The air was dry, almost insufficient, and seemingly without temperature. Moldy and dusty, the kind that catches on your throat like barbs with every inhale. I tried hard not to gasp. Never had I seen so many books in my life. I reach out to the nearest shelf, carefully picking out a book that would not topple the many piles of writing. I sensed that maybe, in a previous life, this place may have been organized. No longer. Books covered every surface, piled dozens on top of dozens. Thin, hardly usable walkways separated the towers of literature blanketing the warped wooden floor. I look down at my newest treasure. The title, an array of geometrical brown indents, is in a language I can’t read. I flip open the deep maroon hard canvas cover and almost crush the first page to dust as my fingers attempt to grip it. I had created a wobbly indent, almost piercing through the brittle page, and resolved to be more careful in my exploring. After wiping my hand dry of as much oil as I could, I continued turning page after page. 

I had expected to see instructions, diagrams, explanations of old-world technology, but it was just words. Pages and pages of one sentence after the other, creating massive blocks of unbroken text. The sight was dizzying. No numbers, no separations, no drawings, no graphs—nothing to guide the eye logically from one idea to the next. What’s more: the dashes were in the middle of these endless paragraphs! As if a step would begin in the middle of a sentence! No wonder these people were killing their own planet. How could anyone follow this mess? The idea made my head spin, but my curiosity overtook me, and I put on my reading glasses. 

I focused the lens on the book and began fiddling with the knobs. Codeless. Of course. Every damn thing down here was codeless. I flipped through the menu and ran recognition on the language I was looking down at. English. A once-popular language, now almost extinct. Only linguists bothered to try and decipher its endless rules along with its endless exceptions. Those guys were heroes. Going through that so the rest of us wouldn’t have to. All their hard work culminating in a Light Reader stumbling around an eternal basement, reading some senseless flood of words, not even made of light, mind you. My one use, and it was absolutely irrelevant down here. At least the reading glasses had a few other helpful features, like translating the mass of text I held in my hands, though it hardly helped. The never-ending drone of words made it almost just as hard to follow post-translation as it was in English. My rising irritation made it increasingly difficult to ignore the musty dryness scraping at my trachea. I tried to suppress the coughing fit threatening to escape my tightening chest, but, still, I let out a few strangled coughs into my elbow.

Something stirred. In what I assumed was the far corner of the room, a few quick mechanical clicks and whirrs sounded out through the scarce strings of stale space found weaving through the labyrinth of books. My heart fluttered and my lungs ached with the desire to let the rising tension of the trapped air out. I realized I had stopped breathing as I frantically focused the lens of my reading glasses in the direction of the noise, trying to find an angle of vision through the narrow corridors, to no avail. All I could see was walls of books. My breath had begun to scream at my throat and my eyes filled with stinging tears. I didn’t trust my next exhale to be a quiet one, and fear battered stronger at my heart as it became increasingly obvious I wasn’t going to be able to hold it in.

The dam burst. Chokes and coughs clung lazily to the towers of old books, sounding almost far away as they travelled through the static air. Panic running through my body like lightning, I felt as though my throat should’ve been bleeding with the effort I put into regaining control of my breath. Every inhale made it worse, with my body then reflexively gagging to be rid of the nothingness I was choking on. The humidity of my exhales finally gathered enough in the fabric of my sleeve to slowly ease the attack on my respiratory system. Finally, as I managed to reign my breath back into control, brittle, static silence wrapped quickly around me like a blanket, muffling my now slow breaths. I waited, unmoving, listening for whatever else was making its way through the maze of disconcerting literature. Suddenly, a horrific idea settled itself deep in the pit of my navel, beginning a slow, cold churn in my stomach. This room wasn’t as big as it sounded. Lifting my reading glasses back onto my forehead and switching my Life Lenses’ lighting to “none”, I finally notice the bright red gleam peering at me through the wall of jumbled books