Leaving the Library

After spending more than a thousand years in the Library at the End of Time learning everything about everything - including all the future things she would someday invent - Sophie had felt her brain begin to change. 

She had come here to get away from everyone and everything. Here, at the end of time there was nothing at all, except for all the books ever written (and the robots who had made the holy pilgrimage here) (and the cockroaches) .

All people? Gone forever. 
All wars? Forever over. 
All songs? Already written.
All noise?  Already made.

There would be no more falling in love, no more discoveries made, no more jokes told or sunsets to be seen. 

The library at the end of time contained just one thing: the sum total of what everyone everywhere and everywhen had ever learned and taken the time to write down and record.

It was nearly endlessly large, stretching as far as the eye could see, from left to right, right shelves upon shelves packed with books of all sizes.  There were, of course, little ladders everywhere, so that she could reach the books that were higher than her little mouse arms could reach.  There were also candles and lights handing from the ceiling, giving what would have otherwise felt dark and ominous a warm, cozy, almost Christmas-like feel.

And that was just the first floor. There were floors that stretched higher than Sophie could see.  When she first arrived she had made a point to attempt exploring them all.  She quickly gave up.  The library was bigger than her ambitions.

Because the library existed at the end of time, there was barely any time in the library itself. Meaning Sophie could spend her days focusing on the books.

Days which themselves stretched on nearly forever with no suns to speak of rising or setting. This lack of time meant there was no need to eat. And no need to exercise or get up and use the bathroom or any of the other dozens of inconvenient things about living in time the rest of us are forced to do each day. 

There was no need for her to grow older here so she didn’t. 

What happened in those thousand years and the things she learned there are the story for another time.  A story we have already told.  What's important here is that once the thousand years were up, she thought that she was ready to return to the world of time.

It wasn’t long after Sophie left the library behind to return to time (or at least the time when things were still happening) when she found herself in a hurry to find a place where she could rest her head for a little bit. 

That might sound funny until you remember that she had just spent the last thousand years in a place with no one to talk to except the cockroaches and robot pilgrims - except the robot pilgrims were (reasonably) faithful to their vows of silence and the cockroaches were, well, cockroaches and (for the most part) had nothing interesting to say.  Most cockroaches don't, not the ones from long ago, not the ones around today.  Certainly not the ones which out-survived everybody else.

In a word, Sophie was finding her return to time exhausting. People, or whatever passed for people in the times she visited, were constantly scurrying around and talking. 

There was so much going on:

Talking.  Crying.  Shouting.  Hustle.  Bustle.  Buying.  Selling. Loving.  Hating.

Try as hard as she might, she was finding it impossible to filter any of it out. Everywhere she went, it took all of her energy to simply concentrate on listening, not listening and trying to find the balance between those two things. 

Sophie looked around. From her time in the library, she’d learned that there was nothing she could say or do to have people stop talking once they got started. To escape, she’d have to find someplace away from the crowd.

So that was how she found herself desperately trying to find a place to rest, away from the buzzing of the living so soon after spending a thousand years doing nothing but reading and writing and sleeping and thinking and tinkering and doing it all again the next day. 

It wasn’t what she'd grown accustomed to. She needed to recharge.  To find a place away from all the noise where she could hear her own thoughts and not the thoughts of others.   But where would she be able to go that there weren’t so many people? 

Eventually she found a quiet stream that was just far enough outside of the town that the babbling of the brook over the water was louder than the shouting and laughing of all the people. It was true that the sound of the water over the rocks sounded a little like laughing - but it was a kind of laughing that made her own thoughts easier to hear.

Sitting by the banks of the river, it was clear to her that her brain was seriously  broken - the time she’d spent in the library had been good for reshaping the way she thought. But bad for her knowing how to act around other people. 

Sophie had distant memories of having once been a fun mouse. 

The time in the library broke her brain.
How could she get that back again?

She decided it was time to go find a doctor and see if they would be able to help. 

She hopped into her Time Machine and headed for a time in the future when medicine would be a little more mediciney and a little less leachy and chanty. In Sophie’s experience (which was nearly infinite) the medicine which required an incantation tended to be a lot less effective and frequently led to funerals.