The Library

Eleventh Scene

"What's up?" No. 1 climbed on top of the flat boulder where Gwen had retired in search of solitude. To anybody else, she would have looked like she was meditating, but not to him.

They were sitting cross-legged, a good height above ground, and from their elevated viewpoint, they enjoyed a beautiful panorama of the desert at dusk.

Gwen put a long pregnant pause between the question and the answer, one which, to be sure, would have garnered applause in any theatrical performance, and then declaimed, with the pathos only afforded to the young.

"What is the point of all this!"

"Meaning alert!" No. 1 yelled at the top of his lungs, loud enough to reach every eardrum within range. "Gather round, everybody, we have an emergency!"

"The point? Of this?" No.5 mumbled, irritated because he was woken from his afternoon nap. "Whatever gave you such a silly idea?"

"Have you been listening?" Gwen snapped.

"I don't have to. Do you think you're the only fool who thinks there's got to be some deeper meaning to this nonsense?"

"Of course there is meaning!" No. 6 protested, outraged.

"Hogwash!"

"How can you even look at this beautiful landscape and not understand there is purpose and thought behind everything there is!" the former pointed to the intense purple, pink and orange sunset, which looked like an artist's psychedelic dream world.

"Oh, yeah!" No. 5 retorted. "God made the sunset just for you! Wait until he makes you a sunrise. That's something worth waking up for!"

"That's not the point!" No. 6 fretted, uncomfortable. "You find meaning in what is, you don't expect the meaning to be manufactured for your personal use."

"Actually, I'm not sure that's true," No. 4 intervened. "How can you know this existed before we could see it? You can't!"

"I'm sure it existed before your highness deigned to look kindly upon it," No. 7 chuckled.

"Define existed," No. 4 continued, unperturbed.

"That's too deep of a question," No. 1 took the subject and ran with it. "You really can't define existence in the absolute. Things only exist for you because you are able to observe or conceive of them. Can you say something exists if you have no way of knowing or verifying it?"

"And now we're back to the tree falling in the forest when nobody is there to hear it! God, I hate this topic! I was hoping to never visit it again!"

"We can't," No. 1 jumped to his feet and pointed emphatically at the unfortunate young woman, making her crumble under the weight of scrutiny. "Gwen here is having an existential crisis."

"Yeah, and we're making it worse! She's questioning existence in general now, not just her own."

He turned towards Gwen and addressed her in a kind tone, completely out of character for him.

"Don't waste your life with existential musings, child. Just live it."

"Live it?!" Gwen's inner anguish made its way to the surface like lava from a volcano. "Live it?! There is no safety, no comfort, even the bare necessities are in question! Every morning I wake up in a cold sweat wondering if that damned bread is going to show up in the cupboard! By ten it's a hundred degrees out there and my greatest joy for the day is to find an egg that was actually laid by a chicken! How do you even have chickens here? You know what? Don't answer! I spent four years studying the greatest minds of civilization so I could get stuck here, hacking smelly fish, covered in guts!"