THE MAUSOLEUM OF

FREE SPEECH

August 2058

“May I assist you?”

Everything about the person behind the counter suggested she was a woman, except that she was completely bald. She was, however, warm and friendly, with the unusual energy field emanated by people who enjoy their work, like a grazing animal that has checked out the pasture and decided it isn’t going to run out.

Behind her was a warehouse bigger than six football fields, silent but for an occasional soft electric purr.

“Is this the Shame Book Repository?” Jordan asked. It was printed on the sign outside the building and again on the signage at the counter, but he didn’t see any bookshelves, let alone books.

“Books, books, books,” the woman smiled, “all reposing peacefully. We have here one million square feet of books, stacked eight shelves high. My name’s Corinna, and I’m a Shame Foundation librarian. Is there a book you would like to see?”

“It’s not a book so much as a treatise, I believe, dated May 2039 and written by Douglas Melville Smythe, an economist.  I saw it in your online catalogue.”

The woman stepped backwards, almost falling, as if the floor had given way. “I’m sorry,” she said, recovering her composure. “We don’t have a public catalogue. You must be mistaken.”

Jordan, realizing that Quantum XR-9 must have hacked the museum’s computer, immediately back tracked. “Oh, I might have just imagined that,” he said vaguely.

Alexa, who had been silent to this point, came to his rescue, thinking as only a mathematician can. “You said you have one million square feet of books stacked eight shelves high, Corinna,” she reminded the woman pleasantly, “and an average book probably occupies sixteen square inches, which is one ninth of a square foot. So, by my estimation, you must have upwards of seventy-two million books in this warehouse! How on earth do you find them without a catalogue?”

Alexa’s inability to be disliked, Jordan realized, was a remarkably valuable attribute.

Corinna laughed. “Actually, we have just over sixty-eight million books, which allows us room for expansion,” she explained, “though far fewer books that meet our criteria come to us these days. They’ve mostly been destroyed, or we already have a copy. I can look in our internal records for your title, but I’ll need your identification first.”

Alexa glanced at Jordan before stepping forward with her Konektor to the ID reader on the counter.

“Thank you. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll take you to our reading room and do a search. If we have what you’re looking for, you’re welcome to read it here at your leisure, but we are not permitted to lend books or to make copies of any material for you. That’s forbidden under our mandate.”

The reading room was a glass-paneled area furnished with comfortable chairs and writing desks. There were no other visitors. Corinna sat down at a computer and typed in the details Jordan gave her.

“Yes,” she said, “I can see the item you want, dated May 2039. I’ll have it brought to us. And while we’re waiting, I’ll tell you something about our repository.”

The rescue of books, she explained, began in the 2020s when universities started to dismantle their libraries, which were classified as culturally white-dominated spaces and thus became a focal point in the drive to decolonize academia.

“By the 2030s, the content of all books and reference materials had been vetted for suitability with respect to race, gender, social justice, and potentially offensive teachings,” she told them. “All approved student resource materials online were digitally stored in the federal education database. A small number of students, believing that history and cultural reference points were being destroyed in the process, started an underground movement called Book Rescue, collecting thousands of copies of classic literature and scientific texts that were being thrown out and storing them in unused garages and barns all over the country.”

The move to censure books that could potentially harm people of color or nonbinary sexual orientation had quickly spread to public libraries. By the mid-2030s, county boards were removing hard-copy books from their shelves and converting to subsidized download services with state-government-approved rating systems.

“The last-gasp efforts of the publishing industry to save themselves from going out of business saw them producing things like Diversity Editions and the Purity Writers series. Do you remember them?” She turned to Jordan, assuming that he was old enough to recall those days.

He didn’t want to remember.

“Diversity Editions were classics,” Corinna explained, “selected by an algorithm that established that the original content had never identified the ethnicity or race of the principal characters. So, for instance, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz became Native American, and Captain Ahab in Moby Dick became black. However, these were quickly withdrawn because black and Native American writers objected that only new stories written by people of color were acceptable, not old white men’s stories.”

“I can see their point,” Alexa said with a nod.

 “Shakespeare, of course, despite being reclassified as a woman, failed on every count… Soon publishers took on so-called ‘sensitivity readers’ to try and help them navigate such identity politics tripwires during the 2020s and ’30s, but the Purity Writers movement finally brought the industry to a halt, and hard-copy books became a relic of the past.” Corinna shrugged. “So, here we are: shamed by our written history.”

“Tell me about Purity Writers,” Alexa requested. “I think I remember them.”

“That was the movement that insisted that no writer could authentically write about a character’s experience unless it exactly mirrored the experience of the writer in real life. Only an autistic transsexual author could write about an autistic transsexual character. Only a Mexican illegal immigrant could write a story about a Mexican illegal immigrant family. It was rather limiting with regards to imagination—and to the stories written at that time. Then, of course, the Overthrow came, and books were banned except in registered digital form. By that time, the Book Rescue movement already had thousands of books piled up in hiding places all around the country and needed somewhere to house them.”

Jordan stood up and peered into the vast warehouse. It was spotlessly neat and eerily quiet. Dense rows of yellow plastic shelving on modular frames stretched into the vast interior, divided by aisles of the same width. “So, how did you get them all together in one place? Is this a government-built facility?”

“The Book Rescue collective found an angel. He was a billionaire property investor who bought this Amazon fulfillment center when Amazon went out of books, and he set up a foundation to ensure the collection would never be lost. The state censors allowed it, providing no books ever leave the premises or are ever copied. They see it as a time capsule of ignorance and false thinking, standing as a warning to humanity in the future. That’s how our benefactor sold the idea to them. It didn’t hurt that he was black as well as rich. So, it’s not a library; it’s a museum. Amazon had three hundred people working here. We have just two, but we inherited their barcoding software and robots.”

At that moment, a stack of yellow shelves on the back of an orange robotic trolley came purring through the aisles to stop precisely outside the reading room door, and Corinna got up to meet it. A tiny red pencil light was beeping on one of the shelves, and a matching light was beeping on the small receiver attached to Corinna’s lapel. She picked out a document from the tray on the beeping shelf, and the light on her lapel turned green.

“‘Donald Melville Smythe,’” she read, “‘The Jackass Explained, May 2039.’ Now, who would like this?”

Alexa put up her hand and took out her glasses.

“I’ll leave you to read, then,” Corinna offered. “I’ll be at the front desk when you’ve finished.”

Knowing that Alexa’s glasses were transmitting images of the document back to XR-9 at the DDC, Jordan felt no need to read over her shoulder. He was suddenly feeling overwhelmed and wondered whether he’d been overdoing his breathing exercises and running. To suddenly go from living a sedentary life with an electrical fault in his heart to believing he could recapture the strength and energy of a thirty-year-old in a matter of months was naïve and bordering on stupid… Or was it the book repository that was making him feel like this? The air he was breathing was filtered and dehumidified to help preserve sixty-eight million books, banned thanks to public hostility to their authors’ ideas—ideas that had only expressed the public attitudes and opinions of the time in which they were written. Were they worth preserving now, and if so, to what end?

Alexa skimmed the document, knowing her microchipped spectacles were transmitted the pages via her Konektor and, like Jordan, now being eager to escape the oppressive feeling that this mausoleum of free speech was arousing in her.

“Let’s go,” she announced.

At the front desk, they found Corinna waiting for them with a colleague. Both of them seemed to be on edge.

“I’m sorry,” Corinna blurted out, accepting the returned document. “I didn’t mean some of the things I said; I was trying to be lighthearted. I hope I wasn’t indiscreet.”

Jordan and Alexa looked at each other, confused.

“I should have looked more closely at your identity record,” Corinna confessed to Alexa. “I didn’t realize you were with the Agenda Implementation Tribunal and the Department of Truth and Public Guidance. Please forgive some of the things I said.”

Alexa smiled reassuringly. “You were great,” she said. “Exceptional.”

“You’re very kind. And would you like passes to the Shame Arts Museum while you’re here? It’s just half a mile down the road. It contains all the works by male artists that people managed to save after they had been removed from public galleries, when the gender and racial balance rules came in after the Overthrow. It’s very popular … far more so than books, I fear. But so it should be. It may be one of the greatest collections of masterpieces left in the world.”

“We might look in if we have time,” Alexa said. “There’s just one more thing I’d like your help with before we go. Somewhere in your system, you must have a record of the origin of items like that document we just read. How do you classify them?”

Corinna looked at her colleague. “Jason?”

Jason took the file from her. “The barcode allocation records tell us the date that a work went into our system. I can look that up, if you’d like to wait.”

“We’ll wait,” Jordan confirmed.

It didn’t take long.

“The barcode was issued in October 2039 for a large batch of items from the FIB. We received quite a few works from them at that time.”

“And what’s the name of the foundation that funds you?” Jordan asked.

“The ParkFed Foundation, established by Bill Jones, Jr. Do you know it?”