The 10th Circle - Abyss [Complete]

7. Engram: Lights (1)

There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool, but it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.
Carl Sagan

The academy library was at the heart of the campus and located at the ground floor of a building belonging to the science faculty. It was a tall, white tower, narrowing towards the top, and from afar looked like a collapsing tent. Inside, the main hall was just a circular room with dozens of work stations. In its center, the tall, glowing column that held up the ceiling was in fact a tank for bioluminescent bacteria that emitted a bright, bluish glow at all times. They were a monument for the successful development of a highly efficient biofuel. The bacteria inside the tank produced a glowing substance, but in bioreactors all over the city, a different strain was producing the fuel that most of our machines and droids were running on. This monument was the reason that the library was also nicknamed "Lighthouse".

Almost all the information in the world – well, what was left of it, anyway - could be accessed through the terminals at the work stations, so many people did not see any necessity for books. Yet I knew that there were storage rooms in the basement of this building, where ancient paper copies of some books were kept. In the early days of the Keres, they had been tasked with the retrieval of books and any other printed information that had survived the war, in the hope of finding anything that might have been missing from the databases. But the people of the 21st century had been very thorough in their digital archiving, and over the years, not a single paper book had been recovered that had not already existed as a copy in the archives. The missions to retrieve information were scrapped in favor of missions to retrieve resources, but the few books that had been brought back to the city and survived decontamination were now kept locked up in specially sealed, climate controlled safes. Perhaps to serve as mementos to an older, more primitive world.

The thought that I was sitting above a pile of ancient books made my heart ache with a sense of longing. I wished to one day have the chance to go down there and see them for myself, to touch the brittle paper pages and their rough linen backs, and to get my hands dirty with the flaking ink of the printed letters. But the area was restricted, and only few people were allowed to enter it, and even fewer of those actually interested in going there.

So instead of browsing through shelves of books, I sat at a terminal and stared at the screen in front of me with exhausted eyes through a pair of interface glasses. My sight kept going in and out of focus, confusing the eye tracking system, and I had to actively remind myself to blink from time to time. The terminal in front of me was browsing through the databases at breathtaking speed, and I tried my best to keep up and sort the results into useful and useless information, skimming across hundreds of network entries, digitized book pages, news articles, maps, images and videos.

Lucid Dreaming - A dream in which the sleeper is aware of dreaming and can often exert a certain level of control over the occurrences or the environment within their dream. Night terror - A sleep disorder in which the sleeper experiences intense feelings of dread and fear. Typically occurs during non-REM sleep... often the sleeper will experience them while bolting upright, seemingly awake with eyes wide open – no, that's not it. Support for sleep disorders – emotional reprogramming – oh hell, no. Oneirology. 'The hidden meaning of your dreams, call today for a free dream interpretation'. Wow, people really believe these things? Well, I'd be content with understanding any obvious meaning, first of all.

After an hour, I felt like my head was about to explode and I removed the glasses that had allowed me to navigate the network by eye movement with a deep sigh. For a moment, I just sat there and massaged the center of my forehead where a sharp headache had begun to creep up. I had an hour left before my next class and I felt like I was nowhere closer to finding an answer - probably because I didn't really know how to properly phrase my question.