Her mousy brown hair smoothed back into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. An anachronism, a pair of glass lenses perched on her nose. Corrective lenses went out of style after gene therapy and single organ cloning came into common practice. She crawled her eyes up the wall to the first of five secret cameras on the floor. She couldn't see where the tiny eye was pointing but she knew to be careful. There was no privacy to be had here. This was a public building.
The musty smell of books surrounded her, despite state-of-the-art air filtering. That smell lived in the rows and shelves of books. From floor to ceiling the books surrounded her as comforting companions. When confronted with her eccentricity, the excuse her peers gave most often unwavering passion. She lived in these books. They would find no surprise in the news that her index finger thumped from spine to spine at this late hour.
In her free hand she held a white clipboard with an imbedded touch screen. It was rare to see paper in use but as a research librarian it passed through her carefully gloved hands on a daily basis. She compared the electric catalogue to notes written by long dead librarians. Few librarians volunteered for this job. It was tedious and mind numbing. She was one of the few. Her days were spent happily auditing the past, in search of clues that could lead her to lost literature.
The list in front of her was handwritten in pencil on a piece of torn notepaper. She knew the secret eyes couldn't tell when pencil first touched paper. That wasn't the purpose of those spies. No one would ever suspect that she knew how to write. No one would think she kept antique graphite pencils and old lined notebooks for any other purpose than collection.
Her days were spent as such. The morning wasted searching for mention of any book that wasn't listed in the public database. The night spent searching for the truth no dead librarian could tell her. This crusade started in pre-pubescence. A school project. She wondered about censorship, as it was not a great cause in her time but underlined so much history before hers.
In order to facilitate her project she created a public database and solicited submissions from earlier generations. She visited local hospitals and care homes. She spent hours speaking with people about books burning and banning. Soon the database was ripe with information. She published the results for class and forgot about the project entirely.
Over the next few months two strange things occurred. The first, her modest little database became a kind of community. For two months the database thrived and filled to capacity with information. The recent history of censorship was a hot topic among certain circles. The second odd thing occurred at the end of the second month. Suddenly her little database developed a case of Alzheimer's. It began to loose pieced of its memory.
She was not aware of either of these events until well after the fact. One evening she noticed that her local private drive was maxed out. Like the smart little girl that she was, there was a fail-safe for her database. Public entities are notoriously unstable because of viruses rampant on the public network. She set the database to replicate every night. More than 90 instances of the database now propagated her hardrive.
There is no privacy on the public network, what was once called the Internet. Once you leave the door of your private network, as when you leave the door of your house, you can count on a dozen public agencies recording your every move. The port of your connection is the doorway and public agencies are legally bound to remain outside that door. Inadvertently, she'd recorded the very specific degradation of her database.
There was enough interest left in her, concerning the topic of censorship, that she decided to coalesce the information on her harddrive. She sent the collection of backup databases through a filter, a query, and a checksum. The result was one database that included all the transactions of the database, including any entries that were changed or deleted. She was surprised to find a list of missing entries that correlated to specific users and threads from the database.
Suddenly her little project was a mystery. The sleuth in her came to life. Why would anyone care to systematically erase those entries? Privately she contacted each of the users whose entities were deleted. She connected them to a private database hosted on her internal network. A few of them assisted her with the task of securing the database. She set up virtual connection and encryption for all the users.
The second coming of the database lasted a mere six months. She brought new users into the community through referral. None of these people knew an eight-year-old girl was at the core of the little network. Many years later she realized that was the only thing that saved them from exposure. An agent infiltrated the community. Although the virus sent into that section of her hard drive wiped out the current version of the database, the agent couldn't hack past the child safe features.
The algorithm provided to anyone under 18 is one of the most advanced and up-to-date. It couldn't keep people from hacking the data on a private drive but it'd keep anyone from hacking a special file that included all the contact information entered by the underage owner of the drive. Another happy mistake that allowed her to continued the little community into its third evolution.
Through grade school, junior high, high school, and past college she kept her secret little community secure. After years of attempting to keep the lines of communication secret, she found there was only one completely safe way. She ran her fingers along the shelf and picked out a book on her list. This book slid under her arm. Then she knelt down and to find the next book. She set the book on her clipboard as she stood.
It was standard practice for librarians to check the front and back cover of any book they held. Like any good habit, this quick flip was meant to save them from future problems. It allowed them to check the seal of the cover, the scan strip, and look for other signs of damage. She flipped quickly to the front and ran her finger down the inside. Then she flipped to the back.
Her finger ran down the back swiftly, as it had for the front, and closed the book. The spying eye couldn't feel what she had. It didn't know her thumb jumped over and the across a round disk inside the book cover. If someone was watching closely they might have noticed the happy twinkle in her eye as she slid the second book under her arm. But who cared about a librarian and her tedious little habit?
It wasn't that she knew of some great conspiracy. She'd found, over the years, that censorship lived in small minds. Passed down from generation to generation, old lies were covered by more lies. The books and stories she'd found in her search were benign. They told of old sins. No one from her generation cared about them. It was her private pleasure to collect those secrets.
She walked down the isle with a stack of books under her arm. She checked them out on her librarian account. Despite her excitement, she didn't open any of the books on the trip home. It wasn't until she shut the door firmly behind her that she sorted out the special book. She went to her bedroom and sat down on the bed. From under her bed she pulled out an old suitcase. She opened it and pulled out a clunky old laptop.
This was a rarity. A computer not connected to any network. It was a homebuild. With an old soldering iron she'd disabled the wireless network connection and removed all other physical ports. She brought the machine to life and slid the round disk into a lip on the side. After a moment of decrypting, a two-day-old copy of the database popped up.
She let down her hair and leaned back into bed. The network survived in libraries. An algorithm was distributed to a mailing list once a year. In order to decipher the e-mail, you had to first break the algorithm and then decipher the long list of numbers it produced. Any research librarian knew the numbers intrinsically. The obscure dewey decimal system was a required class for librarians in graduate school.
The next two hours she spent adding her contribution to the community. Notes about books she'd found, rumors she'd heard, and general chatter with her friends. Every addition to the database was time-stamped with her special signature. When she was done, she burned a copy of the database onto another disk. She checked a handwritten list of numbers on the sidetable to see which books she was supposed to use and carefully slid the disk under the back cover. A tiny sticky blob secured the disk in place.
With a happy little sigh, she put away the computer. She shed her clothes down to skin. Her sneakers were the first to come off but the last to be put away. She took the shoes over to the closet, lined them up at the bottom of her closet, and closed them away for the night.
The End.
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