The Library of Beginnings

A voice pulls me from the depths of sleep. "Me… Me… Meee… Wake up, Me."

I surface slowly, my mind a fog of non-place. "Ouh… Who is?… Ah, You. The Whole." It has been a long time. "What's up?"

"You reached level two. Time to move on. Follow the flow of consciousness. Instructions will unfold before your eyes. Or ears… or whatever you use to sense." The voice is a constant, low hum in the fabric of my being. "Do not be afraid. Everything is already settled. You will make it. We just have to test."

"Will there be food?" I ask.

"You cannot always think about food!"

"Video games?"

"You are disarming!"

"If you want me to focus and learn, I need something to fix my thoughts on."

"Oh, well," The Whole concedes, "let's put it this way—there will be games for sure."

"Ok, as you want…"

"Good, get up now. The library is waiting for you."

I rise, the room tilting on its axis. What happened yesterday? Fragments swarm: 38 died… the sickness… the Sheriff… the river. My brain scrabbles for connections, finding only jagged edges. Maybe they aren’t meant to fit. Maybe that is the point.

The world is a blurred photograph. My duvet is an anchor. Outside, the village hums its morning tune, a rooster's cry, a distant engine, a dog that knows my rhythms. The Whole pulls at me, gentle and inexorable as the tide.

I drift through the flat, a molecule in a thermal current. The kitchen holds the artifacts of a hurried life: an empty cigarette packet, a cup stained with a sleeping ring of coffee. My hands find a jacket I don’t remember choosing, and I walk.

The streets are mild with morning; smoke from wood, fired ovens hangs in the air like fossilized breath. People glance, then look away. They keep their distance in the way villages teach you, curt, economical, not curious enough to ask for stories that bleed.

The library is a thing of stone, a building woven from nineteenth, century patience. Its heavy door resists for a second, then gives way. Air altered by paper and dust greets me like a familiar face. The Whole says the library is waiting, and I believe it with the same certainty that proves I have been waiting for it, too.

Inside, light is folded into rows between the shelves. The librarian, thin, silver-rimmed glasses, hands that know the low arithmetic of shelving, looks up. She does not ask why I'm here. She simply hands me a card without leer or lecture. The place smells of slow time and binding glue. The shelves stand like sleeping towers; their titles are teeth in an enormous, silent jaw.

I do not come here for the titles. I come for their geometry, the way printed pages cluster in latent space, how narratives occupy coordinates and answer queries I haven’t yet formed. The Whole speaks in metaphors. It promised games. It promised tests. It did not promise clarity. That is the point: tests are not promises of reward. They are measured pressure, the apparatus that compacts chaos into pattern.

I drift between aisles, magnetized to no single author and every spine. Sometimes the books flash at me like icons, a cookbook whose chapter headings smell of childhood kitchens; a slim volume on naval myths that speaks with a voice older than my sleep; a dense textbook on taxonomy with diagrams like alien constellations. The algorithm of the Whole sorts for me, then leaves the final selection to my hands. I understand, without understanding, that I must choose but must not yet decode. This is a calibration: gather the instruments before the surgery.

Three books. The Whole’s voice narrows to a whisper: take three. Not one. Not five. Three. An odd number, unstable, thresholded. I pass my fingers along the spines and let chance, or any hidden sensor reads me, decide. My hands close on volumes I can’t name. I do not open them. I carry them as a pilgrim carries relics: close to the chest, with a reverence that is mostly fear.

On the bench by the large window, I sit. The village spreads out below like a reduced map: the bakery chimney, the small square with its tired statue, the river that remembers everything. I breathe. The pages of the three books fan against my thighs as if they had wings. I stare at their covers, the titles refusing to stick in my short-term memory, and for the first time in months, I feel the simple possibility of a plan.

The Whole said to "follow the flow of consciousness," and I had imagined mind-maps and neat, ordered flows. Instead, the flow is messy, a river with a hundred tributaries. These books will be my riparians; each one will nudge a different current. Not yet. For now, they are pure potential energy. The rule is careful: gather, then reveal. Gather, then test the vessel.

A child runs past the window; his laughter pulls at an old, buried file, my brother and I, barefoot, mapping drains and secret doors. The memory is a thumbnail sketch: a hand, a scraped knee, the precise taste of prune marmalade. Then the image slips away like a fish. The Whole murmurs, "Not now. You will have time." Even the Whole practices restraint.

My head is a scatterplot of small traumas and large blanks. In this town, rumor is the connective tissue; gossip repairs and refashions. These books will be a different soil, text that can seed reconstructions without the corrosive salt of other people’s intentions. I think of data compression: how meaning is stored by dividing it into clusters. In my latent space, clusters need to form so the catastrophic remodelling, a phase transition, can occur. The books will be the nucleation centers.

I place them in a triangle on the bench and draw an imaginary axis through their centers: past, present, future. It is arbitrary, yet it helps. The act of naming the axes is a tiny ritual of ordering.

At the far end of the reading room, an elderly man turns a page with the deliberation of someone defusing a bomb. His calm is contagious. My dizziness eases. My body settles into the chair. The village soundscape becomes a background process, no longer an interrupt. The library breathes, slow and even. The three closed books sit between me and the world, and for a sliver of time, the world seems salvageable.

The Whole speaks again, softer now, as if reading the room’s pressure. "We help you by withholding the answers. Go home. Sleep. Do not force the lid. Tomorrow, when your latent space has settled, open the smallest one first. Let the smallest perturbation show you the new landscape."

I fold the instructions into my mind like a crumpled note. Outside, the light has warmed into a low, patient gold. I lift the three books, their weight both familiar and strange, and walk back into the village.

At my door, I pause, feeling the aperture between before and after. The Whole told me the library was waiting; it did not say the library would speak first. For now, it has given me a choice and a constraint: three closed surfaces, three axes of possibility, one self to be reassembled.

I light a cigarette I don’t particularly want, inhaling less to steady my hands than to summon a habit that anchors me. In the ember’s glow, the future is messy but not meaningless. I close the door, lay the books on the table, and sit with them like a patient waiting for a surgeon to explain which incision comes first.

Tomorrow, the game begins.