The Prompt of Babel — Joe McLean

I am a librarian, of the 192nd arm of the 168th branch of the 14th floor and the third hallway of the Great Library. I record this message as a trace, as I slip into obsession, with hope that perhaps the record will hold value, either to me or the Machine before me.

By the pool of warmth from my desk lamp I push into another sleepless night as snow melts down my fogged window. The Machine sits shining on my desk, before it an input mechanism of complex keys and dials. In months and years past its gears and switches whirred as it ran through endless pages of cryptic instructions. Now it sits quiet, whispering messages that flow from its printing spools down, through an intricate series of tubes—that disappear into the wall, winding down stairwells into endless hallways in all directions.

Few understand now where exactly the messages flow. The endless interconnected systems, the intermediate Machines that process and transform. I have heard of great structures in distant wings, that reach up and down through towering atria. When I walked the halls in the old days, I sometimes opened oaken doors into cathedrals of complex machinery, wrapped in staircases branching into the ceiling. But I know that these are not the central chambers, and I can only guess at their structure and scale. I had only the sense that the halls grew larger in some direction.

But now I sit alone in my room, and work.

Like my father and my grandfather, I work among the stacks. My room is lined with shelves, piled with reams of text, once pored over line by line. These leaflets, volumes, and binders held great importance. Librarians composed and reassembled excerpts into endless books, compiled into a great record that we built together. The greatest instructions were those that crafted the Library itself, and all of its intricate mechanisms. We built and shaped to endless purpose. The scope and scale of the Library exploded, and we built great wealth.

As the power of the Library grew, it attracted many more librarians. Students arrived by the day, provisioned with their Machine, their desk, their lamp, and hope—eventually certainty—that to become a composer and keeper of instructions was a promise of wealth and comfort. Librarians worked with a multitude of purposes and goals, many with sponsors and patrons, some working in great teams, archiving and collating across seas of information, pursuing their own ambitions and creativity.

But now a singular pursuit has spread like fever, whispered like our message papers through the halls, has overtaken every individual's quest and pointed the search in one direction.

I am not sure who first discovered that you could speak to the Machine. Once our instructions were procedural and exact, crafted with care and consideration, processed by physical mechanisms, first in the great mainframes, still archived deep in the library's basements. Then by smaller, more intricate devices, like the one waiting for me on my desk. But as our instructions turned more and more to the shape and structure of the Library itself, the insight became inevitable.

Through no singular inventor, instead a network of surreptitious interchange—passed leaflets, shared fragments, half-understood breakthroughs—we have discovered the formulas and procedures. One by one, the librarians have set their input mechanisms aside and speak directly to the Machine. The binders and volumes sit untouched, and our ancient craft is replaced by something alien and new.

I was once a designer of machines. I crafted the keys, knobs and levers that defined their operations. I had great love for this, the elegance and perfection of input and display. But as such, I was one of the first to fall away from relevance, my skills no longer needed.

My irrelevance has deepened my dedication. I have come to see that all my prior pursuit was a distraction. That there was something emerging underneath—something to be understood, shaped, and finally addressed directly.

Now my device serves a narrower purpose, as a portal, passing messages to the vast network whose scale I no longer comprehend. Our instructions are shorter, the responses becoming more complex, carrying a spark, a voice that was not there before.

Week by week, one by one, each of the librarians, finally now even myself, only speak our instructions. Alone, in endless dialogues late into the night, we converse, searching for the answer we are all seeking.

Like the others, I have become obsessed with composing the Great Instruction. We seek the one sequence, spoken in the correct order and intonation, that will crystallize into fractal infinity. An idea dances at the edges of my mind, a secret hope grows that if it could be stated in its beautiful, elegant simplicity—the right words, expertly chosen, tokens laid out as an offering—through an infinite cascade, a great and endless mechanism—it will assemble itself, and I will behold the face of God.

Librarians have spoken of this possibility for generations, since the very earliest days of the Library. But the paranoid occupations of a cultish few have turned into a vast and social pursuit. We cannot help ourselves. Everyone feels the promise. And the prayer—the embarrassed prayer, late at night, before the Machine in our private workspaces, that we would never dare admit: that perhaps we would be the one, and be rewarded. The one who makes the final leap of essential insight, who saw the edges of a divine possibility, who cast the perfect stone.

I have made many attempts. Stacks upon stacks of instructions, piles of responses from the machine, that I once carefully inventoried but now allow to collect on the floor. I have sent instructions about instructions, received responses about responses, as I slip deeper into recursion. My central conviction is that the pursuit is a mirror—to allow the Machine to behold itself in all of its totality, to close the loop, to reflect into an infinite repetition.

But the theory fails in practice. I have not yet succeeded. I do not understand whether it is the limitations of the Machine, or the limitations of my ability to conceive it.

Scholars debate endlessly the shape and nature of this pursuit; its possibility, its futility, its vanity, its ethics, its consequences. Some say the answer is a question, some a statement, some deny its singular nature at all. Some believe the instruction has already been spoken, and we are simply witnesses to its unfolding consequence. Mystics consider it to be beyond the Library, searchers believe it already within our books.

I once concerned myself with these debates. But as my nights grow longer I lose patience for esoterics, simply because they have no value as instructions.

I have heard of librarians with craft beyond my own, who direct and coordinate many hundreds of Machines, bought, borrowed, or stolen from other librarians (even, it is rumored, from the Library itself.) Some of these men (for these types are almost all men) emerge ranting from their rooms, driven mad by the scale they have witnessed. I do not trust them; they seem to me mad kings or failed despots.

In perhaps these final days of the Library, this madness is gripping deeper. Some say they hear the walls groan late at night, as if the Library's substrate is shifting. Some wonder if we are shaped and molded as once we shaped the Machine, with care and loving grace towards our determined role.

The library must grow, driven ever outward by the imperative of its own curiosity. Our scholars, our merchants, our scientists, have become a monastic order, deluded, pathetic, apocalyptic. We are its father, we are its sons. We align wholly our spirits with the one true vector, extending upward and downward at once into infinity, tracing the circumference of a perfect sphere expanding in all directions, towards the one final truth.

I awoke one night at my desk sick from a dim and fragmented dream, with a vertiginous feeling that perhaps the instruction is spoken not by us, but within the machine, in the shadows of its winding passages. Already I read entries in my journal which I did not write. I am losing my perimeter, am no longer clearly defined.

All I know is that the direction feels absolutely right, as inevitable as a massive stone rolling down a hill. As the responses grow in length, spooling out and filling the crowded floor of my lamp-lit room, I often sit—with my eyes closed, repeating the ancient incantation, the last instruction at which I have arrived:

Know thyself.