The Onyx Mind

Jessie had entered the university library under the pretense of work, but if she was being honest with herself, she had come to find a place to cry. The campus buzzed with the stress of year end exams, papers and projects, and on this particular evening it had boiled over and her eyes brimmed at the thought of her own incompetence. The old librarian glanced over her spectacles as Jessie hurried past the front desk, her backpack nearly knocking over a stack of fliers. She cast her eyes down, afraid to look at anyone, afraid her tears might betray her. Grand archways and the smell of books and academia mocked her. She felt a fraud. The past three years she had struggled to feel like she belonged. That she wasn’t smart enough, good enough, disciplined enough. And now, in the last month of her final year, she felt more stuck than ever. For the last three years, almost four, she had known this was coming. A thesis. A culmination of her journey in academic pursuit. But now. The actual… doing of it? Was eluding her. Something about a blank page had always made her panic. Why couldn’t she just. Do it? Write something. Anything. She had been at it for days. Agonizing and outlining and reframing but to no avail. Time was running out, and finding a dark place to wallow in her misery seemed the only option left. 

She barged into the stairwell of the library and descended. Down, down, down she went, following the stairwell until the worn carpet ended unceremoniously at a door covered in layers of old paint. It groaned as she threw her weight against its stiff hinges and slowly revealed the low-ceilinged expanse before her. Rows and rows of filing cabinets and old archives waiting to be digitized sat before her in quiet uniformity. The silence was broken only by her quiet sniffs as her tears flowed more freely now. She stumbled through row after row, blurred vision merging the shapes and light before her. The first door she tried was locked so she tried a second, and a third. Locked. Locked. On the fourth attempt she almost fell as the door swung unexpectedly inward revealing a small windowless room. 

Ancient wood paneling lined each wall, the burgundy carpet plush and soft giving the room a cozy feel despite the cold of the basement. A single wooden desk sat near the back facing the door, a frosted green reading lamp softly illuminating its worn surface. Odd. There was no sign of a recent occupant. Her thoughts faded when her eyes fell on the strange object in the center of the room. Balanced perfectly atop a slender golden stand stood a smooth sphere, black as night. No light reflected on its perfectly smooth surface. It seemed that everything around it was drawn to it. Consumed by it. It was almost difficult to see it properly, and Jessie couldn’t help but think it resembled a kind of black hole. She took a step forward. Then another, and became aware of a faint hum that seemed to emit from the strange sphere. Her tears forgotten, she stood transfixed. And before she realized what she was doing, she found herself reaching for it, entranced. At the moment her fingers touched the surface, a few things happened very suddenly. The blackness connected with her fingers and traveled up her hand, seeming to enter her body, fusing with it. The humming became much louder, and the lamp dimmed as the darkness of the sphere overtook the small wooden room. Before she could stop herself or move her hand away, her vision blackened and she collapsed into a heap on the floor. 

Jessie awoke with a start. Her face pressed into a small pool of drool on the carpet beneath her. She sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. Her head ached. She looked up. There sat the sphere, unharmed, unmoved. The humming faint once more. Jessie looked around to see her open backpack, and her computer nowhere to be found. Panic filled her chest. Had someone knocked her out? Stolen her laptop? Had the mystery occupant returned to rob her? She couldn’t remember seeing anyone. She stood up, vision swimming as she realized she did so much too quickly. There sat her laptop open on the desk. She turned the screen to face her and was shocked to see an open document with nearly ten pages of completed writing. Had she been… sleep writing? No. Maybe? She looked at her phone. It was nearly eight in the morning. She must have been at it all night, passed out and didn’t realize how much time had passed. And now she was late for class. Shit. 

Sitting at the back of an immense lecture hall, Jessie tuned out the drone of her professor and turned her attention to the mystery paper. She was astounded. It was her thesis, but she had never written anything this good. All of her thoughts in symphony, each argument supporting each other in a web of perfect harmony. She didn’t dare alter a single word. But it wasn’t finished. It was a good start, but it needed more. She counted down the minutes until she was free of her last class of the day, and almost skipped on her way to the library. 

Jessie burst through the basement library door. The room looked exactly the same as it had the night before. Desk toward the back, the soft glow of the lamp illuminating the wooden surfaces throughout. And the black sphere. Jessie stared as it hummed with curious power. Heart skipping with excitement, Jessie tossed her backpack on the floor next to the desk and opened her laptop, her partially finished thesis pulled up on the screen. The cursor blinked at her steadily. Waiting. When she had first enrolled in university, she never could have imagined that this is where she would be in her senior year. Was this even real? It must be. The result had certainly been real enough. She had been reading and re-reading each word all day, unable to believe that she had somehow produced such masterful work. Or had she. She couldn’t help but feel the nagging doubt that she was cheating. But hadn’t she written it? Hers were the fingers on the keyboard were they not? She didn’t have the time to debate. Deadlines are a nasty thing when they arrive too soon. This… thing needed to be finished and done. Jessie looked up from the dull glow of her screen to the patient darkness poised on its golden pedestal. She stepped toward the inky black and stared deep. Before she could change her mind, Jessie touched her fingers to the cool darkness. 

Jessie awoke to find herself seated with her head down on the desk in front of her laptop. Galvanized into action with eager anticipation she scrolled to see if there was more and… yes! Yes she had another ten pages of writing before her. She read on, thrilled by her latent talent. Eloquent, detailed and riveting arguments graced the pages on her screen. Jessie calculated that one more night of this frenzied writing trances would be enough to finish her thesis for good. Just one more night. And then it would be over and done. 

The day was a blur. Too distracted to pay attention to anything her professors said, Jamie continued to read and reread her thesis. And once again, the moment her last class of the day ended, she returned to the library. 

The door to the basement archives looked especially shabby. The paint peeled  in more than one place, and the scuff marks looked especially pronounced. It groaned in its usual protest, and she strolled through the rows of filing cabinets to the other side, counting. 

“One, two, three…” She grasped the handle of the fourth door and pushed inward. There, behind the wooden desk and the black sphere, illuminated by the soft glow of the lamp, stood the old librarian. She peered down at Jessie over her spectacles, hands clasped and unmoving. Jessie froze. She felt as if she had been caught at the scene of a horrible crime, but she wasn’t sure exactly why. She wasn’t sure what this room was or how it had been helping her, but the librarian’s piercing eyes made her feel utterly exposed. 

“Do you know what this is?” The librarian's words cut through the low hum of the sphere. Jessie could only shake her head no. 

“Many others have come before you and found this room. And while I could stand here and explain the many great mysteries of this artifact, the simple truth is this. This…” 

She waved her hand toward the sphere. 

“ …is a culmination of all the work of every student who has attended this university, compounding a millennia of research and analysis into one breathing consciousness.” She stepped from behind the desk and approached the orb, which sat perfectly still and cool on its golden perch.

“By accessing its consciousness, you are tapping into the best minds that have ever graced our grounds, and using the power of thousands of thoughts channeled through your own.”

Jessie stared into the librarians eyes, she found no accusing look, no chastisement. Only a kind of strange sadness. 

“But…” Jessie paused. “But is that wrong? Am I not the one directing it what to write? Using this… superconsciousness as a resource?” 

“Ah. Yes you are directing it what to write, but ultimately you are not the one doing the writing.” 

Jessie looked at the jet black surface with longing. And then back to the librarian's bespectacled face. 

“But what is writing a thesis like this other than synthesizing research and presenting it in an understandable way? I read what it wrote, and I couldn’t have said it better myself.” 

“The ideas and theories you are writing about have been written before by other students, yes. But there is a reason that this is kept in the basement archives.” She paused. 

“If every student came here and wrote as you have done, producing iteration upon iteration drawn from the same material, however vast the source, eventually there would be no new ideas left to explore, and each paper would be related to the other. Each written in different voices but with the same author.”

Jessie cast her eyes down. 

“The death of originality.” She said, defeated. 

The librarian looked at her with fierce approval. 

“What you bring to your writing is unique because you offer a perspective that is utterly your own, and no matter how hard it might try, this sphere cannot recreate that. Your heart and your thoughts on the page are worth preserving in their truest form. And for that reason I request that you do not come looking for this room again.” 

Jamie looked into the librarian’s kind face. She spoke again. 

“You have the capacity to think deeply and write freely. You’ll never explore your full potential if you are held captive in the realm of ideas that already exist. So I ask you to leave this here, in the archives where it belongs.” 

She offered a half smile, and made her way out of the tiny wooden room. Jessie stood unmoving for some time, pondering the librarian’s words as she stared into the humming black abyss, standing innocently inert on its golden pedestal. And without another word, she collected her things, turned out the light and left the way she came, shutting the door softly behind her.