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The Library.


MacThorstenson

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NOTE: this is a very very rough draft.

 

The Library. 

Deemed utterly useless by some, and Voidus' great gift to mankind by others, it was a realization of Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 short story, The Library of Babel. No one knew how it ended up in the alleys. But considering these were the alleys, it likely popped up overnight. The contents were simple if irritating. Every book was 410 standard pages (about 1500 characters), like the original library. However there were 95 possible characters in each book in the Library, as opposed to the 25 characters available in Borges'. Someone wanted to be able to do math and properly cite things in these books apparently, and so they decided that all the characters you could get from a standard keyboard would be useful.

Obviously most of the volumes in this library were completely useless. Complete gibberish in a physical form. In addition to the useless fluff, however, the library contained the sum of all human knowledge. Everything that could be known about the universe and written down, was inside of its hallowed walls. In an effort to properly gauge the task before himself, Ronald sat down with an envelope and preformed some proper back of the envelope calculations (Of course, my dear reader, Ronald is a fictional character, so I, the glorious narrator of his tale, actually sat down and spent a disturbing amount of time calculating everything out).

His calculations revealed that there were 615,000 characters in a book (assuming 1500 characters in typewriter font per page), and each space for a character could be filled by 95 characters meaning that there would be 95^615000 books in the library, or 1.04x10^1216300 Books. To otherwise represent the shear quantity of paper in this library, we can take the number of books and multiply it by the volume of a 410 page stack of A4 sheets of paper, which is 0.0012 cubic meters. We get approximately 1.25x10^1216297 cubic meters. Thats roughly 1 followed by over 1 million 0's. Some have correctly pointed out that the observable universe is only 10^80 cubic meters. This would make this bigger then the observable universe by over 1.25x10^1216217 times. Basically, the library is massive. Truly, unbelievably, massive. 

That was why the librarian, and her helpers, were there. The chief librarian was reportedly an eldritch being that none could behold with their eyes. Ronald wasn't sure how true this was, but he had never been there before, so he hadn't verified it yet. The helpers were apparently there to guide you around the library based off of your questions, but who or what they were, remained elusively out of reach. 

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