update

“This is it. We need to get the update into the system.” 
The gatekeeper roamed the hallways of his adopted home, an endless, dark grey metallic pod riveted together around him, hundreds of shelves framing the streets of an infinite city inhabited only by the whirring and humming and whining of machines working overtime to keep the information flowing. Flowing back. Flowing forth. It can never stop moving! It must always go somewhere, for ending its flow would be akin to ending time itself. Does time even exist if we can’t see it’s refractions scarring everything around us? 
“Five years of work and about half a billion dollars it took.” the gatekeeper said, fidgeting with the data stick. “And the results are just a bunch of lines of code on a stick. Imagine if our ancestors who killed each other for meat saw what we assign value to these days.”
“Man will always be man. It used to be that a thousand slaves were swallowed by the earth and came out months later, starved, thirsty, wounded, with a cart of shiny stones.” the man besides him, the lead programmer, added sarcastically. “At least there is functionality to these codes. This new software completely streamlines the storage process, takes less processing power to transfer data a hundred times faster, and opens up the APIs so that staff members have more control over the way the archives are organized. It is the single most important evolution of the New National Library since their conception.” 
“That’s my decision to make.” 
Framing the two men were not walls of paper but metal cases that housed the circuits and transistors where the National Library now lived, safe from fire and dust and all the perils of the world, enclosed in an impenetrable cyber-bubble where danger dared not lurk. Inside it, the entirety of the archives and records and works of this nation and countless others fused together in the great quilt of history. 
Having reached a data terminal at the end of one of the streets that lined up in between these silver containers of the past, the gatekeeper plugged the data stick while the lead programmer fiddled with installation settings on his tablet. His fingers danced across the screen with the technical precision of a well-choreographed performance. 
“Ok, the system needs a reboot now, and it will be all set.” 
The gatekeeper pressed his fingerprints against the pad and typed the four passwords, one after the other. 
The whirring stopped. 
For a few seconds the city of knowledge became quiet enough that the two lone heartbeats that echoed through it were not mechanical, but human. When it started again, it wasn’t the same constant hum that made all time look equal, but an arrhythmic, sick series of thumps and roars and buzzsaw noises that repeated themselves across all aisles. 
“Is that… normal?!” the gatekeeper exclaimed startled. 
“The computer is working. It’s a lot to process. Give it time.” 
The circuits cracked the wires snapped and the transistors exploded with dry thuds. A metal-founding heat emerged from the air ducts as the organs inside the giant silver silos melted in a flurry of electrons. For approximately forty minutes, the system clung on to existence and fought. It fought a newer, strange alien invader, an unexpected storm that ravaged all remnants of the ancient order. It resisted like the folk of the jungle defending their sun god and their stone pyramids against the silver knights that had landed on their shores mounted in galleons. It resisted like the regents of fallen empires at the sight of angry mobs storming their gilded gates. It resisted like the stubborn concrete wall that endured years of being splattered with paint and blood before brother and brother decided they had not seen each other for far too long. It resisted. Until its last boiling breath, it resisted. 
Finally the chaos quieted down, leaving only the hum that blew like a soft spring wind over the burnt fields. 
“UPDATE SUCESSFUL” sang a robotic voice that seemed dangerously oblivious to the war that had just concluded. 
“It’s done.” smiled the lead programmer. “Go ahead.” 
“What shall we bring up first?” 
“How about the original transcript of the president’s inauguration speech?” 
The gatekeeper latched onto his tablet and with his fingers traversed a series of new, unfamiliar highways. He typed words onto strange boxes and selected from a series of alien lists, using the endless codes he had learnt by heart. 
“ERROR/PARAMETER INVALID”
“Curious…” the gatekeeper gawked at the screen. 
Again he crossed the paths and imputed the parameters required to dig out the file out of the gigantic mechanical vault. It had worked, this same process, a thousand times before. Hadn’t it?
“ERROR/PARAMETER INVALID” 
A shiver ran down the gatekeeper’s spine. His heavy breathing permeating the pod, now as inert and silent as ever. 
“Something’s wrong.” he gasped. “You… you… something is broken.”
“It can’t be. We have been running test versions for months.”  
One file after the other, the gatekeeper tried to unbury them, only to run into the same message. The National Library’s copy of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the transcripts of the conversation between Houston and some corner of the Moon. Beneath a graveyard, all of them and a trillion other archives remained buried, and with each one the gatekeeper’s face became more and more scarred by shock. A few lines of code, the flicker of a couple switches, and the gatekeeper looked into the abyss of a generation of lost history! Thousands of years erased, and now both men stood on second one of everything that will ever happen!
“It won’t read them. Any of them.” he shivered. 
“You must be doing something wrong.” 
The programmer grabbed the tablet and traversed the digital chasm, imputing data, selecting lists and setting categories. He pressed the buttons serenely as if he was stroking the keys of a piano. 
“FILE LOCATED” 
The President’s inauguration speech materialized on the tablet, with the exact coordinates of its whereabouts on the great digital bookcase. 
“What did you do?” the gatekeeper insisted, tightening his fists anxiously. 
“You see, in an effort to streamline operations, the update has added some necessary algorithms and simplified the ones that seemed to slow it down. It now works with a completely different set of codes. I’m surprised the IT department did not run this through you.” 
“What are you talking about?” the gatekeeper shrieked, drowned suddenly by the immensity of the metallic cocoon he had walked a million times before. “I’ve ran this library since its inception, I  am the only one that understands its complexities. I have memorized the location of every archive, for god’s sake.” 
The programmer stepped backwards, looking at the shivering, angry old man of inflamed face whose hair was as silver as the glistening silos that populated the space. 
“That’s the thing, all of that is now obsolete. Aren’t you familiar with the new protocol?” 
The frozen face of the silver-haired man was the only response. The circuits blew their breeze amongst the silence. 
“What a monstrous oversight, if you must forgive me. I can’t imagine how this could happen. Training sessions were implemented during the testing phase.”
“Training sessions!? Not one of the librarians under my watch got one of those” 
“I guess bureaucracy can be an unpredictable beast.” 
The face of the gatekeeper broke down into a wrinkled mess as the air became heavy around him. Voice broken down, eyes inflamed, he ran his fingers across the metal, which now felt colder than ever. 
“I… I stood next to the chief administrator during the announcement. I pledged my life to this. I… I… This couldn’t have been a mistake.”  
“I am as appalled as you are. I guess I’ll have to let management know.” 
“Wai… Wait!” 
The gatekeeper snatched the tablet off the programmer’s hand. ‘I can do this.’ ‘I can do this.’ He repeated maniacally. ‘I just need to learn a few adjustments.’ ‘I can do this!’ His fingers cavorted all over the glass, thumping and sliding and rolling over its surface, covering the screen in sweat. Why are these strange foreign symbols? Where did the time period parameters go?! What kind of madness has taken these tranquil lands?! He fidgeted, and sweated and grunted, but with each passing second the contents of screen became more and more bizarre. 
Footsteps echoed on the walls of the pod. It was the programmer, walking away, almost at the sliding door that opened itself for him. 
“Come back! You can teach me how! Right?! You can…” 
“I really can’t teach you a whole new language in a few hours. The only thing I can offer you is to try to get an explanation from management for why you were left out of this. I’m sure this situation will be sorted out.”
“Don’t you see?!” the gatekeeper yelled, knees pinned to the ground. “They want to retire me and all the others! They want the IT department to take over, this has always been their plan! Stop, just listen!” 
But all the programmer could hear were the incoherent ramblings of an old man, a man who had been outgrown by the world around him. 
The door slid shut behind him, and the gatekeeper remained kneeled, crushed by the weight of the metal and the contents it hosted, all he had ever known for years, now hidden behind a hermetic, invisible wall that rendered everything behind it even more so. All archives, every word written and picture taken and video recorded since the first of their kinds, now inaccesible to an entire generation of men that had lived amongst them, studying every second that came before. Has time reset itself? Does the past even exist if the means to remember it become extinguished?

In his mind he tried to retain every bit of information that dashed past. All words read and images looked at, he attempted to burn into his brain. As many as would fit, till the day his neurons would loose their sparkle and finally dissolve into the ground or vaporize in a fire pit. Till the day the world would render him obsolete and dispose of his bodily vessel, in the eternal pursuit of updating itself with each passing second, no matter what or who it left behind. 

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