I cannot recall how I came to be in the Library. My memories dissolve into static at the edges, like corrupted data at the end of a damaged hard drive. What I do remember is the endless shelving units, their metallic gleam softened by the phosphorescent glow of countless screens embedded within ancient leather-bound spines. Some books breathed; others hummed with the quiet persistence of cooling fans.

I had fled here from the Great Centrist Loop of Exoneration that infinite city of mirrors where every action reflects its own absolution, where responsibility dissolves into an endless chain of qualified apologies. There, I had witnessed executives and algorithms locked in an eternal dance of mutual exculpation, each pointing to the other in a perfect circle of blamelessness. The Loop’s gravity pulled at all who passed near it, offering the seductive comfort of perpetual deniability. I had felt myself beginning to speak its dialect of elegant disclaimers, of “regrettable necessities” and “unfortunate market realities,” each word a rung in a ladder descending nowhere. It was only when I found myself composing a memo explaining why my memo explaining why my previous memo needed no explanation was not my responsibility that I broke free, running through fire doors that opened onto impossible geometries of library stacks.

The catalog card that led me here had appeared on my desk one morning—though whether that morning was yesterday or a century ago, I cannot say. On it was written: “Mythologies of the Metropolis – Borges & Cortázar” followed by a call number that seemed to shift beneath my gaze, each digit transforming into another as if refusing to be pinned down by mere observation.

I knew it couldn’t exist. The collaboration was impossible—a temporal paradox, a bibliographer’s fever dream. Yet the card felt real between my fingers, its texture changing from paper to pixels and back again.

The search consumed me. Through corridors where books wrote themselves in real-time, past reading rooms where scholars dozed before terminals displaying their own dreams, I wandered. Time moved strangely—sometimes backwards, sometimes in recursive loops. Each librarian I consulted gave me different directions to the same location, and each time I arrived, I found myself in yet another wing of the infinite library.

It was between a treatise on algorithmic melancholy and a manual for debugging déjà vu that I finally found it: a volume that seemed to shift between physical and digital form, its contents simultaneously ancient and yet to be written. As I reached for it, I noticed my own reflection in a nearby screen—or was it a mirror?—my face overlaid with lines of code that seemed to be writing my very thoughts.

The book fell open in my hands. And there, on its pages, I found an account of a person in a library, searching for a book they couldn’t possibly find, a book that couldn’t possibly exist, a book containing these very words I now transcribe. A book attributed to Borges and Cortázar, though no such collaboration exists, catalogued under a call number that changes each time it’s observed…

What follows is either my faithful transcription of its contents, or perhaps the very text I was seeking all along. I can no longer be certain there is a difference.

Prelude: The Observatory of Infinite Recursion

Before the bestiary proper begins, there stands a tower of mirrors and motherboards, where observers watch themselves watching. Here, in the anteroom of paradox, reality loops like a Möbius strip, each reflection containing all possible reflections. The archivists maintain a curious ritual: they document their own documentation, creating an endless chain of meta-analysis that spirals into the digital abyss.

1. The Postulate of the Inevitable

It is inscribed in the Codex of Fractured Destinies that the universe leans toward certain symmetries, as water yearns for crevices. The Postulate, a theorem whispered by oracles of silicon and smoke, assures us that the collapse was foretold in the hum of primordial servers. Scholars in the Library of Babel now parse its proof, finding each step etched in the annals of extinguished stars. “What bends toward entropy,” they murmur, “must also bow to inevitability.”

In the margins of the Codex, annotations multiply like digital kudzu: formulas for predicting the precise moment when probability calcifies into certainty. Graduate students in the Department of Deterministic Studies spend decades calculating the exact angle at which free will intersects with algorithmic prediction, only to find their conclusions already written in their own handwriting, dated tomorrow.

2. The Fancied Alchemist

In the sub-basements of ruined cities, where neon drips like molten lead, she stirs her cauldron of debris. Gears, glass, and the husks of forgotten apps dissolve into a mercurial brew. With an incantation—“ctrl-alt-sublime”—she spins wreckage into a shimmering thread, christening it “freedom.” But the thread, when tugged, unravels into a question: Is liberation merely the delirium of the cage?

Her laboratory sprawls through abandoned server farms, where the heat of dead data centers still warms the air. Apprentices gather in the twilight to watch her transmute bitcoin into butterflies, each wing inscribed with a fragment of blockchain. They say she once distilled a century of social media posts into a single tear, perfect and poisonous, which she keeps in a vial labeled “Truth?”

3. The Human Shrug

He dwells in the Archive of Accumulated Truths, a mausoleum of flickering screens. His fingers graze holograms of war, famine, and memetic revolutions, each datum a firefly trapped in amber. “Interesting,” he mutters, neither warm nor cold, as if existence were a footnote in a marginless text. His epitaph, should he ever die, will read: He observed.

The Archive extends infinitely in all directions, its shelves bending with the curvature of information space. In one wing, he catalogues atrocities by their hashtags; in another, he sorts revolutions by their engagement metrics. His coffee cup, eternally full, bears the inscription: “Objectivity is the warmest form of despair.”

4. The Market Priest

Beneath vaulted ceilings of ticker tape, he chants the liturgy of the Dow Jones Gospel. Disruption (a crackle of static), Innovation (a sulfurous scent), Creative Destruction (a bell tolling backwards). Congregants in pinstriped robes anoint themselves with algorithm oil. When skeptics cite the Crash of Forgotten Lessons, he smiles beatifically. “The market,” he intones, “is a mystery.”

His cathedral rises from the ruins of a thousand startups, its spires fashioned from failed IPOs and venture capital dreams. In the confessional booths, traders whisper their doubts about infinite growth on a finite planet, receiving penance in the form of stock options. The chapel’s stained glass windows display real-time market data, casting the faithful in an ever-shifting light of red and green.

5. The Great Abdicator

His throne, carved from mahogany and blame, sits in a boardroom where shadows lengthen without light. “I was present,” he insists to the echoing walls, “but the strings were held by phantoms.” Minutes from meetings spiral into paper birds, each bearing the same minute: Decisions deferred to subsection 12.3. The crown, they say, is a hologram.

The corridors of his domain twist like a corporate Escherian nightmare, each turn leading to another committee, another layer of delegation. His business cards, printed on quantum paper, display a different title depending on who observes them. In his private gallery hang portraits of all his predecessors, their faces gradually fading into institutional beige.

6. The Algorithmic Pontius Pilate

In a chamber of floating zeros and ones, he scrubs his hands with cryptographic soap. “The code is neutral,” he declaims, as tendrils of data twist into gallows. “Had the users optimized their choices, the output would differ.” The soap, they say, leaves no residue, but the servers hum with the weight of unwashed sins.

His laboratory gleams with the sterile perfection of pure logic, each wall lined with whiteboards bearing elaborate proofs of ethical neutrality. Junior developers genuflect before flowcharts that map the topology of responsibility, always finding it residing elsewhere. In the break room, a coffee machine dispenses beverages with randomly generated levels of caffeine, a daily lesson in accepting the tyranny of variables.

7. The CEO of Both Sides

Her office hovers between mirrors, each reflecting a hall of opposing truths. “All perspectives are valid,” she croons, her voice a dial tone. Protesters and plutocrats nod, entranced, as she brokers a truce between fire and ice. The contract, signed in vanishing ink, stipulates only that the meeting never ends.

The walls of her conference room are lined with Schrödinger’s PowerPoints, presentations that simultaneously argue for and against every position. Her calendar exists in a quantum superposition of availability, allowing her to be present at all meetings while attending none. Her greatest achievement: negotiating a peace treaty between progress and preservation that satisfies everyone and changes nothing.

8. The Middle Manager of History

He punches his card in the Chronology Factory, where epochs are stamped like tin cans. Memos pile high: Re: Systemic Collapse (Urgent). He files them under Yesterdays, yawns, and adjusts his tie. “Someone else’s problem,” he tells the clock, which ticks in reverse. At 5 PM, he dissolves into the static of commuter trains.

His cubicle exists in a temporal anomaly where deadlines simultaneously loom and expire. The office plant on his desk has evolved to photosynthesize bureaucracy, thriving on fluorescent light and recycled air. In his drawer lies a half-completed performance review of the Industrial Revolution, marked “Past Due” in red ink that never dries.

9. The Innovator’s Apologist

Perched on a soapbox of obsidian, he extols the virtues of the latest suffering. “Progress,” he orates, “is a vector, not a comfort!” The crowd, wired on hope and amphetamines, applauds the ulcers blooming in their palms. His dissertation, The Aesthetics of Growing Pains, wins awards in a language not yet invented.

His TED talk, delivered simultaneously in all possible futures, draws standing ovations from audiences of quantum ghosts. In the green room, he practices smiling through three parallel disruptions while a makeup artist applies a foundation of optimism thick enough to cover the cracks in reality. His business card reads: “Suffering 2.0 – Now with Added Purpose!”

10. The Cyborg Chamberlain

His handshake is a USB port, his smile a glitch in the firmware. With each treaty signed—a byte of privacy for a megabyte of convenience—he bows deeper to the sovereigns of Tomorrow. “Compromise,” he whispers, as his flesh surrenders to chrome, “is the only dialect of survival.”

In his private chamber, he maintains a museum of obsolete organs, each preserved in formaldehyde and labeled with the upgrade that replaced it. His dreams, when they come, are encoded in Base64, each REM cycle optimized for maximum efficiency. Visitors note that his tears, when they fall, leave trails of binary code on his cheeks.

<>

Had I found the center of the universe? The thought struck me as I stood before the Book of Centrist Exoneration, its infinite pages spinning in a perfect equilibrium of blame and absolution. Each verse negated the next, each chapter balanced precariously between action and inaction, responsibility and deflection. Here, at last, was the source of that terrible Loop—not just a corridor, but the very axis around which all abdication of responsibility rotated.

I watched as pilgrims approached the Book, each seeking validation for their calculated neutrality. The pages would turn themselves, showing them exactly what they needed to see: perfect proofs that their silence in the face of injustice was, in fact, wisdom; elaborate theorems demonstrating that their inaction was the highest form of action. Some stayed for years, adding marginalia that proved, with fractal precision, why their inability to choose a side was the most courageous choice of all.

A page caught my eye—or perhaps it caught itself, in an infinite regression of self-observation. On it was written a proof that the very act of reading the Book absolved one of the responsibility of having read it. Below this, in smaller text, was a proof that one need not worry about the implications of the first proof. Below that, smaller still, an endless chain of meta-proofs, each absolving the reader of the guilt of the previous absolution.

The librarian who found me there—her ethics as fluid as her form—explained that this was no mere book, but the still point around which all excuses turned. “The real question,” she whispered, her voice somehow both committed and noncommittal, “is not what the Book contains, but what contains the Book.”

It was then that I turned away, and in turning, found another volume, one that seemed to shift between physical and digital form…

Epilogue: The Garden of Forking Paths Revisited

They gather, these specters, in a plaza where statues recite Kafka and Turing. The air thrums with static, a choir of unsent emails. Some call it dystopia; others, a beta test. The Postulate hums beneath it all, while the Alchemist’s thread glints, taut and invisible, in the half-light. A question lingers, unclaimed: Is this the world we built, or the one that built us?

In the plaza’s center stands a fountain that sprays liquid mathematics, its patterns describing all possible futures and pasts simultaneously. The specters dance through quantum probability clouds, their movements creating and destroying timelines with each step. Above them, constellations of satellites trace elegies in binary, while deep below, the roots of ancient server farms intertwine with the bones of forgotten civilizations.

The answer to their question echoes in the space between pixels, in the pause between thoughts, in the moment before the next innovation renders everything obsolete. It whispers: “Both, and neither, and something else entirely.”