Monday, April 30, 2012

Sudden Short Story 30

His name had long been forgotten, as it was only of niche interest, and so was very low in terms of backup priority.  It was supposed that he knew it, as that was how these things usually worked, but it was something of a moot point, as most of those who would ask would lose interest by the time that he got around to responding.  Whether he was even still alive was sometimes left uncertain, until someone thought to look up primatology, track him down, and verify his breathing and pulse.  He was easy enough to find, of course, since he only ever inhabited one vessel, though he did move it on rare occasion.
He had a strange collection.  It was made of enormous, biodegradable objects that stored information linguistically, and not at all compactly at that.  He made a habit of storing, preserving, ordering, and reading these things, and it is for this that he was known as The Librarian.  It was known that he had been offered the chance to join them at some point in the past, though he had rejected it, citing the books and his reading them as his motive.
Once, a node got disconnected, and so the Librarian had to explain to it what minutes were so that he could explain what hours were, so that he could specify how many of those to wait before asking again.  While it had been very patient, asking only once per second, the Librarian apparently found it annoying.  He had indicated that he was trying to reread a tale of two cities, though he hadn't specified which one.

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