Librarians in Exile: A Secret Sanctuary for Subversive Works
AI News Desk
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MIT Technology Review
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9 min read
A group of librarians harbor a fugitive filmmaker and plan to send a repository of censored works to space.
There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace.
And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm.
Eustace was holding the screwdriver she’d been using to tune the aneroid barometer. Eustace had painted height lines on the big double doorframe, as only half a joke. When the wanderer paused, outlined within, the eiroscope and I both registered that they were exactly five feet, ten inches.
They paused, boots scattering sand on the threshold. A narrow straight-hipped silhouette against the white noon light falling from the white, white sky. The doors had been open to catch a breath of wind, but there wasn’t any.
So when the stranger swayed, it wasn’t from the gale. “Sanctuary,” they croaked, and remeasured their length onto the rug between the smoothed trunks that held the loft up. The Stetson went rolling.
Little Jo dropped her stack of books and her pistol and dashed forward. I jumped at the noise but holstered my own shooter in case I came to need it. We each grabbed an armpit and dragged the outlaw’s feet inside the threshold, grunting, lickety-split.
I slipped their floppy pack off, empty metal water bottles clanking as I set it aside. Eustace helped us roll them, and I laid the soft of my wrist on their head. Hot as Hades, but still tacky.
Moist enough that my skin gave a reluctant pop when I lifted my arm. Not past saving. “Let’s get them someplace cool,” I said.
“Little Jo, go empty out the ice machine.” Eustace and I toted our fugitive down to the cellar, using the rug as a stretcher. It was Diné, vermilion with black and gray, and I was glad they hadn’t thrown up on it. Though that wool had seen worse.
Mehitabel, the black cat, watched us from atop the timber lintel of the cellar access. Her tail tip flicked incuriously. She was on pack rat watch.
Aloof from human antics. The cellar was narrow, low, and stocked with Eustace’s blue corn lager in bottles, prickly pear jam, potatoes, and the few hard-rind squash still left over. The mud walls were whitewashed, and while it wasn’t quite cool, it was better than the outside.
We stripped off the stranger’s clothes, trying to slit along the seams so we could repair them later. City stuff, mass-produced and machine-woven. Little Jo brought the ice and went back upstairs to watch alongside the eiroscope in case pursuit was close behind.
The stranger’s eyes flew open, and they screamed when I packed wet cold pillowcases against their pink bits. Eustace had to hold their battling hands away from their genitals until they settled. Brown eyes blinked between heavy creases.
“What the hell—” “I’m Ponyboy,” I told them. “She. PhD.
I’m one of the librarians here. This is Eustace. She, MLS.” “Shhh.” Eustace pushed them down and laid an ice-soaked cloth across their eyes.
“You’re heat-sick.” “Sanctuary,” they whispered. “Did I say?” “You did. This is the Bōchord.
You made it. Must have been a long walk.” We continued packing ice around them—into their armpits now. They yelped and moaned but gave up fighting.
“Guh—” Too long a pause to be believable. “Gibson. She.” “Welcome to Judgement, Gibson,” I said.
“Sorry about the cold, but it’s got to stay there for a little.” “My pack,” she said, shrilling. “My pack. I need it.” “It’s safe,” Eustace told her.
“You just relax and we’ll get it for you.” When I came back out the nave was still and heavy in the heat, as if nothing had happened. Little Jo had turned one of the bumpy-backed wooden chairs to face the door and was sitting on it, hands buried in tiered skirt ruffles between her knees. I looked left, two steps up into the sanctuary, but all was calm, the work I’d left—cataloguing—still heaped on the blond wood altar table.
Behind it, bright primitive saints in shades of blue-green, scarlet, and yellow looked with shocked eyebrows down from the adobe wall. I moved up behind Little Jo, making sure she could hear me coming. My footsteps echoed from roof joists made from entire peeled and waxed trees.
Scrolled headers painted the color of good turquoise held them over the bookcases lining each long wall. The Bōchord. Book Sanctuary.
Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro. Little Jo turned her unambiguous jaw away, tendons rising on a long neck, jailhouse ink black-blue on her red-black skin. A sweaty curl escaped down her nape.
My fingers itched to tidy it. But it hurt too much to even think about taking a risk that profound. She stretched horny discalced feet before her.
Cracking calluses wrapped the balls and heels. “Only what we brung in with us.” She was a double murderer, but I couldn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I hadn hadn’t heard about her history from her . And her guilt wasn’t mine to absolve.
You do your own time. Not anybody else’s. “You check her bag for anything dangerous?” “She’s got an SSD,” Little Jo shrugged.
“No threat if we don’t plug it into anything.” “I can speak for myself, Ponyboy,” said the eiroscope from the air all around. Actually it used the old wireless speakers tucked in the corners, but the effect was as of a choir of angels. Or an airport announcement you could actually understand.
“I’ve been focused on the CubeSat launch.” “Eleven forty-seven. The launch came off perfectly. Our last batch of sats are on their way.” Little Jo breathed deep and unfisted her hands from her skirts.
There were so many hours of work in those satellites, and so much of the money we collectively squirreled away as researchers for hire had gone through cutouts and shell companies to pay for the launch. The parts—boards, housings, chips—were salvaged from the same derelict data center where we got our solar panels and the hardware the eiroscope ran on. We were behind schedule, because we’d lost one payload when the commercial rocket we’d rented cargo room on exploded.
But this would be our last batch, if they reached orbit safely. I turned my wrist to glance at my watch even though I already knew what time it was. The second hand ticked past the big hand.
Old school. The rainbow band was a tiny rebellion, though out here it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to send me back to jail for subversive iconography.
Unless I left our little patch of exile. Ten minutes and we’d know. Ten minutes and stage three of our plan—assembly—could commence.
It was out of my hands, and anyway the eiroscope would tell us if the telemetry wobbled. She was a ghost astride the radio signals to and from ground control. It had taken a lot of engineering to get us this far.
Engineering, software and relational. Computer. Social and mechanical.
I walked beside the bookcases, running my hand along the shelves, over the UDC labels. Some shelves even held books, though none of mine were there. But the majority of the information we protected like Irish monks from this willful dark age was digital.
I knew my fidgeting annoyed Little Jo but I couldn’t stop. I was killing time. When I had murdered enough of it, the eiroscope said, “Payload away.
Everything seems nominal. I have contact with the CubeSats.” “Twenty out of twenty,” the eiroscope said. “A triumph of modular design.” “Sure,” said Little Jo.
“As long as we can get them to assemble. And the solar panels and sails deploy.” She flipped me off with a gnawed green nail. My hand rested on the label marked 326.
Social sciences, slavery and unfree labor. I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. People born into bondage or remanded there judicially.
Political prisoners like Nikolai Vavilov, murdered in a labor camp by Stalin for the thought crime of using plant genetics to breed hardier crops. Enslaved people like Harriet Tubman, who after her own escape risked capture again and again to rescue others. Convict laborers like Austin Reed, a Black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner and documented his experiences in a suppressed memoir.
We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it.
And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever. Because it was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.
The Vikings had the concept of word-fame: the idea that life was finite but as long as the stories of one’s deeds lived on, so did their memory. How much truth could we get outside the clutches of the Patriotic Library and Archive Network? A name that would have made Orwell cock his head.
But most folks these days haven’t heard of Orwell. Or Bradbury. Or Solnit.
Or Le Guin. They’re suppressed also. Integrated data storage makes it easy.
A few keystrokes, a propagating worm. What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? Unpersoned, as Brother Orwell would have it?
No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. To erase the existence of those that make the ruling class uncomfortable by existing. By thinking.
By demanding to be seen. So that was our plan. Little Jo, Eustace, the eiroscope, and me.
To preserve it—for later generations, if they got that far, or just as a silent record of our existence—by sending it to the stars. Why this matters: As the world becomes increasingly digitized and surveilled, the librarians' actions take on a profound significance. They are not just preserving books and knowledge, but also the ideas and stories that could challenge the status quo.
By sending a repository of censored works to space, they are ensuring that these ideas will survive, even if they are erased from the digital record on Earth. This act of defiance has far-reaching implications for the future of free expression and the power of ideas to shape society. For developers and businesses, it highlights the importance of preserving digital information and the need for secure, decentralized storage solutions.
For consumers, it underscores the value of access to diverse perspectives and the importance of protecting the freedom to read and think.
