How to Find your Way in the Incomplete Archives

Eleven

'I see you are still waiting for the culprit,' the Librarian jumped at the sudden voice in their head, 'See, I told you the shared cognition module was creepy.'

'I was surprised,' they straightened the ends of their cloak, 'Anyways, Archivist, since you have returned does this mean you have something to say?'

'You bet I do!' the other had a triumphant edge to their words, 'Behold, the Reserve Copy of the Records of Metamorphosis!'

'The backup change logs?'

'Oh, damn it! After I thought that up, now you decide to go colloquial?' The logs in question appeared in front of the Librarian, 'Look at the entries on rows two hundred and sixty seven through five hundred and two.'

The rows had various entries but the Librarian paid special attention to the inputs of the last four columns marked – 'Title', 'Affected Pages', 'Modified By' and 'Action'.

'Attempted deletion?' the bookkeeper was outraged, 'A 'literary_user' tried to destroy the pages of these books two hundred and thirty six times? On the same series?'

'That's how it appears, yes,'

'And why did it not trigger any system alarms? Don't tell me it is because of the...'

'You guessed it, Maintenance Mode. Resources for surveillance were reallocated to classification and storage systems.'

'You do realise that book health reports are important? Why did you not think to warn me?'

The Archivist was apologetic, 'In my defence, I thought since the Library was closed to visitors during the maintenance, we could ignore possible threats for now. Besides, the books are self healing, no one could destroy them anyway,'

The Librarian took a moment to rein in their anger, 'On the bright side, this makes things easier for us. They targeted the same set of books every time. That rules out a whimsical trickster. We are looking at some creature that holds a grudge or at least, a vested interest in this series.'

'But it still doesn't add up. Even if they are characters of this story and they remembered something about it, characters can't touch their own books without getting absorbed. So we can rule that out. In addition, these books are individual worlds. The characters of one series are unknown to that of another. Why would they hold a grudge against someone they don't know?'

'Let me remind you of something you mentioned earlier about possibilities, my dear Archivist,'

'Yes, yes, the impossible, and the improbable, I get it but how does that make sense here?'

The Librarian donned a satisfied grin, or so their voice conveyed, 'What if the character knew all the other characters but was not involved in the story? Someone who knew every detail. Someone who might be dissatisfied with how the story turned out.'

'Who would care if it wasn't their own story? I mean, an unhappy reader might try throwing it away a couple of times but over two hundred is too many,'

'What if it was their own story?'

'You mean,' the Archivist picked up on the hint, 'The character is the author of the world?'

'A foul possibility. Maybe an article discussing the books. Something that captures the essence of the writer. Considering the last book was from a different publishing house, and of a lower paper quality, there must have been some tension,'

The two went quiet for a moment but the record-keeper soon returned with a response, 'Nope, nothing along that front.'

'What?' the Librarian was flabbergasted, 'Did you find nothing else by the same author? No biographies? No notes? No short stories?'