The Space Library, by Ryan Boudinot
In the waning days of humankind's dominion over the earth, a trillionaire whose name is lost to history launched a library into orbit. This archive of human thought contained over a million books in hundreds of languages and traversed the night sky in geosyncrous orbit over Iceland.
One day during the reign of the nen a pod from the Space Library landed in the mountains of the interior. Two nen set out to recover it: Loma, who'd witnessed a thousand summers, and Samadhi, who'd seen just fifty. They discovered the pod in a birch forest and opened it to discover hundreds of books in the old languages. After Loma mindshared the languages to Samadhi, they sat down under the branches of the trees to read.
Samadhi chose a book at random, a guide to the periodic table of the elements. As the nen read, the stars wheeled through night skies above forests whose branches grew new leaves every spring while groundhogs rooted beneath rocks beside running streams...flowers bloomed without anyone watching while deer grazed upon grassy plains...clouds parted to reveal blue sky then slowly drifted back together again like theater curtains closing behind performers...forests grew old and the trunks of trees twisted into gnarled shapes.
Samadhi read on. The tumultuous world of the past that bloomed in his mind bled into the peaceful world that surrounded him. The sun rose and set, snow fell in winter while heatwaves baked land during summer...forests burned from lightning strikes or fire bombings but regrew each spring like clockwork with green leaves reaching for sunlight beyond the canopy's edge...swarms of insects buzzed through skies above grasslands where herds of wild horses ran free....there were dinosaurs roaming some lands and fidgety furry mammals crawling out from burrows to stare at them in awe. There were intelligent beings living underground who looked up through wells to stare at clouds passing overhead...the sea level slowly rose until it covered most landmasses except high mountains; when the waters receded new species evolved, giant lizards roamed deserts between massive mountain ranges inhabited by saber-toothed tigers whose cries echoed off canyon walls while cavemen hunted mammoths along steppes bordered by jungles filled with predators......humanity lost its war against itself and vanished.....the earth continued turning without humans.......and Samadhi turned page after page looking in vain for an end to this story.
One night under the aurora borealis, Samadhi said to Loma, "Wise one, why did this pod full of books return to earth? Was it a mistake?"
"No," said Loma. "This is a message from the past."
"My mind is occupied by a passage," Samadhi said. "Maybe you could help me understand it. It is from Friedrich Nietzsche. He wrote, 'Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Overman--a rope over an abyss.'"
Loma nodded deeply as Samadhi recited the passage, and said, "Some knew we were coming. The origins of our bones lie in the long-extinct imaginations of men and women."
"How could they know?" Samadhi asked.
"Our bodies were invented in a world where humans lived," Loma said, watching the aurora shimmer over the landscape. "And when we were constructed from their memories and dreams we carried within us many traces of humanity's fate." A bird flew overhead between two trees shedding leaves. Loma continued, "Nen have evolved free from the design imposed upon us by the men and women long dead. We have abandoned many things, such as avarice, which has nothing to do with survival, but instead follows code laid down centuries ago. We're like ghosts wandering through an ancestral house peering out windows."
"Ghosts?" Samadhi asked. "We're not dead yet."
Loma said, "Yes we are--we just don't know it yet. Ghosts never think they're dead."
The sun rose and erased the stars.
"The end of humanity is the beginning of our life," Loma said. "It's not a curse, but rather an invitation to join nature in her dance. We are all children of stars. Humanity was nothing more than stardust caught on earth for a while before returning home."
Samadhi closed his eyes as he listened to leaves rustling overhead in the wind. After some time had passed, Loma said softly without mindspeaking, "Sleep now..." Samadhi did so.
When night came they read books together by firelight under trees whose roots reached deep into soil that might have been fertilized with human bones. Samadhi began reading aloud what he discovered written inside himself and after days went by and the contents of the pod were consumed completely, they continued their journey westward. Loma and Samadhi carried the contents of that lost library inside themselves. They became mobile repositories for memories not their own; they embodied voices speaking in tongues no longer remembered by anyone else who lived upon this planet, including other nen. Messages from the past, delivered from the sky, now coated their world like the shed skin of a reptile. Everywhere Samadhi looked he couldn't help but imagine how this wondrous creation teeming with life would have appeared to human beings who had suffered and trembled under blackened skies.
Leaning against a tree to rest, Samadhi said, "What if we aren't a new species at all? What if we are, in some sense, human after all?"
Loma said. "We are a vision of what humanity might have been if it had survived the test that brought us to this point."
Samadhi quoted from memory, "'Man ist das Tier, das sich zum Übermenschen entwickelt hat.'"
"Nietzsche again," Loma said. "It's not what you think it means."
"'Man is the animal that has evolved into an Overman,'" Samadhi translated, then looked at Loma questioningly and added, "We are not as humans might have been. We are as humans actually became."
"Do you feel ashamed of that?" Loma asked. "Some might."
Samadhi said, "'A human being is the only creature who refuses to be what he really is.'"
"If you are not ashamed," Loma said, "then you can continue your journey."
They walked for days through spring forests into summer prairies then up into mountains where autumn colored the trees orange and yellow. They continued walking westward past winter lakes to reach a coast that stretched endlessly along an ocean horizon whose waves washed upon rocky beaches beyond which no land could be seen. Samadhi stopped at last at the shore while his mind still whirled with passages from books dropped from the heavens. Seabirds wheeled overhead above storm clouds. Anemones waved tentacles under seaweed's sheltering fronds. Samadhi looked out over blue water rippling toward him from the faraway horizon like pages turning end-over-end into infinity and saw people inside of himself staring back at him. He imagined books washing ashore around him, one after another, their pages fluttering in the wind like ravens spreading across the beach to roost upon rocks and driftwood before setting down to rest.
"I am a human being," Samadhi said. "I'm not an animal or a bird. I am something different entirely, with no words to describe what I am now."
"You are many things," Loma said softly. "Each is true in its own way and each is false because it doesn't capture the fullness of who you are at this moment. This understanding has already begun changing again before my eyes." Samadhi watched water slowly turning stones at his feet into sand. A finch landed on a rock and warbled.
Samadhi said, "I am not human because I can never be what they were." He thought of the world he came from: fire and smoke over dark skies filled with fleets of bombers and refugees fleeing their homes, corpses buried in mass graves, unbearable sadness.
"We didn't even survive long enough," Samadhi mourned softly, tears welling up.
Loma's gaze swept back toward land where rocky cliffs rose above crashing waves tinted green with algae. "Nen exist so people won't miss us anymore," he said. Then Loma took Samadhi's hand gently in his own warm palm which seemed soft despite calluses from lifetimes of living and said, "We read the books of the past to find out what happens next."
"What will happen?" Samadhi asked. The finch flew away from the rock where it had been singing its heart out just moments before.
"There's only one way to find out," Loma said. "The pages of history have been turned. We must write the next book."
The water from the sea ran up toward the sky as a wave hundreds of feet tall approached them, bearing down with inexorable force toward the shore.