brave new world

I was a day shy of my two hundredth birthday when I found out I wouldn't be able to die.

The last piece of information in the Library of Congress had been filed away, recategorized and re-entered into the system much more efficiently. Sixteen decades in this dark chamber, the only light coming from the high windows and the computer screens. It was done. I reflected on my success. Two hundred years, and I was still here, and the job was done.

I'd been one of the first to get the immortality treatment, a form of gene therapy that arrested growth, prevented disease, and enabled regeneration in case of massive injury. A forty-year-old librarian, I had been tasked with the feat of reorganizing the entire Library of Congress as sort of a dry run for the immortality process.

Just four others had been given eternal life. In those days, there was a prevailing concern about the effect of immortality on the human psyche, on human society. If three out of the five of us proved successful, the process would become widely available. In case of failure, there was a means of reversing the process, another therapeutic intervention that would start the clock ticking again.

I hadn't left the library in all that time, though. Powers of focus and concentration cultivated through reading and puzzles had made the world fall away, leaving only the mountain of information ahead of me, ready to be set right, given room for growth. I dimly registered the passage of time, but there was work, always work to be done. Only by looking at the time on a computer screen had I noticed the decades falling away.

Now. Everything was finished. The screen in front of me registered a polite blankness, a single line asking for a term. Everything was there. The pieces of paper, the chunks of data, the mountains of books, everything I'd labored on, searched for, read through, reclassified, loved--all ready, all available for the curious seeker.

It was time to leave.

For the first time in a hundred and sixty years, I sought out the exit. A door, its hinges long rusted, its doorknob long stuck. Still, with the patience born of two centuries of life, I worked it open with a protesting shriek, and looked down the long, dusty hallway. Overhung with cobwebs, it was, the paint that had been fresh when I started now caked with dust and filth, the result of an air-circulation system that had expired sometime around my hundred and tenth year.

The fact that it went unrepaired, that not a human body had appeared in over a century and a half, had failed to register. Light bulbs had died, one by one, the long-lived compact fluorescent balls of light admitting defeat in the face of time. The only light that remained was the weak, vanishing light off the computer screens, powered by a small nuclear processor tucked away in some forgotten chamber beyond the bookshelves. Still the marks of entropy had left no scars in my memory, obliterated by the cold light of the screen.

Finally, I came to the large double doors, my nose feeling clogged from the dust I had stirred up. Grabbing the arabesqued door levers, I pulled them open.

Nothing happened. The doors were stuck fast. Not a single inch of give, not a millimeter of motion. It was as if they had turned to slabs of stone, ancient and immovable by mortal hands.

I was not mortal. The door didn't care about that. I began to grow concerned.

I went back into the main chamber of the library. I noticed the high windows, set in the dome of the chamber, tall and thin slits of failing light, dust-encrusted. The third-level bookshelves reached to within five meters of the lower windowsills, and the walls were covered with elaborate plaster moldings. I had done some rock-climbing in my youth, so decided it would not be too difficult a task.

Climbing the winding stair, I noticed the path I had worn into the floor on the balconies encircling the enclosing dome, dark roads through fading carpet and enshrouding dust. Only the bookshelves seemed clean, the product of a hundred and sixty years of use. Reaching the third level, I looked down. The chamber seemed massive, an enormous empty space that had been my world for the intervening years.

I picked a window, approximately sixty degrees around the dome from where I had arrived on the third level, mostly because it seemed the brightest. The light streaming through was odd, dark-tinged, shifting in color. It reminded me of a night in Las Vegas, centuries past. There might be more activity up there.

Pulling an access ladder over, I lined it up with the window and gauged how much room I would have to stand on the top of the bookcase. Perhaps a foot of clearance, probably enough. Ascending the ladder, a dizzying sense of my own height, of my smallness in that echoing, papered space, came over me, and I paused a moment. If the library seemed so enormous, what effect, then, would the outside world have on me?

Shaking my head, I resolved to climb. It was time for a new sky, new air, new light. Standing now on the top of the bookcase, I looked up at the window above me, and grew dizzy again. Only a foot of clearance, just long enough--naturally--to accommodate the length of my foot. My awareness of the distance below me did nothing to help, and I pitched forward as best as I was able, clinging to the arching ferns sculpted into the plaster of the wall. Up close, the plaster was cream, almost beige, particulate. The grime had reached up here, too, and had altered the nature of the plaster. How had I missed the change in color, the change in texture?

Still, I pressed on. Anchoring my left foot on the head of a cherub, I grabbed hold of a sprig of holly, and hauled myself up onto the breasts of what could have been Lady Liberty, Holy Columbia, or any other mythical abstraction clothed as a woman. Still I climbed, and the windowsill grew closer.

I finally grabbed hold of the sill, trimmed in an expensive wood coated in cheap latex-based paint, and pulled myself up onto it, using muscles I had forgotten about for over a century, but which still worked as well as the day they had formed. Immortality has its benefits.

I stood on a four-inch wide ledge, staring through the grime. Night had fallen, and the light had changed, but it still had that strange, rainbowing quality. Gripping the sides of the window-trim so tightly I could feel my knuckles drain of blood, I butted my head forward quickly, shattering the window and covering my forehead in blood and glass. I very nearly lost consciousness, and toppled forward out of the window.

Almost immediately, I met a wall, hard, coated with a kind of steel. I gasped at the impact, rolled around, and sat down automatically. My legs dangled over the windowsill as I faced inside the library, my head leaning back against the strange steel wall. Glass fell down the sides of my face as my skin pushed it out and zipped up again. The dangerous haze in my head began to clear, and I could feel my thoughts sharpening again. Within seconds, I was back up to par, and realized what I was looking at.

Straight up, another ten meters, was a grating. Through it, the rainbowing light was filtering down from a curiously opalescent night sky, framed by tall buildings that looked odd in an undefinable way.

My library had been buried. Nearly two centuries I had spent in there, and it had been--would have been--a tomb. I had been forgotten.