Caidence M, a scholar nearing his master’s completion, accesses the Library’s holographic records to explore the future history of Earth, uncovering mysteries about its societies, species, and cataclysmic events.
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This history is transcribed from a place beyond time, language, and mind, read the introduction, as it always did, and continued: For the purposes of remembrance, familiarity, and foresight, records will be related at a resonant level of understanding so to benefit those aspiring to learn, to expand, and to integrate. Goes with lightness, fortune’s song.
He frowned, then smiled. Interesting, he thought, as he scanned the words and phrases appearing on his lumaglass tablet as it smoothly and rapidly translated rows and columns of unfamiliar symbols. He’d never had the chance to study these particular symbols before, and he found the exercise quite stimulating. Remembrance, familiarity, and foresight…
Caidence M is a scholar nearing the completion of his mastery studies. Through his advanced level of training and education, he has acquired the requisites to gain access to the Great Holos of the Library — to further delve into a lifelong pursuit of that in which he has a passionate interest: history. Specifically, the future history of a world he’s come to understand was, or rather would be, called Earth.
While the university’s dataframes certainly can access and, as an immense network, store nearly all of the galaxy’s rich information, records, and understanding, the Library offers a specificity and inexhaustible granularity of study. It is also based on an experiential holographic technology that traditional dataframe systems simply could not offer. It was intense, to be sure, yet Caidence had known, since he was but three cycles of age, that this was for which he was purposed.
Most interesting to him was exploring the cultures, societies, and technologically advanced species of many varied worlds — from across time, space, and dimension. He’d learned of numerous parallels and commonalities between his own society and life in the herenow. Earth was his current focus, and the latter millennia of its story were deeply compelling.
M, as his home planetoid was known, is a manufactured, conscious entity — designed, from the infinitesimal to the extravagant — to be an energetically stable, self-maintaining, self-sustaining superstructure. He is one of the nearly five hundred million citizens who habitated on M — itself being one of the oldest of many thousands of such planetoids, distributed throughout the galaxy.
The Library is a structure at the Nexus, near the center of the galaxy. It is energetically projected and, thus, eternally protected. It is not directly accessible, however, being of holographic construction, its entirety could be accessed through scaled synchronous portals, anchored and sustained inside the core of select planetoids, such as the one inside M. Scholars who achieved adequate status were conformed through the process in such a way that enabled their access to Library technology. It was thus that the Librarians, an ancient, benevolent, non-corporeal race, became aware of them and subsequently granted them entry.
The tablet continued its translations while Caidence pondered the values and belief systems that had evolved. The economies, ecologies, governments, sciences, militias, and other such constructs were fascinating to him. What cataclysms may have occurred? How many derivations of dominant species proliferated? Were exospecies intrusive or primarily passive? Earth, he was discovering, would keep his mind rapt for many a term. The Library would vastly expand on the records he currently had access to. The experience seemed limitless, but he was ready, able, and willing.