In the Stacks

Image by Thanks. All my pics are free! from Pixabay

"Seriously," the man said to himself, "how did people ever used to do this on a regular basis."

The man was looking around at rows and rows of books.  The aisle seemed to stretch on forever in front of him, and all he saw were more continuous rows of metal shelves, housing an untold number of books.

Continuing to himself, "I get that those little signs on the end of the shelves are supposed to tell me what's here, but they don't make any sense."

The man was on a mission.  He'd been given an assignment to report on a particular event in the life of someone important.  He had a name, a couple of sentences about what he was looking for, and a few keywords to help his search.

Now he was struggling.

He stood there, in the middle of an aisle, with shelves on either side of him, "why can't they join the information age, and have something in the cloud! At least give me a computer I can look stuff up on..."

He spent more time looking around to see if there would be something else that would help.  Down a ways farther there were a couple of tables to sit at, and up against a wall was a big wooden box thing that looked like it had a bunch of drawers in it, but he didn't see anything that might be useful.

In that moment, he gave up his searching for help, and took a step closer to one of the shelves with the thought that maybe if a he looked at a couple of the books, then maybe he'd have an idea of where he needed to go.  He reached up, grabbed a book, opened it up, and found himself immersed...in the least interesting thing he could imagine.  

All he found was a constant droning on about the proper ways of weaving a basket, about how long you let the wood soak, and the right pattern for going over and under, and he knew this wasn't what he was looking for.

He moved a couple of shelves down, and picked up another book.  This time he was in the middle of a cricket match with it's creases, and bowlers, and innings, and pitches, and a lot of other things that weren't understandable.  He put the book back, this time took a few steps down the row and pulled out another book.

Now he was in the middle of what appeared to be a normal day for an average person.  Nothing extraordinary was taking place, nor for the next few minutes as he was browsing the book, did it appear that anything would take place.

Again he moved down another row, with similar results, and to another row...

and another...

and another...

and another...

No where did he seem to find what he was looking for, and nowhere did he seem to figure out any system of organization.

The man knew, when he took this assignment, that it would be a challenge.  He'd never had to try and find his way around the fourth dimension before.  He assumed that it would be like his own experience in life, and there would be some sort of progression, and that (if nothing else) things would be ordered chronologically at the very least.

This library was unlike any he'd ever been in before. It was the collection of moments that made up the entirety of the fourth dimension, and moving through the shelves of books represented each moment of time, and for all the great events that had taken place, most of that time was spent with very little happening or taking place.  All those great events only make up an infinitesimal amount of the whole

The man was hopeless, because he had no idea what to do next, or where to look.  All around him, all he could see were rows of shelves, more books than he could count, and no way to know where to find what he was looking for.

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(This is the start of something different for me.  This the start of some one shot story ideas for things that run around my mind.  I promise they might make some sense, but probably not.)