The Librarian's Locket

I was under our half of the oculus when I found the locket. The oculus is one of the last remaining stained glass art pieces in the world, or so I am told. I'm not old enough to go outside yet.

Wait! That was a really bad beginning. Let me start again. My name is Ellie and I'm a librarian! Today is my first day running this cast. You are not listening to a lost recording, or some piece of the historical record being broadcast for strange and nefarious reasons. Nefarious, adj., wicked or criminal. I am a librarian, and you are listening to me in real-time, broadcasting from the media room of The Library (perhaps the last one in existence).

Okay, I'm not technically a Librarian yet. I am an assistant. I grew up in the Library which in-the-before was an actual city library. I can't tell you which for security reasons. The Head Librarian reassures me that many places are beginning to rebuild, and small Library Guilds are forming out there and if you need some of the knowledge that we have kept secure for generations, find your local guild and they’ll contact us. Guild, n., an association of people for mutual aid or the pursuit of a common goal.

Our ability to get you those plans for a motorcycle engine, or instructions for growing corn, or whatever, depends on our location staying secret. You can't reference a book that's been stolen away. Oh, I probably shouldn’t have told you there is an oculus, should I? I mean it is possible that your great-great granddaddy or some such was a patron of a library with an oculus and by that clue you could find us and steal all our books, but, cheesus!, How likely is that? I hope none of you know what an oculus is.

Anyway, I didn’t sit down here to talk to you about Library security. I am sure the Librarians have that handled—in-between shifts of papermaking and scribe duties. What I wanted to talk about was this locket I found. It was tucked in the stacks at #790 Recreational and Performing Arts – which, let me tell you, is a big section. The books have pictures of the most astonishing things! Dancers running casually along a stage playing with miles of fabric! Entire castles being built as backdrop for a beauty and a beast. The extravaganzas that humans used to create, thousands of them sitting together in the dark watching expensive fantasies. Ex·trav·a·gan·za, n., an elaborate and spectacular entertainment or production. If it wasn’t for those pictures, I’d never conceive of the excess our ancestors wallowed in.

Back to the locket, sorry. I opened it, and there is a tiny portrait, I think they were called photo graphs – although that makes no sense because a graph is a mathematical tool for showing relationship… well maybe they called them photo graphs because they showed someone you were in relation with? Gaahhh! I got sidetracked again. Gretta, the lead Reference Librarian says that distraction is a natural part of language development in a world where you only get to speak to adults through glass or through mechanical means until you pass the age of infection. Kids haven’t learned to focus their communication skills yet.

Did you know there is a really wide age gap in the genealogy charts of the original Librarians? The ones who locked down in the local library to escape the plague outside. All the kids died, and they kept dying. It took them almost twenty years to figure out how to keep them alive. Everyone pretty much thought it was the end of the human race. Librarians are good at figuring stuff out though, and they realized that the adults were transmitting a virus they didn’t even know they were carrying. And that virus is deadly to anyone under age sixteen. They did what Librarians do best; they started a process. Now, when a baby is born here in the library, it is immediately passed through the barrier to the kid’s side and we Assistants take care of it. The adults think we don’t know how the new babies appear – but all I have to say to that is Boom! The Dew six-ten and three-seven-zero! Taught me everything I wanted to know about how you make babies and how you are supposed to teach kids about the subject.

Where was I? Oh yeah! The locket! As an assistant, my job is to fetch books from the shelves on my side and pass them through to the Librarians on the other side. I also reshelve books once the scribes are done with them. That is why I know the Dewey Decimal system. I call it The Dew for short. It is an ancient classification system that was designed to help Librarians find books and to organize shelves by book relationships… Whoa! The Dew is a graph! Mind blown! Well maybe not technically a graph because it isn’t visual but imagine if the Dew could walk into the library and project and picture on the movie screen of its real nature, and that baby would be a graph! I love making connections.

The Library has taught me that everything in the world is connected in one way or another. Every ecosystem is reliant on every other ecosystem and when you destroy one, it is like pulling the bottom card from the house you have built. Nine times out of ten, it is going to come crashing down. That is because an Ecosystem, n., is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Those people in the long ago, with their miles of fabric so cheap you could dance with it, they didn’t pay attention to the interacting part. And they kept spending money and buying stupid things and killing ecosystems until the whole thing collapsed and left us with a stew of novel viruses, heat domes, flooding, and freak storms. And all of that was followed by starvation, mass death, and doom.

Here at the Library, we share our knowledge freely, but carefully. Books degrade with time. That’s why we always wear gloves when handling them and we do our best to keep a cool and stable environment. And we are scribing them as fast as we can. And we hunt rats with a vengeance – that’s my favorite part of the week!

Wow! I’m rambling again; it’s hard to choose what to say that will make sense to another human. I mean, do you even know all the words I know? Probably not, because you didn’t grow up in a library. So how can you know what I mean if I use a word you don’t know? You can’t just look it up. I’ve heard enough stories of how rough it is out there to know that you are not likely hauling around a dictionary. I’ve heard that the pages of most books were torn out and used for toilet paper out there, which is inconceivable to me. In·con·ceiv·a·ble, adj., not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable.

I’m just going to assume that you get the gist of what I’m saying. We started doing these broadcasts as a way of bringing hope back. Yes, you people out there used all the books as ass wipes, but we still have knowledge, and we can share. Contact your guild to submit a request.

Oh, hey! I bet you are curious how we keep the lights on. Yes, the library has power, limited, but enough. We have two main sources—solar and wind turbines on the roof, and a hydro electric engine in the basement that is fueled by the river beneath our foundations. It didn’t used to be a river. It was a tunnel for the subway systems. You can learn all about the different transportation methods the ancients used in Dew six-two-zero. But all you need to know for now is that water rise turned tunnels into flood zones, and the ones that were on a slope still become rivers after a hearty rain. One of the Librarians on every shift is tasked with going to the basement to flip the switch when we hear the rain start. Can’t get much solar during a three-day rain, but water turbines work almost as well.

Anyway, that was a long diversion to get to my point about the locket. It was hidden between two large books about dance. That’s how I saw the picture with all that fabric. And by the way, that fabric looked soft and kinda flowy, not scratchy and stiff like the stuff that comes off our loom. Yes, we have a Loom, n., apparatus for making fabric by weaving yarn or thread. But we don’t have sheep and all the hemp from our plaza garden is needed for paper. So, we’re stuck with fabric from flax, which they grow for the seeds and the rest of the plant can be spun into thread and I don’t know exactly how they do that because Dew six-four-zero is on the other side of the barricades and weaving is a job for a librarian.

Where was I? Oh, yeah! The locket. I found the locket and it had been there so long it was practically embedded in the covers of the two books it was between. Em-bed-ed, adj., fixed firmly and deeply in a surrounding mass; implanted. I know better than to just pull at books willy-nully. I took them to the central table. People used to come into the library and sit at these big tables and study or read, can you believe it? For free! Evidently, there used to be a lot more than this one, and truthfully, we have the floor space for it, but the other tables were sacrificed to the Gods of security and warmth in the early days when everything was insane outside, and the first librarians could think of nothing but saving the books.

I laid the joined books carefully on their spines and used a thin metal ruler, that’s a measuring device, to pry them gently apart. When they fell, Dew 792.618.AP to the left and 792.618.AS to the right, this little golden locket heart fell out. In addition to the picture inside, which is of a middle-aged woman, holding a baby in one hand and a book in the other, there was a tiny piece of paper with a Dew number on it—813.451.ST. Fiction is on the other side of the barrier, so I wrote my check-out request on the chalkboard and waited. When she brought me the book, the HL had me pass the locket through the barrier. “This is the last one,” she said. She told me that the first librarians all had matching lockets, something that was gifted to them at a Christmas party – obviously, an extravagant party. Anyway, in those years when all the children kept dying because they hadn’t worked out the barriers, the librarians devised a way to share their favorite books with those of us who came after. Each locket was hidden holding a tiny Dew number, and written inside the front cover of the book (in pencil) was the name of that Librarian and why they loved this book. “We’ve kept records,” she said. “Maybe you’ll write a book about it one day.”

I don’t have an ambition to write. I do have the ambition to read every volume in the library but the HL says it’s impossible—there are more pages in here than I will have minutes in my life, even if I lived to be a hundred and I can’t really read a whole page in a minute and wow!, kinda blows your mind if you think about it.

All I can do is read the book in front of me. Which happens to be the one the Librarian in the Locket loved the most. Shall I read it to you?