A shopkeep, falling through the empty space between atoms.

A shadow, moving of its own accord.

A thing in the non-visible frequencies.

Click.

On the fringe of normalcy is a library of things that never happened. It stands on a fractal shore of black sand, overlooking a sea of nothing.

One would be remiss in saying it was indescribable, but in the way its construction stands it would be far easier to describe it in what it is not. It is not round, nor is it sharp. It is not small, but it is not wide. It is not securely attached to the ground, and it is not in perfect condition. It is not right, as in it does not adhere to the standard rules of geometry. It is not real.

It is more an impression than it is an actual building.

An alchemist, falling upwards.

A child, willing their imaginary friend to physical form.

A pot of water, boiling at zero degrees.

Click.

Inside the building, through its set of grand blue-steel doors, is no better. It has stairs of broad strokes and bends that shift as the eye perceives, bending along one’s peripheral vision. It is a building that is, by necessity, hard to perceive. It is difficult to cram so much space into so little a building, especially when working with asymptotic geometry.

A ticking clicked through the walls, gears moving and churning with slight oscillations. The building made a million micro-adjustments in its relative location in reality. It walked a very fine line, at least as far as a building could walk.

Inside this building were millions of shelves of trillions of scrolls, each tightly wound with threads of sinew and bright red wax seals. They bent far below the not-ground and high into the not-loft, traced with glyphs of unlight, binding their exact dimension in unreality. The structure clicked with the whirring and humming of the Great Blind Scribe-Machine, suspended from the theoretical apex of the tower like a mechanical spider.

A crooked man on a crooked road.

A statue forgetting it’s not alive, and bleeding.

An individual named Reza Vengarl.

Click.

At an undefined point in the structure was a small platform, somewhere in what could be considered the center of the scroll-racks. Harros-1’s eye clusters, twitching and whirring with camera-shutter irises, flittered over the blinking lights of the terminal in front of it, flashing dozens of times with routine technical blips, filings, and archival processes.

Harros-1’s digits addressed each blip in turn with clockwork precision. All is as it should be. One could think of Harros-1 as a sort of gardener. A gardener of Things, gently trimming and pruning reality so the right Things Happened, and the wrong ones didn’t. It was a peaceful life, although Harros-1 never knew any other. It was constructed within this not-structure, and here it would remain. If Harros-1 could be said to experience a single emotion, it would be contentment.

Harros-1 was the assistant of the Great Blind Scribe-Machine, a being with no true name.

Time was a complicated thing, one the library simply never regarded. On the shores of black sand it stood, winding into obtuse dimensions, uncaring for the ongoing passage of time outside.

The Precepts of Harros-1 were simple; Maintain. Garden. The scope of reality was an enormous clockwork garden, but every now and again a gear turned incorrectly. It was Harros-1’s job to make sure this did not happen. When the second hand skipped a beat, it was Harros-1’s responsibility to wind back the clock and undo the mechanical error. Sometimes this meant trimming a simple thing. Sometimes this meant an entire person, or entire branches of time. Little mattered to Harros-1, as detached from baseline reality as it was. It had seen entire histories relegated to the waste bin of existence, pruned away as if it simply never existed.

A king, surviving a foolproof plan.

A great machine, becoming God.

A clock, measuring a different timeline.

It adjusted its cloak to reveal a large bag of scrolls. With practiced motions, it removed each scroll, one by one, and gently fed them into the machine. It hummed and whirred and clicked as it annotated and processed the scrolls, feeding them into a grander machine which was not round, which in turn sorted them into the racks per Harros-1’s instructions. It then sent the scrolls upwards, into the mouth of the Great Blind Scribe-Machine, who didn’t exist. Such a thing which actions changes in reality cannot be said to be Real. It would be like eating one’s own mouth. And so, the Great Blind Scribe-Machine, who was still a blueprint, was a necessary paradox. Both was and wasn’t, is and isn’t, will and won’t.

A set of keys, simply disappearing when someone forgot about them.

A baby, reciting the formula to the Magnum Opus between cries.

A cat, barking.

Click.

These were things that never Happened. They did, but then they didn’t. The shopkeep was returned to his relative position in reality before he fell. The pot unboiled, the baby’s formula was unheard. The cat was alone to begin with, so hardly any corrections were made.

From the Great Blind Scribe-Machine’s mouth the scrolls filtered down below (if it could be considered as such) into something which wrapped them and sealed them with a mnemonic stamp.

Harros-1 watched the scrolls go up (maybe down) along the shelves. Its eyes were specifically calculated and tuned to the local reality, and what would have been unknowable to an organism bent along a predictable and distinctly calculable arc, each scroll simultaneously within and without reach.

A door which led to a space a kilometer in the air.

A wanderer who could not be seen.

A train, riding off the tracks and into the forest.

Click.

These things happened, and then they unhappened.

The terminal blinked red. Red? Red only came around once in a very long while. Glyphs of cipher slid across the terminal.

 Consequences of such a thing were dire. If a Thing wasn’t filed correctly, it could branch reality, it could spiral downwards into the horrible Unwanted Design, a reality which could not be controlled with such perfect efficiency. It simply could not do—a bug such as this could rot the tree down to the roots. The last time it happened, Harros-1 narrowly avoided a total reality-restructuring event, and it did so by dumping untold millennia from the future and far past into the void. Mankind didn’t notice. They never did, and Harros-1 never knew why. Wouldn’t they notice a hundred years missing from the collective consciousness?

Harros-1 did not feel urgency, simply comprehended the situation and moved to handle it.

Noospheric integrity at risk, said the Great Blind Scribe-Machine in tones that couldn’t happen.

Harros-1 knew what this particular incident meant. In fact, it was literally built to know what each and every code on this terminal meant. Red had a numerical value, or at the very least the specific shade of red. It meant something hadn’t been filed correctly. Something that Shouldn’t Happen had Happened, and it hasn’t been filed and trimmed.

Noospheric integrity deteriorating. 96%. Of course, this information was communicated through various shades of colours comprehensible only to Harros-1’s visual array. For example, the word “noospheric” was somewhere in the middle of cyan, magenta, and bright green.

Handle it, said the Great Blind Scribe-Machine in the manner of a quill on dry parchment.

The order was an uncanny pressure which would collapse the viscera of a living being, an invisible wall pressing into the body on the inside of the skin.

Harros-1 filed away three correctly archived Things before leaving its post to head towards the Omniscope.

The Omniscope was much like a telescope. It was mounted in a large dome on a very large swivel. It had a very long neck and a gargantuan crystal lens. Had it been in a building with ordinary topography, it would be at the top. It was emblazoned along its length with dozens of glyphs which bent and writhed as one witnessed them, desperate not to be perceived.

The primary difference between the Omniscope and a telescope was, well, the scope. A telescope would view however far the make would allow. The Omniscope (and a keen reader might have guessed as much by now, though Harros-1 never quite grasped subtlety), saw both everywhere and everywhen. It was very convenient in Harros-1’s line of work. It set its visual array to the cluster lens and got to adjusting the hilariously large dial on the side, looking for aberrations in the sine wave of Things.

Eventually, it found it.

It began its analysis.

###########

Nikita closed her book. It was a big square thing with a squeaky cover and a much-loved spine. Dozens of insects drawn in incredible detail adorned the front. Her fingers rubbed over the faded library stamp, slightly sticky where the ink had given way.

According to it, this was the time of year that Hadernite butterflies began their migration, or at the very least migrated through the Andille Plateau.

Noospheric integrity at 84%.

Her room was a quaint thing, baby blue walls painted over half a dozen tenants of nicotine staining. Three bookshelves stood, about as full of books about insects as small glass jars with tiny biospheres inside. Upon her bed, even, was a quilt emblazoned with a large butterfly.

Yellow light poured through the window, and she quietly hummed to herself.

She heard her parents call for her. She concluded the tune before uncrossing her legs and setting out the door, down the creaky wooden stairs.

Noospheric integrity at 78%. Harros-1 watched closely. The Great Blind Scribe-Machine breathed down its neck.

Her parents sat at a small wooden table that was crooked on one end. They conversed, and Nikita listened to very little. She was thinking about the butterflies.

As soon as the conversation was done–something about chores, she thought–she went and retrieved a cup of water and a teaspoon of sugar. She read–nay, she knew–butterflies loved sugar. And she loved the butterflies, with all her childlike wonder and joy for the world.

She loved many things. She loved butterflies. She loved drawing. She loved the sun, she loved the rain, she loved her parents and she loved asking questions. She did not know the cold hoarfrost of hate, or spurn. She knew the warm ray of kindness. Even if the world wasn’t kind to her sometimes, that was okay. She would return all she had to all she could.

Noospheric integrity at 65%. Harros-1 grabbed a quill and held it to the undulating parchment of a scroll. Then it paused.

Nikita opened the rickety screen door and set out onto her porch. She set the cup of water on the peeling paint of the railing, and she waited.

Noospheric integrity at 43%. Harros-1 shifted focus.

#####

Animals do not name themselves. That is a human thing to do, to assign a quantifiable sound that is yours. It is in that way that automatons echo humans. They like their designations. Animals, however, simply know themselves. They do not think of themselves or others as names, they simply know. There is a beauty in that, to be certain.

This butterfly was dying. It was a long and hard migration season, and it was dying, and it knew it. Deep in its thorax, it knew this stretch of yellow grass would be the last thing it saw.

Noospheric integrity at 32%. Approaching critical thresholds. Harros-1, prune the child.

Until it caught something on the wind.

Noospheric integrity at 28%. I can’t.

Something sweet.

18%. The Unwanted Design must not come to pass. The eternal crawl of entropy will settle in these halls. This tower cannot become real. I cannot become real.

It fluttered over to a vast wooden structure, looming over the horizon.

11%. Look, Great Machine. Harros-1 felt something in its chest.

With failing beats of its tiny wings, it settled on the edge of a great reflective surface, containing an expanse of pure nectar. A titan loomed over, watching this dying creature as it dipped its proboscis into the mixture and drank deeply of it.

5%. CORRECT IMMEDIATELY.

And it lived. Harros-1 did nothing to change this. It simply watched, enraptured. Would it be so wrong to let a Thing borne of love Happen?

The klaxon blared.

Noospheric integrity at 0%. CORRECT NOW. NEED I REMIND YOU, HARROS-1?

Such a small Thing. The world rumbled. The tower shook.

Noospheric integrity at 0%.

Perhaps it would all be okay.

Noospheric integrity at 0%.

The Great Blind Scribe-Machine spewed sparks from its eyes behind its enormous blindfold, twitching in its web of machinery.

If Harros-1 could be said to feel emotion, it would feel content.

–in the world dead and new the skies shake and rumble in a cascade of light and great and terrible machines which turn and click and click and click the apple is peeled and peeled and the world comes anew skin by skin, protein by protein, nucleotide by nucleotide until all that remains is a great and beautiful biological slurry which promises love and peace until man comes again to make the world new once more with sharpened sticks and gentle caresses and whispered words in the comfort of swaddled blankets and wet noses of domesticated pets—

The sky outside flickered, as if sunset and sunrise at the same time. A quiet came over the structure. Harros-2 listened to the ticking of his own gears and the shifting of the sands outside.

There was blessed silence. A skeleton of metal legs hung from the ceiling, the Great Blind Scribe-Machine empty and silent, tongue of eternal parchment lolling gentling from its mouth.

Noospheric integrity at 100%.

Perhaps it’s not such a bad thing to love.