by Logan Thrasher Collins
Six years after their wedding night, Erik’s wife Viviana died in the halls of La biblioteca de las estrellas. Viviana’s body laid on the floor of that great library, stacks of blue books scattered all around. The covers of the books were navy blue, the pages a pale cornflower blue, and the paragraphs written in brilliant sapphire ink. Erik stepped hesitantly towards his wife’s body, not wanting to comprehend the sight before him. Viviana wore a yellow sundress and her cooling skin seemed luminous beneath the azure light of the library’s electric chandeliers.
As Erik approached the body, he began to weep. His tears fell like rainwater onto the blue books, staining them with grief. Erik reminded himself that Viviana had died for a reason of her own choosing, that she had purposefully let El conocimiento de las estrellas into her brain. He knelt beside her, not wanting to move, not wanting to look away from her face. To Erik, Viviana was the most sparkly glittering girl in the universe. She had been enamored with small animals, she had danced in meadows of scarlet flowers, and she had spoken animatedly of constellations and galactic nuclei. But now her glamor had been stolen by the miniscule machines inhabiting these blue books.
Erik stood and turned away. He walked through the archway that led out of the colossal room where Viviana laid. He walked through the labyrinth of corridors and chambers, past rows upon rows of blue books on cold chromium shelves. At last, Erik found the edge of the library. He sat down in an armchair and gazed out at the stars. La biblioteca de las estrellas floated in outer space, encapsulated in a sturdy bubble of nanomembrane. The tears on Erik’s face had dried. He tried to gaze at something very far away, something beyond the galaxies of the Hubble Deep Field. He tried so very hard to see into the depths of the universe that his eyes hurt. After a long time, Erik closed his lids, surrendering to exhaustion.
In his dreams, Erik remembered Viviana. She kissed him with ferocity, sweet as sugarcane and hot as a lightning bolt. She held him tightly and kissed him and kissed him and after she finished kissing him, she whispered sweet nothings into his ears. They laid in a bed in San Juan and they loved each other desperately. But one day, Viviana said that she wanted to fall in love with the universe itself and to revel in the connectedness of all things. She told Erik that she wanted to go to die in La biblioteca de las estrellas. Erik begged her not to embark on that journey. It took a few years of back and forth, but Viviana eventually climbed aboard a silvery rocket ship and shot off to the library which waited in outer space beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Erik had heard people’s accounts of the library. They said that, in the minutes before death, one would start reading faster and faster and faster, comprehending all that ever was and all that ever would be. The end of time and the beginning, the mind of God, the purpose of life, everything. It was an outpouring of bliss and sorrow which inflated the soul to the point of bursting.
Scientists had studied La biblioteca de las estrellas. The glowing sapphire ink of the books held octillions of machines, each smaller than a single atom. Reading the books would activate the machines. They would rise up like clouds of pollen and infiltrate the brain through the eyes, the ears, and the blood. They would write changes into the synapses, transforming the gooey matrix of neuronal tissue with their ultraprecise fingers, prodding electrons this way and that. No one knew exactly what the machines did to people. No one knew who had built them. Some suspected that God itself had directly constructed the machines. Others thought that the machines were created by an unimaginably powerful alien species which had long since gone extinct. Erik had never been certain of what he believed about the origins of La biblioteca de las estrellas.
Erik opened his eyes. An eternity of stars still glittered in front of him. The library’s looming archways still waited behind him. Viviana was still dead. Erik knew that if he walked back into the labyrinth and found the room where she had read the books, her body would still lay peacefully among the tomes. He felt empty and strange. He had loved her since they were teenagers. For most of his life, he had thought that he and Viviana would grow old together. Erik wondered if it was really true that this place’s technology contained some kind of link to the deepest secrets of the cosmos. He wondered if reading those books could really give someone a glimpse of Nirvana. He wondered if Viviana’s desire to know the secrets of the universe had truly been worth dying for. He did not know.
Erik stood up from the armchair. He glanced back at the halls of the library. Perhaps someday, he would return and see what Viviana had seen, the incandescent knowledge which had pulled her soul from her body. Perhaps then he would understand. Erik took an obsidian computer out of his pocket and called an automatic rocket ship to take him back to Earth.