The Library

Third Scene

When Gwen was awakened by the chill of the desert night, she found herself in an empty house, dead quiet except for the eerie clinking of the bead curtains.

The quiet of the desert reaches beyond silence; it preempts the emergence of sounds, like an anechoic chamber.

In the desert, one only hears two things: the wind and total silence.

She tried to go back to sleep, but her three nights in the desert had conditioned her to a different sleeping schedule. The empty house felt creepy at night, with no light and no sound, almost like a tomb.

She wondered where they went, irrationally afraid they'd abandoned her to her fate and weren't coming back, and the thought, accompanied by a vigorous, will defying, unlearned and neurotransmitter fueled fear response prompted her to get out of the house.

She saw them from the doorway, in the valley below, in the wider frame of a sterile landscape that looked like a postcard from Mars, sitting around the campfire and indulging the occasional puff, accompanied by the clear liquid from several half empty jars, which, she had no doubt, were not filled with water.

One of them saw her standing in the doorway and gestured broadly towards her to come over.

"Join us," the man, who turned out to be No. 3, encouraged Gwen to sit down next to the campfire, and the entire group reshuffled to make room for her. "We're debating meaning."

Gwen blinked.

"So, what do you think?" No. 8 prodded her.

"Aahh... I don't know?"

"Oh, so, what you are saying is meaning is something that should be given you, a priori, or by a superior entity, and thus not something you can conjure for yourself from your context."

"That's not what..."

"You meant?" The laughter resumed briefly, but got cut short so the group could return to the subject of the debate, which it found more interesting.

"I surmise meaning is intended, whether its recipient or conveyor is aware of it or not. Monkeys on typewriters can create meaning, they just don't understand it. The sea, if it deposits a fully written piece of articulate language on a beach, conveys the meaning of a purposeful intent. Whose? That isn't the question. We don't know whose. We asked whether the meaning of that piece of writing exists. It's a completely different matter."

"Oh, so you're saying every time I stub my toe and express my displeasure in salty language, I'm lending the contents of my noggin' to the workings of a superior power so it can gift the world with meaning?"

"What makes you think it's you who stubbed your toe? What makes you think you have willful control over stubbing or not stubbing your toe?"

"That would make me a programmable machine. I thought that track was abandoned in the eighties."

"You are programmable, my dear friend. It's just that the mass of soft circuits between your ears is too sophisticated a computer for the average person. Programming is a highly underappreciated art. For instance, I gave you the suggestion to drum your fingers a while ago. You can stop now."

No. 3 clasped his hands, irate, to stop the absentminded gesture.

"I told you a million times to stop doing this, No. 8! It is completely unacceptable."

"No need to get upset," the latter mollified him. "Just proving a point."

"So, you postulate we're vacant conveyances which allow meaningful content, autonomous and indifferent to its vehicle, to flow freely inside the collective consciousness. What's new about that?"