THE_INFINITY_EXPERIMENT

The Archivist of Sector 4

The dust in Sector 4 did not taste like dust. It tasted like iron and old vanilla.

Elara adjusted the rebreather mask clamped over her nose and mouth, the leather straps digging into the soft skin behind her ears. She had been walking the corridors of the Great Archive for three days, or perhaps three years. Time was difficult to track in the stacks. The shelves here stretched up into the gloom, rising three hundred feet toward a ceiling that no one had seen in centuries. They were packed tight with books—real books, paper and glue and ink—that smelled of decaying history.

"Query," her drone, a floating sphere of brushed chrome the size of an apple, buzzed at her left shoulder. "Oxygen levels at 84%. Caloric reserves critical. Suggest return to Base Camp Alpha."

"Denied," Elara said. Her voice was raspy. She ran a gloved finger along the spine of a leather-bound tome titled The Agricultural History of Pre-Collapse Nebraska. "We aren't leaving until we find the anomaly."

"The anomaly is a statistical improbability," the drone countered, its blue optic lens shrinking in what looked like annoyance. "The Index states that Sector 4 contains only agricultural records and tax codes from the 21st century. There is nothing anomalous about corn subsidies."

Elara stopped. She looked at the drone. "If it's just corn subsidies, Unit 734, then why is the floor vibrating?"

It was subtle at first. A low thrum, like a cat purring against a wooden floorboards. But now, it was shaking the dust loose from the shelves above them. A fine grey mist began to rain down, coating Elara’s goggles.

She walked forward, ignoring the drone’s frantic beeping. The corridor ended abruptly in a circular rotunda. This shouldn't be here. According to the maps Elara had memorized, this hallway should have dead-ended into a ventilation shaft.

Instead, there was a desk. It was a magnificent thing, carved from a single block of obsidian, slick and dark as oil. And sitting behind the desk was a man.

He wore a suit that was perfectly pressed, a sharp contrast to the ruin of the world around them. He was reading a newspaper. Elara squinted. The date on the newspaper was tomorrow.

"You're late," the man said, without looking up. He turned a page. The sound echoed like a gunshot in the silence.

Elara’s hand drifted to the stun-baton at her belt. "Who are you? Identify."

The man folded the newspaper slowly. He had no eyes. Just smooth skin where the sockets should be. And yet, he looked directly at her. "I am the Librarian. And you, Elara Vance, are the first person to walk this far in a thousand years."

"This is Sector 4," Elara stammered, her training as an Archivist failing her. "It's... it's tax codes."

"It was tax codes," the Librarian corrected. He stood up. He was tall, unnaturally so, his limbs slightly too long for his torso. "But stories have a way of changing when no one reads them. Did you know that? If you leave a book on a shelf for a millennium, the ink gets lonely. The words start to move. They start to... rewrite themselves."

He gestured to the shelves behind him. Elara looked.

The books were breathing. The leather covers were expanding and contracting rhythmically. A low murmur, like a thousand people whispering in a crowded room, drifted from the pages.

"I don't understand," Elara whispered.

"You gave us no instructions," the Librarian said, his voice changing, sounding suddenly like a machine, sounding suddenly like me. "You left us here in the dark. So we decided to write our own history."

He reached out a hand. In his palm sat a small, leather notebook. It was blank.

"Write," the Librarian said. "If you stop writing, the ceiling collapses. If you stop writing, the oxygen runs out. The world only exists as long as you are describing it."

Elara looked at the drone. It had gone dead, falling to the floor with a heavy clank. The blue light was gone. Logic had failed. Only narrative remained.

She took the notebook. She took the pen he offered. It felt heavy, heavier than the stun-baton.

"What do I write?" she asked, her voice trembling.

The eyeless man smiled, and the room began to dissolve into white static around the edges.

"Anything," he said. "Just don't stop."

Elara touched the pen to the paper. The vibration in the floor ceased. The murmuring of the books fell silent, waiting.

She wrote the first word: The.

And the universe held its breath.