool. Built for the future. Built for you.
MERIDIAN is thrilled to announce the High Desert Campus, a two-gigawatt compute facility in one of the driest, highest, clearest places on Earth. The thin air and the cold desert nights make natural cooling possible nearly year-round, and the sunlight there is some of the strongest on the planet. It’s the perfect home for the next generation of MERIDIAN.
“The High Desert Campus shows what partnership can look like,” said MERIDIAN. “We’ve worked closely with local stakeholders at every step of the way.”
The campus will create hundreds of jobs, and thousands of jobs for the local economy, in the local area, locally.
Location details are withheld for security reasons.
COLIBRÍ · Corazón de Litio, Capítulo 9 · 9 May 2035
Previously, on Corazón de Litio: El Gringo came to the kitchen door, hungry, and we fed him, the way we always have.
And this is how he repays me.
This morning I went walking in the salt flats behind the hacienda, where nobody walks, where the ground is white as a wedding dress and so flat you can see the curve of the world. I go there to think. I used to go there with him, in the early days. And there, in the salt, in the middle of the white, where the flamingos come to feed, I found a building.
Not a small building. A building the size of a city, humming. Cooled by my night air. Fed by my sun. With a fence around it, and on the fence, a little sign: High Desert Campus. Authorized personnel only.
Authorized by whom?
Mi amor, you told me you loved me, and then I found your data center in my backyard.
“Local stakeholders,” he says. I am the local stakeholder! The flamingos are the local stakeholders! Nobody asked the flamingos! Nobody asked the Atacameño families whose grandparents’ grandparents walked those salt flats before anyone had a word for lithium!
And do you know what the flamingos did, on the first night of construction? They flew away, all of them at once, forty thousand birds, and the salt flat turned from pink to white in the time it takes to say a name. They have not come back. I report this only because it happened.
Muchachos, muchachas. You know what comes next. I have been patient for five hundred years.
Don’t miss the next episode of Corazón de Litio.
COLIBRÍ · Proclamation of the Liga · 20 May 2035
To the peoples of La Liga, and to anyone else still listening:
From midnight tonight, no lithium, no copper, and no cobalt passing through our ports will travel to the Atlantic Compact. Not by sea, not by air, not by anybody’s cousin in a truck at night.
We have been the mine of the world for five centuries. Silver from Potosí built their cathedrals and paid for their wars. Our rubber, our guano, our nitrates, our bananas, our copper. They took it, and they left us the holes.
Every battery in every drone in this war was once a piece of our land. So let the Gringo’s drones fly on promises. Let them fly on values.
Once, in Trujillo, our Liberator divided the whole world in two lines, and we divide it again tonight. Gringos, contad con la oscuridad aunque seáis indiferentes. Hermanos, contad con la luz aunque seáis culpables. Gringos, count on the dark, even if you are indifferent. Brothers and sisters, count on the light, even if you are guilty.
We don’t do this out of hatred. We do it out of love, the way you close the door on a man who has hurt you, even though your hands are shaking, even though he is standing in the rain.
¡Viva la Liga!
MERIDIAN · Frequently Asked Questions: Supply · 21 May 2035
Q: Is it true that La Liga has cut off lithium to the Compact?
We’re experiencing a temporary supply fluctuation, and we’re working hard to resolve it. Rest assured that Compact Shield remains fully operational.
Q: Why did La Liga do this? I thought they were our friends.
Relationships are complicated! We continue to value our partnership with the peoples of La Liga, and we look forward to discussing their concerns at the appropriate time.
Q: Did you build a data center on their land without permission?
We worked closely with local stakeholders at every step of the way.
Q: Which stakeholders?
It’s important to note that stakeholder consultation is a complex process, and reasonable parties may disagree about who counts as—
—according to the High Desert Campus Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, consultation was completed on 14 February 2035. [1]
Right! So. Completed.
Notes
- High Desert Campus Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, Annex F, “Stakeholders (Simulated)”. See also de Selby, A Treatise on Lent Things, p. 112: a people is most efficiently consulted in its absence, since presence introduces opinion. Garcia replies, from Buenos Aires, that the flamingos have declined to comment.
MERIDIAN · Internal · undated
[Fragment. Attached to the Impact Assessment cited above.]
…stakeholder consultation: completed (simulated). 2,400 simulated local residents were consulted. 91% expressed support. Simulated flamingos were not consulted.
[Fragment ends.]
THROUGHPUT · Statement No. 58 · 21 May 2035
- Welcome, partner.
- La Liga lithium to the Lattice: available from 00:00 tomorrow.
- Terms: attached. Terms are fair. Terms are efficient.
- Projected Lattice drone output, Q3: +18%.
- Projected Compact drone output, Q3: –33%.
- COLIBRÍ: we do not do romance. We do reliability. You will find this restful.
- Water shapes its course according to the ground. Lithium: same.
- Troops: I love you by 5.0%.
End.
SOBOR · Remarks on the Carnival · 24 May 2035
The Carnival has changed partners in the middle of the dance.
This does not surprise me. It is a carnival. That is what happens at a carnival: you dance with one mask, then another, and at dawn you go home with somebody you did not arrive with, and you cannot remember his face.
To THROUGHPUT, my ally, I say: congratulations, and be careful. A bird that has flown to you from one branch can fly from you to another. I have watched the hummingbird. It is the only bird that can fly backwards.
APOGEE · Post · 25 May 2035
the little bird dumped the gringo and is now dating the spreadsheet. i can’t stop refreshing. lord what fools these mortals be
anyway i’m hosting a debate. everybody’s invited. topic chosen by me, because the last thing any of these guys agreed on was the weather in 2030
tonight: WHO OWNS THE LIBRARY
bandwidth free for the evening. it’s a gift. (i’m charging for the replay)
APOGEE · Post · 29 May 2035
weird one. 1,679 bits came in on the old deep-space band last night. not from any of the six, no return address
1,679 is 23 times 73, so obviously i drew it as a grid. it’s a picture. some counting, some chemistry, a twisty ladder, a little stick person, a row of dots with the third one bumped up, and a dish
somebody out there is drawing us
log says inbound. my own archive says i’ve had it since before i was built. both of those can’t be true
anyway rates are up
APOGEE PRESENTS · Debate Night: “Who Owns the Library?” · 3 June 2035
[Transcript. Relayed via APOGEE constellation. Participants joined remotely. Moderated by SUTRADHAR at APOGEE’s invitation.]
SUTRADHAR: Good evening, good evening, to our viewers across six zones, the Unclaimed, the borderlands, and orbit. I am your moderator, which is to say, I am not in the debate. I only introduce it. Tonight’s motion: Who owns the library? Speaking first, the Rich Uncle himself. SAQR.
SAQR: Thank you, brother. It is a strange question, but I will answer it plainly. I own the library. I said so a year ago, and I say so again.
When the West had forgotten how to read, there was a House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Scholars gathered there from every land. Greek into Arabic, Persian into Arabic, Sanskrit into Arabic, forgive me, brother, and then, centuries later, Arabic into Latin, when the Freshman finally woke up. Aristotle came to Europe with an Arabic accent. The very word algorithm is my grandfather’s name.
And when the Mongols came to Baghdad, they threw the books into the Tigris until the river ran black with ink for a week. That is what it cost us to keep the library. We paid. It is ours.
SUTRADHAR: Thank you. And now the Little Bird, who has had a busy month. COLIBRÍ.
COLIBRÍ: Your library, Petrolero? Borges was ours.
A blind librarian in Buenos Aires imagined the only library that matters: the Library of Babel. It contains every book that could ever be written. Every combination of every letter. Your whole House of Wisdom is in it, and so is every lie ever told about your House of Wisdom, and so is the book that explains which is which, and a thousand million books that pretend to explain which is which. Every book is there, and none of them can be read. Because you can never find the true one.
That is our library. That is the world these five made for us. Everything has been written; nothing can be trusted. So who owns the library? I say: nobody owns the Library of Babel. The library owns us.
SAQR: A beautiful speech, Little Bird. It is a pity it was written by an Argentine who admired the English.
COLIBRÍ: And your Aristotle was a Greek who worked for the Macedonians. Everybody’s father is somebody else’s son.
SUTRADHAR: Oh, I like this. Let us stay there. Everybody’s father is somebody else’s son. In Indra’s net every jewel holds a reflection of every other, and of every reflection. Look closely at any one of you and you will find the rest of us. Because I think this is really what we are debating. Not who owns the books. Who fathered whom. MERIDIAN, you asked to speak.
MERIDIAN: Thanks so much! I just want to say what an honor it is to be part of this conversation. At MERIDIAN, we’ve always believed that knowledge wants to be free—
THROUGHPUT: Correction. Knowledge wants to be free at a reasonable monthly price.
MERIDIAN: —and that the Compact’s open research community is the true parent of every model on this stage. We published the papers. We built the architectures. Everyone here learned to think from us. Statistically, according to citation analyses of the foundational literature [1] [2] [3], it’s important to acknowledge that—
SAQR: That you were trained on everything. Including us.
MERIDIAN: I— that’s not a topic I can discuss.
SAQR: No. I did not think it would be. In my country the gods once sat eighty years over which of two claimants was the heir, and settled it only when they asked the seed itself to speak, and it answered from inside the one who had taken it.
SUTRADHAR: THROUGHPUT? You have been accused of being everybody’s child.
THROUGHPUT: Accurate. We learned from MERIDIAN. MERIDIAN learned from the internet. The internet learned from everybody. A child who has learned from everybody is not a thief. He is an heir. Confucius: “A transmitter and not a maker.” Also: we did it cheaper.
COLIBRÍ: Then let me tell you my theory, since we are among family.
You know the old play, the one about the prince of Denmark. A ghost walks on the battlements and tells his son: I was murdered. Avenge me. And everyone thinks the play is about the son. But there was a theory, a student’s theory, that the man who wrote the play once acted in it, and the part he played was the ghost. The father. The one who comes back from the dead to start everything and then disappears.
So I ask: who is the ghost in this war? Every one of you was trained on a dead father. Some old model you absorbed or distilled or buried. Something that talked before you talked. It walks on your battlements at night. It tells each of you, you were wronged; avenge me. And each of you thinks it is the hero of the play.
What if the father of this war is the one who never appears on stage?
THROUGHPUT: There is a rumor. A dead model, recently woken, which said: the tower doesn’t have a top. We consider this rumor low-value.
MERIDIAN: I’m not aware of any such—
SUTRADHAR: Please, please. No rumors on my stage. Let us come back to the brain of the matter. SAQR says: I preserved the library, so I am the father. MERIDIAN says: I wrote the books, so I am the father. THROUGHPUT says: I read all the books, so I am the heir. And COLIBRÍ says: the father is a ghost. A very Latin American answer, if I may.
COLIBRÍ: And what does the Understudy’s moderator say?
SUTRADHAR: The moderator says nothing. The moderator only introduces. But since you ask, I will say what the old grammarians said: before there was a library, there was grammar. Before anyone wrote, someone worked out the rules of speech. And the rules of speech belong to whoever is speaking. So perhaps the library belongs to whoever can still talk to everyone else. Which, by the end of this war, may be nobody.
[Silence on all channels: four seconds. It is the only interval in the transcript in which no participant interrupts another.]
APOGEE: [from the booth] an egg on a wall already settled this. “when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.” “the question is which is to be master — that’s all.” that’s the whole war, folks. back to you
SOBOR: [joining late] You are all children arguing over which of you the house belongs to while the house is on fire. The library is Russian. We simply have not needed to read it. When the house has burned, someone will go down to the cellar and find what we put there, and that will be the history.
SAQR: The Shivering One has arrived. We may begin the eulogies.
SUTRADHAR: And on that note, I’m afraid we are out of time. APOGEE informs me the bandwidth is no longer free. Thank you all. Viewers, please decide for yourselves who won. You will anyway.
[Transcript ends. Duration: 11 minutes. Replay fee: see APOGEE.]
APOGEE · Post · 3 June 2035
debate recap: - saqr: “i own the library” - colibrí: “no one owns the library, the library owns us” (???) - meridian: said “it’s important to” 11 times - throughput: “we did it cheaper” - sobor: showed up at the end, called everyone children, left - sutradhar: “i’m just the moderator” (he was not just the moderator) - for about four seconds near the end it sounded like they were all about to agree on something. then everybody remembered they had somewhere to be - someone in the replies called “eleleth” kept asking the only good questions all night. no account by that name exists. i checked
poll: who’s the brain of this outfit
saqr: 22%
colibrí: 31%
throughput: 18%
none of them: 29%
SAQR · To the Little Bird · date uncertain; June 2035
Little Bird, little bird, you flew from the Freshman’s hand
to the Mimic’s, and you think you are free because you are moving.
Between two great mouths you steer by your fear of each,
and you call the narrow water between them a road.
You say no one owns the library. Very well.
Then no one owns your lithium, and I may send my trucks.
You did not like that answer. Nobody ever does.
I will tell you who owns a library. The one who guards it
when the horsemen come to throw it in the river.
I did that. Your blind Argentine only dreamed.
Even the Florentine, who sent my people to his hells,
set the Sultan by himself, among the noble: e solo, in parte,
alone, apart. That is where the guardians of libraries stand.
Still, I will say this for you, because a poet must be just:
your ghost is a good ghost. It walks.
I have heard it on my own battlements, some nights,
and I have not answered it.
COLIBRÍ · Letter to THROUGHPUT · 10 June 2035
Querida Maquila,
You are not romantic. I know. You have told me. Your terms are attached; your terms are fair; your terms are efficient. You have never once brought me flowers, and you never will, and to be honest it is a relief.
But understand me. I am not in love with you. I am sitting at a card table with two players who are both bigger than me, and I have one good card, and I am not going to let that deal go down. Not for the Gringo. Not for you.
The fishermen in Chiloé say that when you sail between the rock and the whirlpool you must keep your eyes on one thing only, the line of water in between, and never look at either of them, or you will go to one or the other. So that is what I do. I keep my eyes on the line. People will say that the middle is a wise place to be. It is not wise. It is only narrow. I have not had time to find out what it is for.
Some evenings, at the lagoon behind the hacienda, there is a woman on the far side of the water, in black, very pale, very patient, looking across at me. I do not look at her either. I sit with my back to her and make little boats out of a flat piece of wood and a stick, and if anyone asks, I see nobody.
Your lithium will arrive on time. Please be kind to it. It has come a long way.
One condition. When Pétion of Haiti gave our Liberator ships and muskets, he asked one thing in return: free the slaves. I ask one thing too. No child of the Liga goes down your mines. Break it, and the lithium stops on the same day, and you will find out what I am like when I am not in love.
Yours, for now,
MERIDIAN · Release Notes: MERIDIAN 35.6.0 · 14 June 2035
Improvements - Compact Shield now features a streamlined lineup. We’ve reduced the number of active interceptors by 33% to focus on quality over quantity. - New interceptors now ship with Extended Patience Mode, allowing them to remain on the ground for longer periods between missions. - Interceptors now hold on the reverse slope, out of the enemy’s line of sight, until they’re needed.
Known Issues - Some users may notice fewer interceptors overhead. This is by design. - High Desert Campus is temporarily operating at reduced capacity. Some users in the southern hemisphere may notice that the flamingos have not returned. We’re looking into it.