Automated Card Catalog
The Black Void - Episode 379
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There is something about this place that I can't quite put my finger on.
It's so real, and yet so...unreal. At the same time. Mystical, one might
say. I sit back for a moment and take it all in, at one point forgetting
to
pedal. The quick loss of altitude startles James and I quickly resume
pedaling.
"What did you ask again?" he asks. "I'm sorry. I wasn't listening." "Well, I was wondering how we would ever find the right card. I mean, there's an infinite number of books, so there's an infinite number of cards, right? So how could all of those cards fit in this one spire?" "I don't know. All I know is that it works. I've heard that it has to deal with the size of the boxes the cards are in. When we started with a finite number of books, we supposedly used only half of this huge spire. Then, as we started collecting more and more books, we kept putting their cards in boxes that were one-half the size of the previous box, until those boxes filled up. And now that we have an infinite number of books, those boxes are infinitessimally small. Somehow, though, there's always space for another box, and somehow the cards fit in them." I don't quite understand, but I feel I'm not going to get it for a while. I instead ask, "But if the spire contains only cards, how do we get in?" James is surprisingly short and mysterious with his answer. A smile creeps up on his face as he responds, "We don't." A few short seconds later, we are standing on a ledge only a few feet from the top of the spire. I feel I should have more trouble breathing here, but the air isn't much thinner. Perhaps I think we've ascended higher than we really have? James is pointing toward a small machine with a keyboard below a small screen and to the left of a slot that the receipts from my hometown bookstore might fit in. "Go ahead, try it out. All you have to do is type in the name of the book you're looking for and the corresponding card should pop out of the slot. The only difference between this and the computer is that we have to move the cards into cyberspace for the computer to find them--kind of an imaginary world inside an imaginary world, I guess." I cautiously move my fingers over the keyboard and type in the name of the book. While it searches the infinite number of cards, I ask James, "So how does this contraption work?" "I don't know. Some would say that, like a lot of things in the city, it's run by a God. Others say it's been imbued with some kind of magic. Personally, I think there's some kind of shrinker that shrinks all the cards down to the right size to fit in the box, and some kind of scanner to read them all. But how those things work, I couldn't say. Magic, maybe. Or God." As he finishes his thoughts on the card catalog, something appears in the slot. It's a small piece of paper on which is written the following: Book: Goedel, Escher, Bach Author: Douglas R. Hofstadter One Copy in Existence Copy 1 Status: Lost Please put this slip back in the slot when done reading. Thank you. Maybe the bookworms did get to the book after all. I show the slip to James. "That's odd," he says. "That's the same status report I get when I try to look up books originating from my time and place. I think it can sense who we are, and where we come from." I finish his thought for him. "And it doesn't want us to go back." James nods in approval. "We can't access anything that might somehow remind us of the world we left. The only thing we have that can remind us is our memories. Some things, I guess, are okay for us to see. They might jog our memory, but not towards what it doesn't want us to find out. Here, let me try." He enters the name off the slip. The screen blinks an error message. "Hmm. I think you need to return the slip." I put the slip back in the slot, which promptly gobbles it back up.
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unknown adventurer
12/15/2004 1:13:00 AM
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