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Bored: The Librarian — curator of every creative expression of every idea in humanity’s brief history — The Librarian was deeply, deeply, resoundingly bored.
After the first ten or twelve thousand times he dreamed of the desert roadway and crossed the barrier, he’d lost the tingle of anticipation, was oblivious to the double crash of hitting the wall and then rebounding into time on the other side of Kali’s big moment. He’d learned to control the harvesting of ideas so he didn’t immediately get thrown back to his own time; making the passage in reverse had become as routine as in forward. He’d eventually learned the trick of following someone else’s timeline — not his own, and not Gabriel Naude’s — back to particular moments in history. He’d grown accustomed to the many straightforward and efficient ways to add new ideas to his own cloud, from anyone at all, and then to unhook and park the whole rustling, clacking assemblange at a particular intergalactic locus and time so he didn’t need to keep lugging the entire thing all around, back and forth across the barrier.
He’d witnessed the birth of great works and small, and had come to appreciate the later moment — an idea in itself — when a given artist, inventor, scientist, or simple craftsman declared a piece “done.” He’d watched the first time a Scandinavian storyteller told a tale of a vicious and apparently indestructible monster plaguing a kingdom; he’d watched as the storyteller added a new character, in a later telling, a hero whom he called (oh, well, say) Beowulf; he’d watched the growing panic in the storyteller’s head as he realized the consequences of his story-telling decisions so far — Grendel couldn’t be killed, not if weapons couldn’t pierce his skin!; and he’d watched the sudden light in the storyteller’s eyes when he realized that even the toughest skin could be torn from within, if you could just twist a limb enough, and spontaneously told — in an audience before a king, coincidentally also named Beowulf — of the instant when the hero tore Grendel’s arm from his body…
He’d watched as George Gershwin decided exactly how long the opening clarinet note had to be played at the start of Rhapsody in Blue. He’d seen Shakespeare in the tavern, tipsy and arguing with Marlowe over the wording of a line in the draft of Hamlet which Marlowe thought sounded stupid (“Being is the question? Oh, Will, for Lord’s sake. Come on. You’re not even trying!”) He’d been looking over Piet Mondrian’s shoulder when the artist first filled a rectangle with a solid primary color, and over Hildegarde of Bingen’s when she awoke, feverish, from her first vision and hunched over at a table with a sheet of vellum, a quill, and bottle of ink. That young guy with the colored pencils, idly doodling circles on a pad in his studio and suddenly thinking, A mouse! Sure, why not a mouse, a mischievous mouse? With a name also starting with M– Mort? Matty..?: as his doodles became more concentrated and intentional, as the circles started to touch at the edges, there was The Librarian — silently, invisibly watching, harvesting copies of the glowing silver particles…
The Librarian had gone back, way back in terrestrial history — seven million years and change, pre-Kali — and scoured the planet for the first thing he could find resembling a “creative idea” lighting up in orbit around the head of a primate. (As it happened, it was the idea to strangle another creature with a vine. The idea’s “creator” was quite surprised to find this thing in its head, this not-a-direct-observation sense.) In the other direction, he’d fixed his position in all dimensions of time right at the pre-Librarian side of the barrier, and then he’d covered the earth looking for the very last product of something recognizable as human culture. (The word “you” followed by an exclamation point, it turned out to be, at the very end of an illustrated epic poem of love between two doomed — literally star-crossed — lovers, penned by a twelve-year-old girl in a schoolroom in Alaska.) …
He’d been present at a dinner conversation at a club in New York City, when a young comedian started to tell a pointed joke about domestic life — “Conflict?” he said, “I’ll tell you about conflict. Take my wife, for instance—” At which point another, quicker comedian across the table burst out laughing and interrupted: “No. You take mine. Please!” 
He’d loved the moment when Georges Méliès and his brother, working together, came up with the rocketship-in-the-Moon’s-eye gimmick, and equally loved the moment when a musician named Robert Palmer first conceived of a series of videos featuring blank-faced, identically coiffed and made up and dressed, mannequin-like and barely moving women…
The Librarian had seen all of this. And he still had lots more to see, many, many more ideas to harvest. The notion of number, like those of space and time, turned out to have many more dimensions than humans themselves could have conceived of, let alone managed — a convenient fact which enable The Librarian to keep count of all the ideas and hold them in his consciousness in something resembling a catalogue, assigning to each a unique, multi-dimensional number which also revealed its relationship to all other ideas and to the context in which it first sparked into existence.
It was fascinating, in as many ways as it was possible for an experience to be fascinating. (He wondered if fascination itself might turn out to span multiple dimensions.)
But the simple fact remained: The Librarian was bored.
And after countless trips back and forth across the barrier, after just sitting and thinking (so to speak) for an eon every now and then, after letting himself dream without action for millennia, The Librarian had finally figured out why he was bored: all of human culture spoke to human existence, and none of it to The Librarian’s own. It wasn’t about him.
It surprised him, this selfishness. And then it didn’t surprise him anymore. It made sense. He himself might not be “human,” but his consciousness, oh yes: human through and through. He wanted attention, he wanted love. He wanted company. He wanted to know things about himself which he didn’t already know, and he wanted humans, somehow, to know about him.
That’s when he asked himself the question: how — under what circumstances — had Eldon and Adrienne Lane first imagined him?
He lunged back to the barrier. He dreamt his way through. He started backwards, as he did every time he crossed, in the brilliantly lit white basement room of the MagBurg research lab, in Earth’s last second. He hooked himself to the Lanes. And he followed them backwards, further. He knew what he was looking for. He wondered if he’d recognize it when he found it…
—-
Eldon Lane, at first age 18, then tracking back further to age 17, 16, 15, 14… A young, clever, but lazy smart-aleck of a kid, in a suburban high-school library — “media center” — wandering around online. You weren’t supposed to go online for anything but research, and if you got caught doing otherwise your computer privileges would be suspended for a month, but Eldon had become quite adept, when challenged, at improvising “research questions” on the spot. He suspected the librarians and the less officious aides knew he was winging it, but they almost never stopped him. Today, though, could be tricky. Today some kid’s mother was volunteering here while the staff was away at some conference, and she had immediately struck Eldon as an unimaginative and barely sentient—
“Young man,” came the woman’s voice from behind him. “Your name’s Eldon, isn’t it? Are you going to tell me this is some sort of schoolwork you’re doing online right now?”
Startled, Eldon looked at the screen. He couldn’t even remember being at this site. How had he—? oh, right. Trying to figure out how come astronomers liked putting observatories in the wilderness, instead of conveniently closer to research facilities, utility grids, and transportation networks. They liked the Andes for some reason. In Chile. And he’d ended up here at this site, this page, the words Chile and telescope coincidentally landing within a few paragraphs of each other in what wasn’t even a scientific context but some kind of a st—
“Eldon? Well?” The volunteer poked at the back of his head with a forefinger.
Rats. He looked at the screen again. The thick capital letters of an acronym jumped out at him.
“I was looking for information,” he said, “about how they identify scientific researchers at laboratories and stuff. You know, like RFID tags and stuff? I got here by mistake. See?” He pointed helpfully at the screen. “Here and here. RFID. Telescope. Just a mistake.” He scanned some more of the visible text, of which there seemed a lot. Another good w— Wait. What? How?
“I see. Then if it’s just a mistake you probably won’t mind shutting the page down.”
He didn’t mind, no. He’d already memorized the page address and would never forget it. For what were the odds that he’d ever find another page on which the words RFID and telescope and Chile appeared — along with Eldon’s own name?
—-
On the other side of the world about then, aboard a luxurious hovercraft cruiser — MagDrive-powered, of course — in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of Sri Lanka, a slender young woman was grumping at a workstation in the “classroom” (student population: one) staffed by one person, her mother. The young woman was bored by most of the things people used computers for, and she was particularly bored by the Internet. She liked drawing things. She especially liked drawing things she could measure, with tools like her dad used — pencils and rulers and T-squares, sometimes, but also exotic CADD programs, touchpads, smart easels, 3D printers and such. But no, for the moment Mom was insisting that she pay attention to this stupid “powerful” (or perhaps powerfully stupid) legend about the gods of India. There were lessons, Mom insisted — and not for the first time — to be found in the legends and myths and oral traditions (she had to fight not to laugh every time Mom used that phrase) of even ancient peoples, even ones who spoke entirely different languages and were obsessed with magic and the supernatural and bloody battles—
“…research assignment,” her mother was saying. She was pointing at the workstation screen, with her eyebrows raised as though expecting Adrienne to say something.
“Okay,” Adrienne bluffed. “So I should search on, uh, India and gods and, uh, I don’t know—”
Her mother laughed, that musical laugh that always made Adrienne know exactly why her father had fallen in love with her. “You are such a faker, Adrienne Burghar.”
Adrienne blushed, looked down, but grinned. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She looked at the wall screen, which was filled with the search results returned from her mother’s own search. So okay. Her mother seemed to be searching for stuff online about end-of-the-world stories, apocalypses, the gods Shiva and Kali— Wait. What?
Right there in the search results, at the bottom of the screen. Had Mom seen it? The name Adrienne…?
Her mother cleared the master screen with a single mouse gesture and started to shut down her own workstation. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go up on deck.”
Adrienne initiated shutdown on her own workstation, then, but not before bookmarking that one link. She’d come back to it later, maybe at bedtime, when neither Mom nor Dad cared much about how she spent her time.
—-
The Librarian had no eyes so could not blink in surprise. Nevertheless, he blinked in surprise at the information that Adrienne Burghar and Eldon Lane had almost concurrently read of their future selves in what seemed to be a work of fiction, written by a writer of whom The Librarian had never heard. Of course there were many such writers — eventually he’d get them all, but he’d only been doing this for a couple hundred thousand Earth years or so, give or take, since first crossing the barrier in reverse.
Yet this opened up a whole other landscape of questions, all of which boiled down to: how had that writer come up with his story? Chance? 
Even in an infinitely-folded universe, were all things really possible?
He lunged backwards a little into the past and repositioned himself geographically alongside the writer. Once, twice, a dozen, five hundred times he played the writer’s creativity back and forth… and never once found him writing the story which Eldon and Adrienne had read.
But that made even less sense. If the writer never wrote the story, or even imagined writing it, then how had Eldon and Adrienne read it? And if they never read the story, how could The Librarian be here now, rummaging around in human history? And if he were not here now, then what would prevent Kali — and the eventual end of the universe — from wiping out every trace of humanity’s passing? Was he about to… to disappear? to fail?
Bored no more, now The Librarian was just terribly, terribly confused.
__________________________
I have no idea if what’s about to happen next is actually kinda cool,
or, well, not. Guess we’ll all find out next week, hmm?
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