Divestiture of Literature
“You’re here early.” Sam said the next morning when I walked into the break room. Usually Sam got to work before the short bus arrived and had already finished his first cup of coffee when I got there. Not today.
“I moved closer to work,” I told him, “the old place was running out of room for bookshelves.”
“That makes sense.” Sam said. “I guess.”
Sam wasn’t fooled for a second. He knew that most of the plant employees now lived in the same building that they worked in, just as he knew that I did now. In fact he’d help make it happen.
The economy of River City began to improve. Technology advanced. Moore's law continued to not be broken. The Internet grew like a bad yeast infection.
I decided to move onto a barge.
I wasn’t all that happy with all the new people moving into the old factory with me, I liked my privacy. Now that I had been evicted once, I didn’t see any reason to allow that to happen again. In order to prevent it, should the danger ever arise, I’d decided to find a home that was mobile. The re-purposed factory building that I was now living in was adjacent to a river. Some time earlier I’d noticed that there were a number of old barges tied up along the shore. I had Elvira investigate them. I watched through her eyes as she scoped them all out. More than half of the barges were now occupied by industrious squatters just like me. Some were very good carpenters and innovators...some...not so much.
If other people could live on the water then so could I. It gave me an idea, an obvious corollary to simply moving into an abandoned barge. I had Ssmoke now and that gave me a major advantage. I also didn’t need anywhere near as much room to live in as other people. I decided to build my own boat, my own design, right there in the shop. It wasn’t hard. It took a few days to think about it, to design it in my mind then but only a few minutes to conjure it from Structural Smoke. On the outside it looked like a small Trilobite type Shanty Boat®, it was actually based on the 26 x 7 Slack Tide®.
Elvira and I had also discovered libraries. (Yeah I know...duh!) A branch library was near by, and we spent a lot of time there too.
“Houston we have a problem.” I said to Elvira one evening.
“What would that be dear?” She asked me
We were in the reading room of one of the branches of the Carnegie Library of River City. Oddly enough even though they allowed me to check out several books at a time I was reluctant to do so. I felt a strange reluctance to removing books from the library.
“Books are almost holy.” I had told her. “Damaging a book is a sin and a shame. If one of my books gets damaged, one that I bought and paid for... that’s one thing. If one of these books get damaged, one that was entrusted into my care but belongs to someone else. That’s another thing. I’m reluctant to take any of them to the barge.”
“I see your point. I have a solution” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“Read fast” she said.
-Glare- ... I stared at her. (Rather like navel gazing, come to think...voices in my mind...and like that)
“No, really. All you have to do is glance at a page and I can store the content for you to read at your leisure.” she said.
“Oh?” I said. “You interest me strangely. How much storage space is available? Where is the storage space?”
“The storage space is in the SoulStone. I could give you the numbers if you like but they are so huge as to be meaningless. The SoulStone uses allotrope's of carbon in variable crystalline configurations for storage. Consider the storage space to be infinite.” She said. .
“Problem solved,” I said.
From then on he would go to the library after work, a couple or so times a week, and read for a few hours. I chose areas of study that I was interested in or thought I might be interested in at a later date. My body, under Elvira’s control, would read the books as fast as she could turn the pages, which was VERY fast. The library personnel might wonder at me sitting at a table with a book in front of me, flipping through the pages as fast as I could. They might wonder but they wouldn’t say or do anything as long as I didn’t damage the book. Iwouldn’t do that. Not damaging the book was the whole point.
Elvira could easily scan several pages per second. A six hundred page novel took me about fifteen minutes. Most books were about half that in length. We would typically go through several books an hour. Thus whenever I decided to take a break from the shop for a while it wasn’t at all unusual for me to scant thirty or more books. After a book was scanned, it was in my mind. I could ‘remember” the data. Not only that but Elvira understood it all, and could draw comparisons, conclusions, deductions, inductions and cross correlations among everything we scanned. The end result was that I understood it all too. No further studying was required. I wished that I had something similar when I was in college. Maybe I would have stayed in school longer than one and a half semesters.
Maybe.
With so many library books ‘on file’ my need for ‘dead tree’ books declined. I no longer needed the physical book itself. With the advent of e-books and the Internet, I needed less and less dead-tree books. Once I read a book I had instant access to it from then on. I found that he had an embarrassment of riches. Too many books. I began to make donations of books to needy causes. The local “friend of the library” became a repeat recipient. Eventually, except for a few ‘special friends’ with sentimental value, I no longer had any ‘dead tree’ books in my possession. Everything had been converted.
To Be Continued
Yarn
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The Hobo Picture is a Public Domain image from
Samantha at the Worlds Fair
by Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
Illustrated by
Baron C. De Grimm published by
Funk and Wagnall's Company 1893
Unless noted
All other Illustrations are from
Pixabay