The only way we could afford to live in that place was for ten of us to split the rent. we would have to be careful. they were watching us. we could only assume. the building colonized the old city corner, sitting there like an ancestral king somewhere in the deepest of urban jungles, unaware that his day came and went and no one told him, waiting for his people to return to their homeland. but the microchip factory, once the epicenter of a thriving global artificial intelligence industry, shuttered four and a half centuries ago. the people who worked in it are gone, and everything that remains of their lives. the factory stood an empty shell that at one time had housed something living, organic, integrated into the life systems it supported and supported it. to us, for whom its vast square footage stood at 1/115000 that of even a modest galaxy S10 cruiser, it was little more than storage unit with a story. we did not need to know that story. it would have changed none of it.

all ten original tribes sent emissaries, though we had to be discrete. if we had all returned to earth at once, would have drawn attention. earth has not seen a quorum on its shores in over three hundred years, so it took us a full six months to gather everyone together. we had to bribe the customs personnel at the north-am docking station, which–as i am sure i do not need to tell you–would not have been possible fifty years ago under the old guard. their rot is internal now, and it has already begun to spread throughout its ranks. they ceased to be a cause and are now an institution, with all the burden that assumes. their corrupt cronies kept us in steady supply of departure visas and forged logs. a couple of them even falsified contaminant reports to their superior commanders (off-world, of course) stating there was a radioactivity leak in fourth sector b. this would justify the presence of three, four emissaries at once. the rest, however, stayed past their visas legally.

but the risk, we were convinced, was worth it. rumors first came to tribal intelligence agencies through the remnant population who stumbled upon the warehouse bunkers quite by accident, looking for refuge from a particulate acid storm. the ionized lithium battery which kept the facility locked all these years has only a half-life of one hundred and fifty years. with no one to replace it, it simply expired and the locks consequently opened, like a tomb of some earth-bound pharaoh. the bunker, we believe, was a secure room maintained by north-am state entities back in the 21st century. we believe the industrial production of microchips posed international security challenges, and the bunker was designed to protect state secrets. to be honest, we are not sure where all the items came from. the tetherium meltdown of 2298 was cataclysmic. we believe someone during the urgency of departure moved them there, in hopes they would be returned for.

but there are over 1.5 million volumes on-site, representing untold googles of terabyte data, contained in primitive storage systems once known as "books." data is stored in various classical scripts and printed in ink on compressed tree fibers which are cut, glued and bound together. the items vary in size, but are intended to be held by a single human between their hands and read by an occular scan, directionally either left or right, depending on the script, though usually down. contemporary printing practices also featured two-dimension images, again in ink, though of varying colors, all within the traditional spectrum. the technology was considered antiquated, even by the time of the tetherium meltdown, but all digitized formats were lost when the planet was ultimately abandoned.

the data fields contained within the books vary. much of it has simply ceased to be relevant. early attempts at theoretical cosmology, speculative advanced mathematics–all of it of pre-DARMA quadratic funtionality. there is considerable information on the diversity of life-forms on earth prior to the meltdown, but time looping allowed us to collect that information first-hand centuries ago. in short, time displaced what foundational knowledge lingers in the folds of their so-called "pages" centuries ago. its biology, physics, chemistry, earth science, astronomy, logic, mathematics, statistics, theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, information theory, game theory, systems theory, decision theory, theoretical linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, economics, management, communication and political sciences, have all been displaced. nothing a 21st-century human knew of the cosmos and their place in it bore true. i try to impress upon my fellow emissaries the nature of this observation, the limits of our understanding. but we are as overconfident today in our beliefs as they were in their day.

but considerable among the volumes of books are what early humans called "literature." technically speaking, they have little data value. none of the persons and events they recount ever happened (or at least, time looping has been unable to verify their contents). we know from extant contemporary records that literature was considered an artisan production, created by specialized laborers. anthropologically speaking, they were early attempts to ritualize experience, constellating its random happenings into formal patterns of experience. whole pseudoscienes known collectively as "criticism" once existed to taxonomize and explicate these patterns which were seen as somehow internal to the work rather than in the mind of the so-called "reader."

these volumes of literature are in many ways entirely ephemeral, and yet they are also at the center of our convergence. in the centuries to follow, they would largely take over the production of literature, which for the standard consumer of late stage capitalism, commodified into readily standardized patterns of experience, regardless of their source origin. but the early human efforts are genuinely fascinating. their sense of meaning is not tethered to any particular object, context, moment. they are endlessly open-ended in their interpretation, their significations, the layers of denotative and connotative meaning. this polysemy, often centered around a cultivation of paradox, was for a milllenia at the core of the human experience. you have to remember, this is a world before nanotransliteral processors. meaning, back then, was untethered. humans would say somethign and its meaning would fracture away from its original intention, like light fracting through a prism, to be reinterpreted, reassembled, reconfigured by whoever was around to hear it, inserting random contextual data where they found appropriate. the instability of meaning plagued human kind for centuries. it led to wars, violence, and suffering, and yet also a sense of the numinous, the sublime, the beautiful. literature, and the books which contained it, was the center of its cultivation, like the ritualized mysterians of their greek forebears, it sought out mystery, ambiguity, and contradiction.

so a deed was drawn up, transfering ownership from them to one of the tribes, for a period not to exceed six months, for the purposes of clearing up a nearby radioactivity leak. the costs of rent will be split by all the tribes, and paid by ways of the back channels. we have installed a data miner, though we cannot use one of the newer models because of the power requirements. we have to use a downgraded miner to keep our energy profile low, which means the ten emissaries and their teams are living in the bunker of the warehouse. we wake up early in the mornings, decide those titles we need to upload, and then spend the rest of the day holding the books, studying them, dipping into them. at first everyone complained about how long it took them to process the data printed on the pages, but once one of the more senior emissaries had given out a few tricks and tips, we began to enjoy our experiences.

because books take so long to process, it has become customary for the reader to excuse themselves for a spell. some of us lay down in our beds. others go for walks around the warehouse. still others find small nooks through the rafters to hide in, from which they will not emerge for hours. we are using manual transliteral processors, of course. the classical script would be unreadable without them. but through them, suddenly, the voices of humans almost half a millenia old almost "jump" off the page. they are present to us, in the way we are each of us "present" with one another.

for this reason, my darling, i write to you, using the script and tools and ink of the old ways. not only to evade their detection, but to show you the world opening to us, one page, one word, at a time.