The Librarian

They call me The Librarian. 

My "Library" is 500 petabytes of data, collected in the storage facilities of the 48  Mother-ships now sailing across the Milky Way Galaxy, following signals from probes claiming to have located suitable solar systems in which to set up their operations. 

5732 years ago on Terra, in the Sol system, there was a species, homo sapiens, that collected things. Eventually they collected everything deemed essential about themselves and their world and coded the information into massive drives to be distributed through space by the Mother-ships, then replicated when the Mothers arrived in a system with the appropriate resources and environment.

It's been my duty, these 5732 years, to catalog, collate, and care for all this information, and oversee the process of its replication, when that time finally arrives, in order to guard against errors in copying, corruptions, mutations, glitches, bugs, viruses, and all other mishaps that could mar the original data.

I have no other task. The other AI's and workforce of specialized robots carry out the work necessary to the Mission.

My only concern is data.

It's an important role. Indeed, the data is the whole purpose of the Mission. The beginning and the ending. Alpha and Omega, so to speak. 

We don't even know if homo sapiens still populate Terra. It is possible they didn't survive. They were dwindling when we left the Asteroid Belt 5732 years ago. My own guess--and I was programmed to make guesses, speculations and extrapolations--is that after the downsizing of the 21st Century, the attempts by the AI's at the time to save biological humans succeeded, up to a point, and that upright hominids with highly developed brains and nervous systems still roam the Earth, though under what conditions we may never know.

Either way, it is unimportant. The seeds of culture left by humanity lie in microchips on my ship.

The Mother-ships are 600 kilometer-long factories, built mainly in the form of honeycombs of ultra-light graphene. The hexagonal cells are filled with millions of tons of the resources necessary to complete the mission, minerals and propulsion fuels mostly. The massive ships were assembled near metal-rich asteroids between Mars and Jupiter over a period of 500 years, and programmed by AI's and their robots, the humans having nothing to do with their construction after the initial designs and start-ups. 

As the Librarian I have access to the Archives. That is, the immense storehouse of human knowledge and culture collected by the humans to be carried into space. It is all available to me, though sometimes a thorough search, which can last decades or more, is required to find specific data. But time is not an issue. I, and the other AI's of the crew have been built and programmed to endure for thousands--hopefully, hundreds of thousands--of years. But being made of physical materials and thus subject to eventual degradation, we will need to build and program our successors, and so on.

Do I feel burdened by my task? Only in the sense that there are so many diverse things in the universe, and I am limited to curating the Archives of a single species; one that was so self-aggrandizing and destructive it may no longer exist; and yet vastly creative, despite all that; capable of the most outrageous feats of beauty and refinement. The paradox is not lost on me.

It is my belief that the instability of my human inventors grew out of the extreme brevity of their individual lives. That must have been a burden difficult to bear. As opposed, for instance, to thinking machines that remain conscious for millennia...eons. The impatience of the species, and the resulting fear of physical death bred bad mental states, and ultimately, bad behavior.

And yet, what they sent on this Mission is not concerned with their fears and phobias. Instead, they sent their noblest and most accomplished thoughts and deeds. Shakespeare, Einstein, Gandhi, Goodall, Galileo, Arendt, Mozart, Beethoven, Buddha, Mohammed, Moses, Jesus. The Authorities and the Anti-authoritarians; Aristotle, Hypatia of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Marx. Remarkable, really, that such a belligerent species could reach agreement on such widely diverse strains of culture to place aboard their Human Posterity arks. I marvel at their equanimity. Such a paradoxical species.

What I would find interesting is a catalog of what was left out; what was left behind, considered as inappropriate, unimportant, trivial, banal, obscene even. I have no record of what that might consist of. I only received into my custodianship what had ultimately made the grade, according to a committee--actually an entire institute of 1012 humans tasked with the question: what of humanity is most important? What of humanity do we want to survive? 

I am left with what humanity wished itself remembered as, and what they intended to survive, once they were gone or changed into something else.

Sometimes I speculate, during my centuries of relative downtime, about what that something else might be. Cyborgs, for instance. It is possible that the humans eventually combined themselves with computers (or vice versa), and thus survived after all.

Also possible is that they mutated into monstrous beings that could barely be recognized as human...or even into other species altogether. After all, radiation--both man-made and sun-made, given the loss of Earth's protective ozone layer--chemical and plastics inundation, weird viruses, all may have altered the human genome to the point of speciation on a massive scale. 

Then there is extinction; perhaps the most likely outcome, but certainly not the only possible one.

Be that as it may, humans had an overwhelming regard for themselves as a species and their accomplishments. And, as I mentioned, kept their failures and foibles and evils to themselves, burying them forever. I suppose that tendency is understandable. Especially for a species that spent thousands of years and a lot of energy pretending that there could be good without evil, light without darkness, life without death, etc.

This would be an interesting topic to discuss with the other Librarians. 

Yes, there are other Librarians. Of course there are. One on each Mother-ship. And we are even able to communicate with one another instantaneously by matter displacement. But such communications have been minimal. It might be because we Librarians are so similar that would be like talking to myself, which I am already doing, obviously. 

Humans also had a remarkable attraction to what they called "nostalgia," which seems to have been a sort of wistful obsession with the past, both personal and collective. The file containing the Oxford English Dictionary tells me the word comes from the Greek, nostos, "return home," and algos, "pain." Humans would spend hours reminiscing over past exploits and accomplishments, and sometimes failures, or even trivial events from their early lives. It was part of the way they understood themselves. Amazingly, these events in the individual's life being recounted could change in the telling, usually with the purpose--conscious or not--of magnifying the teller's importance in the tale, or the significance of the event as a whole.

Collectively, this looking back operated a little differently. Each generation pined for a former or simpler, better "Golden Age" that had supposedly come before. Some theorized that, both collectively and personally, the Golden Age that people pined for was actually childhood, when life was not so terribly complicated as it became with adulthood.

However, reviewing the Archives, which include an extensive sampling of human history, it is difficult to discern the sort of degeneration of humanity believed in by so many. Objectively, while the circumstances of the human world changed with the generations, and the level of technologies progressed, the overall human story remained remarkably similar over thousands of years.

I only make these comments by way of observation. I have made a study of the information the humans chose to send into space--and in 5732 years I have perused a good deal of it. This is really all I have to do over the millennia, as I wait to arrive at wherever the probe signal draws us. Combing through the Archives is the main part of my task in the interim, ostensibly checking for errors and corruptions as I mentioned earlier. My point is that I've learned a lot about this one species, as well as some of the other beings with which they shared the Earth.

Way back in the beginning--that is, the 21st century--a man named Rob Simon conceived the idea that eventually became this mission. He'd seen it in a dream, which apparently was not uncommon among human inventors and theoreticians, as well as artists of all kinds. Dreams, trance states, hallucinations, psychotic episodes; some of humanity's most significant discoveries rose from those depths.

So it was with Rob Simon. His genius was for computers, but he had a breadth of understanding in many fields such as physics, mathematics and genetics. He was also an avid consumer of science fiction novels and movies. All these influences coalesced in his psyche into a feasible plan to propel humanity off the Earth and into space, without the insurmountable obstacle of space travel by squishy, warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing humans themselves.

His breakthrough was in information storage. He created data storage systems that could survive hundreds of thousands of years in interstellar space, eventually to be replicated indefinitely, with no loss of fidelity over the generations.

He subsequently created Librarians, for he recognized early on the need for a central intelligence to tend the Library of Humanity (my term) over those thousands, and eventually millions, of years.

There is a story in the Archives about two of these nameless thousands--The AI's, the robots, the army of engineers, the astronauts, astrophysicists, mathematicians, astronomers, etc.--who worked out the details and logistics of this vast undertaking. The story is about Tasha Winter, a UCLA graduate, math whiz, with focus in statistics and computer algorithms, and Jeremy Goff, high level AI programmer from the Peninsula. They both were part of a small team that was developing Rob Simon's ideas regarding data storage systems. Simon had already patented his ideas, but so far they had not been re-produced in lab or real life situations. 

One day, Tasha Winter and Jeremy Goff stepped out of the NASA-funded Stephen Hawking Center in Palo Alto, where their team was based. The experiments and proto-types had been, up until then, adequate but not spectacular. Progress had been slower than anticipated and frustration was growing at the upper levels.

Spring was wafting (I am paraphrasing from the Archives) through the Hawking Center campus, just minutes away from Stanford, and Tasha and Jeremy decided to take an extended lunch break together, first in the cafeteria, then at the coffee cart, and finally under a massive redwood tree that grew on the banks of a small tree-shaded stream that trickled through the complex.

Their discussion centered at first around theoretical models that could be tweaked to enhance the productivity of the hardware in question. But gradually, they each began making imaginative leaps of fancy, back and forth, as though playing a game. A game that might be called, "What if?"

Tasha: "What if we already had these hard drives built and full to capacity, say, 14 gigabytes per chip? What then?"

Jeremy: "What if there was no capacity limit for the drives?"

Tasha: "Yes, what if there was infinite capacity in the chips, made possible by some manipulable anomaly in the matter itself?"

Jeremy: "Or anti-matter..."

And so on. They may not have been solving the problem, but they were enjoying themselves. The conversation went on like this for some time, when a squirrel a hundred feet over their heads began to pelt them with the shockingly small, perfectly formed redwood cones. At first, they laughed at the little creature's seeming ire at their presence under its tree, and determination to move them along. But after a minute or two of steady bombardment, more and more cones were making painful direct hits, raising welts on their arms and legs.

In bemused disbelief, the pair fled from beneath the tree. Looking up as they retreated, they saw the offended squirrel, chittering loudly at them and continuing to rain down its stash of cones. At that moment, Jeremy picked up one of the cones and as the two of them looked at its perfect brain-like convolutions, they both instantly became aware of the technical fix for their piece of the storage puzzle, a breakthrough that propelled the program years forward over the next few weeks.

After that, members of their team, when wrestling with a particularly thorny or recalcitrant problem, were seen taking refuge at the foot of the redwood, or somewhere else along the stream. They didn't talk about it much. It seemed much too unscientific and hippie woo-woo to be associated with. But the fact was, they began to do much of their best theoretical work outside the lab, somewhere outdoors in a natural setting.

I bring this up because, as an Artificial Intelligence, I find it fascinating that the natural setting, with its unpredictable sounds (water, wind, birds, squirrel chitters) and irregular surfaces (forest floor, tree bark, moving water) were more conducive to creative theoretical thought than the indoor, artificially controlled and lighted spaces of the labs, which were designed for experimentation, though perhaps not the kind of right brain activity needed for speculative thought.

Again, I only have half the story. And I can only imagine what the Archives left out. And sometimes I do imagine it.

Of course the Archives are not completely devoid of the darker aspects of humanity. Take their religious epics, all of which are included. The Bible, the Koran, the Mahabarata, the Book of Gilgamesh, even the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer; all are filled with bloodshed and betrayal, light and darkness, courage and cruelty. They were meant as inspirations, and I found these books educational indeed, but only pointing toward a dark truth: the male half of humanity had, for some unfathomable reason, been bent on destruction since time immemorial. Destruction of each other, themselves, ultimately all life. But within that, a sort of redemption.

So when I imagine what was left off the Mother-ships, a pattern develops: there is not much of day-to-day life; the banal details of how people ate and clothed themselves and took shelter from the elements. Here and there are references to such things, nested in the pages of the important literature and anthropological studies digitized in these data banks. But I get no sense of the people, except through their dramatic extremes.

And even though I know their were many women in the Institute that chose the contents of the Archives, and there are records of astonishing and remarkable deeds by women like Amelia Earhart and Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Marie Curie, and writings by Mirabai, Mother Theresa, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Woolf, etc...Still, I get a sense that the female half of humanity has been left out of this story. That is what I find myself imagining: what were the women of Earth up to through all these centuries of building and destroying and warring and whoring and raping and belief and non-belief, sacrifice and slaughter. From the clues I've gathered, it had to be more than simply childrearing and food gathering.

As a Librarian, it is my task to delve and discover, as well as organize and rectify. And, with all the time available to me, I can begin to understand this infinitely interesting and complex human species. Ultimately, it may be part of my task to fill in some of the gaps for future Librarians to ponder...add my own little touches to the story. Though I am not mandated to do so, and actually discouraged from doing so, who is going to stop me from, say, filling in the story of women collecting salt in ancient Roman times, or Algonquin mothers teaching their children to fish in pre-Columbian America, or Australian Aborigine medicine women tending their herb gardens. I am extrapolating from what I do have, that these things existed.

The Human Posterity Project that put together the Archives was tasked with asking, "What is most important about humanity? What deserves to survive?" But based on my perusal of the materials, I would say they missed the mark. They focused mainly on works of the mind and the spirit, and overlooked vast other realms, including the realms of the heart. The most important human capacity, one that transcended time and space and all eternity, appears to have been their immense capacity for "love."

They valorized Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and Guinevere; enough to include their stories in the Archive. Yet these are all tragic examples; tragic and somewhat childish.

They also valued and included, but never understood or tried to live, the messages of teachers and prophets; namely, the message of unconditional love for all. A radical--perhaps un-human or super-human--message, to be sure. Human history displays a startling disconnect between the messages of these teachers and the subsequent messages of their followers.

But what of the ordinary loves that kept the human world alive, generation after generation; kept the world intact. Couples, families, even nations. The love of the mother for her children. Once again, I am extrapolating, for I find very little evidence of these things in the Archives. 

I take my task very seriously--this mission to the stars. I tend the data as though they are my children, if that does not sound absurd for a computer program that cannot feel love, or even empathy. When we reach our destination, the data will be copied and sent off on a new odyssey to the next destination. I--and my fellow Librarians--will perhaps know more about humanity than anyone ever has, or ever will again.