Prelude to a Scripture

“Boston Public Library. Bates Hall” (c. 1910-1912). Courtesy of The Boston Public Library Arts Department.
Here is a list of things I know about the author.
Either he was very old or he had a proclivity for the vintage. His briefcase says as much: tan, leather, mid-twentieth century—the sort corporate grunts carried back to their white-picket-fence homes at the end of a long workday, the kind you see in films so old they have not only human actors but also no color besides black and white. Dust has made a permanent home in the fabric interior, and the faint scent of cigarette smoke wafts out when I open it. A brass buckle once locked the case shut, and a small, engraved nameplate, half its letters too faded to make out, lends the only hint about who the owner might have been: J Nort.
Inside the briefcase lives one of the last bodies of original writing by a human being, still untouched by artificial intelligence. Acquired by the library ages ago, the briefcase was apparently overlooked by archivists due to its nondescript exterior and unlucky positioning beneath a bottom shelf. It contains piles upon piles of handwritten notes, completely fragmentary in nature; J. Nort wrote on whatever paper he could, using anything from napkins to takeout menus to advertisements. In this piecemeal collection of scraps, he outlined a novel about a world stricken with war over the relationship between man, machine, and corporation.
It is likely that he was employed as a scientist or programmer, given his intimate knowledge about the inner workings of machines. A thinker ahead of his time—it is impossible to understand how much so, not knowing how long ago he might have lived.
He was a visionary.
And he is almost certainly dead.
It’s brilliant, really; the days get hotter, the rich get richer, and all the while we’re distracted thinking about the sins of booksellers past.
My name is Eileen. I work in the Boston Public Library archives, and I have no living memory of a time before machines rendered the human mind obsolescent. My position involves the digitization of our collection of “organically generated content”—branded as such, despite all of it having been written prior to the existence of artificial intelligence, due to ongoing controversy surrounding the term “human.”
You have probably never given it much thought, but our libraries are dying. When I finished school, everybody warned me. It’s a defunct institution, they said—dangerous, even. There’s no future to be had there. At the time, I wondered whether by “future” they meant money or technological advancement—neither of which I cared much for. I know now that they were correct in a more literal sense: once we’ve finished digitizing our collections, the physical library building will close its doors for good. This is happening across the country, the culmination of a decades-long project to retire the libraries, slowed by a lack of funding to pay employees but fed by a smear campaign—wealthy politicians in bed with fossil fuel executives—positioning paper products as the root of climate disaster. You see the e-billboards every time you step outside. It’s brilliant, really; the days get hotter, the rich get richer, and all the while we’re distracted thinking about the sins of booksellers past. If only they hadn’t been so greedy, we might still have forests.
All it took to get the libraries on board was a mayoral promise that our collections could remain private property—hands-off for tech developers. Although it saddens me, I can admit that even a place as analog as the library needs to go digital eventually, and we can all appreciate the benefits of an online archive—free knowledge, easy access.
Once, the library was a haven, full of students and literary enthusiasts at all hours of the day. Now it is the sort of place you avoid when walking home alone at night.
But let me tell you what the library used to be. A century ago, it received robust state funding and was kept alive by more than just a few passionate donors rising in age and declining in health. It was a miracle, a hub of knowledge open to anyone. With permission, you could take any book home with you for weeks at a time, and you could get more weeks simply by asking. You were incentivized against stealing with small fines—manageable if you forgot for a few days—but the accretion was enough to deter most thieves. It was a place people went, and it was beautiful. Back then, our library had high dome ceilings and intricately designed windowpanes. Rows upon rows of tables with colorful lamps. Marvelous marble sculptures and hand-painted murals. There was even a courtyard garden for lounging with a book on hot days.
Once, the library was a haven, full of students and literary enthusiasts at all hours of the day. Now it is the sort of place you avoid when walking home alone at night.
I discovered the briefcase on a cold afternoon. Technically, our shifts are only supposed to last four hours at maximum to keep costs down, but I made a habit of staying long after I had clocked out just to explore the stacks before they disappeared.
I hadn’t slept much the night before. Another of my neighbors had leapt from the roof, and the crazy man who stands on the street corner with an ANTHROPOCENE IS OVER sign had had a field day screaming at the EMTs about lives laid down in India and Africa to service AI systems, among other conspiracy theories.
In my exhaustion, I sank straight to the floor after lunch, eager to browse but too sleepy to stand. As I let my eyes roam the shelves, they dropped to a brassy gleam beneath the bottom row of books, shiny as a lightning strike. There was no library barcode on the thing, but still I cracked it open right there on the floor, uncovering a mass of aged paper inside.
At first, I couldn’t understand a word. The smudgy handwriting, ruined entirely in some places by water damage, would have been near impossible to read when it was written, let alone decades later by someone raised on cleanly typed text. Still, I squinted at the pages until phrases began to appear, and I gasped at the first words I could decipher: free labor = limitless profit.
I pored over the papers for hours that night, leaving only when the associate archivist banged on the door and yelled at me to go home. The notes were jumbled and incomplete, but clear ideas—even a narrative—concerning a society where machines slowly replaced human bodies in the workforce began to emerge from the madness. I could feel a part of my mind awakening that had long lain dormant, rattling to life with an urge to create.
Every night after that, I stayed late to decipher more of J. Nort’s narrative—or, as I saw it, manifesto. I put my library skills to the test, transcribing like a madwoman. For the first time in my life, I was doing something that felt important. Once I’d gotten it all onto the computer, I faced the biggest challenge yet—finishing the thing. J. Nort had great ideas, sure; he’d built a world eerily similar to ours and made gestures toward a story. But now someone had to make his work readable. It would have to be compelling to trump the seconds-long attention span of the average citizen.
I scoured the library’s collections, devouring old texts on storytelling and rhetoric. Keeping focus had never been easier; my every nerve felt alive with purpose. It was like finally becoming human.
I was nearing the end of the project when I overheard the head librarian—Marla, a kindly older woman who wore her turquoise-rimmed glasses on a chain around her neck—on a call in her office. She sounded cheerful, and it gave me pause; Marla never tried to hide her dismay at the decline of the library in the public consciousness. Some days she seemed so depressed that I trailed behind her on the upper floors, ready to bar her from taking another step should she make for the rooftop. Now, hearing a grin in her voice, I had to listen in.
From what I could tell, she seemed to be speaking with some kind of developer. She was discussing progress made toward the library’s closing, mentioning that she couldn’t wait for the staff to finally receive our hard-earned due. She hoped the new system would “bring a marked improvement in artificial intelligence’s reference capabilities,” and she looked forward to “welcoming the evolution of the library”—
That stupid bitch.
She had let some cheap corporate salesperson talk her, just like that, into pawning off the library’s rights to its own holdings. And in exchange for what? Slightly less pathetic severance packages for her employees as we watched the very idea of our jobs disappear before us?
All my hours—my years—of labor in service of preserving the one safeguard for human consumption of knowledge, independent of computer-generated synopses or suggestions. Sold to the highest bidder and used to train yet another fucking bot.
The Anthropocene is breathing its last shaky breath, and it is choking on it.
I don’t know what I had originally intended to do with J. Nort’s book once it was completed—I had had vague fantasies about keeping it my secret forever or staging a grand discovery to keep the library open longer—but I scrambled to finish and then began printing frantically on the ancient copy machine in the basement office. Then I deleted the file off the library network permanently. What I did next, you’re holding in your hands.
We are living in a time of crisis. The people on the street corners are not insane. The Anthropocene is breathing its last shaky breath, and it is choking on it. We have lost our purpose—not in a figurative sense, but in a very literal one. No one wants to live anymore. Why do you think your neighbors are leaping from the rooftops? Profit is not purpose; every day, another person is replaced by an object. This world is an atrocity; I know this because I can feel it in my bones, and J. Nort’s is the only voice I’ve ever heard telling me I’m right.
So here I leave you, J. Nort’s first and only book before you. I hope that his words will radicalize you, galvanize you. Let them. Allow your world to be changed by someone’s words—engage with another person. It’s the way the world was meant to work.
May our humanity prevail.

Olivia Hu O'Connor
Publab Fellow 2024
Olivia Hu O’Connor is a writer and actor originally from Boston. She graduated from Yale University this May with a B.A. in Theater and English with a concentration in Creative Writing, and she is currently based in New Haven, CT. In her free time, she enjoys tending carefully to her Letterboxd diary.
Instagram: @oliviahuoconnor, LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-o-connor-584278204