The Future Library

by Peng Shepherd

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  18 August 2125

  Kløfta, Norway

  You wonder what this letter could have to tell you, because you think you already know everything about the Future Library. Who doesn’t? It’s the only story on NewsLens, every day, all the time. They’re making yet another movie, and another virtual reality experience, and even a porn game. You can make anything into porn, I guess. Even forests. You’ve probably even entered the library’s Forever Contest yourself, in the hopes that you’re one of the one hundred who is selected each year, out of billions. One of the one hundred who will become immortal.

  I didn’t participate in the official documentary, because the whole thing was a lie. And also because I was in prison on “eco-terrorism” charges at the time. I put this in quotations on purpose. Because of the nature of my crimes, I had no computer access or right to be interviewed during my trial, or after. The Future Library’s lawyers made sure of that.

  It was a life sentence, until Gunnar came to see me at Ullersmo Prison.

  Nothing is for forever. Not a life sentence, not a forest.

  Not even the Forever Contest.

  They have hidden so much from you, but no longer.

  My name is Ingrid Hagen, and I’m the one who discovered that the trees can talk.

  * * *

  I’m not good at telling stories. I started out as an arborist, not a librarian. Leaves, sure, and roots, but words were never really my thing. Well, until they were.

  I have to start at the beginning, so you’ll understand.

  I grew up in Oslo, in the Grønland area just north of the central train station. My mother went into labor early in the summer of 2050, when half of the Americas and a good portion of southern Europe were on fire. All the drought, and so much heat, they said. The icebergs had melted too much, the transportation industry was still using too many fossil fuels, and so on. It was being called the “Red Summer” then, because no one could know at that point that it wouldn’t burn out before the end of that summer. That it never really would burn out, per se. It would just eventually run out of trees to devour. But it was still grey and wet in Norway in those days, and even cold some of the time. Some of my earliest memories are of begging to borrow my mother’s iScreen so I could watch Operation Green’s joint international effort to protect the rainforests.

  I didn’t understand the politics of climate collapse, being a child, but I liked the clips. The rousing speeches, the big tractors building protective fences around the land, the water drums being hauled from the cloud-seeding factories in China, where they could grow rain. And the arborists, most of all. They looked so adventurous, in their scuffed boots and sweat-stained neck gaiters, climbing spikes and ropes dangling from their utility belts. I would watch them shimmy up and down the trees for hours, until my mother demanded I go eat dinner or do homework.

  By the time I got to university, arboriculture was a dying art. Earth’s remaining trees were precious, but there were just too few of them to need many arborists. I had to go all the way to the University of Tennessee, in the United States. After graduation, I ended up in Brazil with the rest of our dwindling industry, trying to stop the mass extinction process there in the Amazon. But it was like trying to save a car crash victim with a Band-Aid. I have never felt wind so hot and sweltering as there, with sun that could sear your flesh through clothes—even in muggy Tennessee. I felt more like I was swimming than walking through the Amazon. Like everything was underwater, if the water was boiling.

  We tried and tried, until Operation Green started laying us off, too. All funding was being diverted toward stopping the CHA7-MRSA superbug that was decimating urban populations, and then toward the global air pollution crisis. We lost the rainforest.

  Ten months later, I was in a grocery store back in Oslo—no, let’s be honest about it all, if we’re going to be honest about any of it—I was in the discount aisle of a Vinmonopolet, spending the dregs of my pitiful bank account on enough liquor to erase at least a full week from my existence, when I first saw Claire Nakamura.

  “Champagne,” I noted, mostly because it had been so long since I’d had anything to celebrate in my own life. Operation Green had promised that as soon as they resecured funding they would hire us all back, but I knew the day they sent us home that they never would. The rainforest, the trees I had loved, were gone.

  “Is this bottle good?” she asked me in English. She sounded a little like Awhina, one of the arborists I had worked with in Brazil, who was from New Zealand. Claire was already incredibly famous by that time, a renowned novelist from Auckland, but like I said, words were never my thing. I didn’t recognize her. I only knew that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “If the occasion is good enough, it always tastes good.”

  That made her smile. “I’ve just inherited a forest,” she told me.

  Forest.

  “That’s incredible,” I said. It had been so long since I’d heard that word spoken aloud. Just the sound of it made my heart stir.

  “That’s not the reaction most people have,” Claire laughed. “No one, in fact.”

  “I’m an arborist.”

  The skin on my hand burned with white-hot fire where she took hold of it—surprised, giddy. I can still feel exactly where her fingers first touched me if I concentrate. She smelled like salt, and the rain from outside the door, and ink.

  “Do you believe in fate?” she asked me. She was joking but not really, I could tell. Later I learned it was that way with writers, that everything seemed like fate or magic to them, and it was always totally normal.

  “I believe in champagne,” I said.

  It was a terrible joke, but it worked. Or at least, it didn’t ruin my chance.

  She bit her lip, suddenly a little shy, as if working up the courage to say something. Finally, she held up the bottle. “I was going to drink this alone because my friends are all still in Auckland,” she said. Her eyes were deep, deep green, like a juniper in spring. “Do you want to come see my forest?”

  I did. But to be honest, in that moment, even with the prospect of a forest, I really just wanted to see her. The entire train ride from Sentralstasjon, I held the fancy bottle for her, heart racing, my fingers gripping the neck of it so tightly I thought it might shatter.

  “So, it’s a forest, but it’s so much more than that,” Claire was explaining, breathless with excitement.

  That’s how I ended up working at the Future Library.

  * * *

  It might be hard to believe, because the Future Library is all anyone talks about these days, but back then, I’d never heard of it. This was some thirty-plus years before it would officially become a library, after all. The trees we
re still growing then. Just little saplings.

  Claire had inherited custodianship of the Future Library from its founder, Katie Paterson, who had just passed away of old age. Katie started the project decades ago, back in 2014, nearly half a century before Claire or I was even born. Back when the world’s forests were beginning to die, but there were still plenty. Claire had learned of the library herself because she’d been asked to write a novel for it. She’d come to Norway because she’d wanted to choose her tree.

  You’ve read it already, of course. The Song of Leaves. The first book the Future Library released.

  I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Katie Paterson originally created the Future Library as a literary and environmental public art project, before the board twisted it into what it is now. After receiving approval from the Norwegian government, she came from Fife to purchase several acres of land in Nordmarka forest, a few hours north of Oslo. There, she planted one thousand Norwegian spruce trees—Picea abies, known and harvested for their quality wood, for obvious reasons—in addition to continuing to care for the thousands of juvenile birch, Betula pubescens, and pine, Pinus sylvestris, already flourishing in the area. Then she began inviting the authors.

  The idea, Claire had said that night as we walked between the dark trees, our only light the moon and the tiny beams from our phones, was to convince one hundred authors to each write one new work, to remain unpublished and unread, and held in trust by the Future Library for a hundred years. At the end of those one hundred years, in the Spring of 2114, long after the authors and Katie Paterson herself would have passed away, the new custodians of the Future Library would cut down one hundred of the thousand trees she had planted, and print these one hundred books on the paper made from their wood for future generations to read.

  The authors were free to write whatever they wanted, with “a thematic emphasis on imagination and time,” Claire explained as she popped the cork off the champagne, her smile so beautiful. She was the fifty-seventh author invited to write for the Future Library—one of the last ones Katie Paterson had selected before she died in the early 2070s—but she was the first one to ask to come to the forest to choose the tree that would become her book. By the end of Claire’s short trip, the aging and ailing Katie had already decided to hand over custodianship of the Future Library to her.

  Claire went home to pack up her life into a suitcase and apply for a Norwegian residency visa. It wasn’t but a few more months before the Future Library’s secretary Ikká called her with the news that Katie had passed away in her sleep.

  Even with the partial travel bans due to the canine-avian-equine influenza outbreak from Greece, Claire could not be stopped. She made it back to Oslo after a forty-hour, six-transfer journey and a twelve-hour wait at the border, plus two temperature tests, three blood draws, four nasal swabs, and a ten-day wrist tracker in lieu of a quarantine. Her first stop, after not having slept for nearly two full days, was that Vinmonopolet.

  There was no sign on Claire’s tree, the one that would be for her book—nothing to mark it out from the others in the grove—but I burned its shape into my mind after that first night. It was one of the newer Norwegian spruce saplings, one of the many planted by Katie, in a particularly sunny clearing. Good sun exposure through the canopy, excellent root spread, and ample shelter from the wind, even being as deep into the north of the forest as it was.

  “What do you think?” Claire asked, leaning back against the bark of its trunk and grinning up at me. Dawn was breaking, just enough that we could see each other in the muted glow of the sunrise without our phones anymore.

  I wanted to ask her to marry me. Instead, I asked her for a job.

  “Trunk measurements, leaf samples, soil pH, all of it requires very precise knowledge and experience,” I bragged desperately. “I would check every sapling every single day, from root to tip.”

  I tried to make it all sound as serious as possible, but it was sort of a lie. The trees in Nordmarka were exceptionally healthy, even with the Amazon already dead ash, and forests in Earth’s subtropical and temperate zones withering. But I worried if I told her that I already wanted to be with her for the rest of our lives, it would have spooked her. We’d known each other all of eight hours.

  Then again, maybe not. She was the one who believed in magic, and fate.

  She was the one who kissed me first.

  We were never apart from each other after that. We took the train back to Oslo the next day so I could pack my clothes and give up my apartment, and then I moved into the library’s modest residential cabins just outside the forest, into the one beside Claire’s. Three months later, I moved into hers, and six months after that we married, right there among the trees, with her favorite librarian, Gunnar, officiating.

  For three decades I had her as my wife, and I had the forest as its head arborist. During the days, Claire would be wrapped up in a cardigan in her office, she and her librarians nearly hidden by their piles of books and papers and stacked mugs of tea, and I would be outside with the other arborists, covered in mud, climbing up and down our trees. At night, we would sit together in front of the fire, and she would tell me everything about her side of the library’s work, about words and stories and books, and I would tell her everything about mine, about roots and rain and leaves.

  It was perfect.

  Sometimes I can’t believe how quickly it went, and sometimes I can’t believe I was ever allowed to have been so happy for so long.

  I’m sorry. It’s just that when I think of Claire, even now, it’s hard to think of anything else.

  If you go back into the news archives to look for mentions, mostly no one cared about the Future Library project in the beginning. It was something that no one alive in 2014 would still be around to see. But by the late 2090s, when the Future Library was only about twenty-five years away from maturing, suddenly a quarter of a century didn’t seem so long. Visits to the forest ticked up, and literary outlets began to run culture articles. Someone even created a countdown people could keep running in the corners of their NewsLens devices. I did not, because it bothered my view when climbing, but Claire did. She would tell me the count first thing every morning even though we both had it memorized, giggling gleefully as she snatched her NewsLens off the nightstand to peer through it at me.

  “Are you sure you can do it?” she asked me, exactly one year before the Future Library was to officially open. Her voice had grown so weak by then, it was barely more than a breath.

  Earlier that afternoon, I had taken the train from Frognerseteren station back to Oslo, to buy the same champagne from the same Vinmonopolet where we’d met half a lifetime ago and bring it back. At this time next spring, my arborists would begin to fell the trees of the first authors, and prepare the logs to be processed into paper, so their words could be printed.

  And Claire would not be there to see it.

  “I promise,” I assured her.

  Before, I had meant it. The library was her dream. I could have allowed them to cut down the one hundred trees destined for their books and been at peace tending to the rest of the forest that remained. I could have done it together with her.

  But now…

  Claire tried to take the tiniest sip from her glass, and gave up.

  I could tell she didn’t believe me, either. She had watched me care for the trees every day for three decades, as closely as a mother might care for her children. And she knew how even more precious those trees had become. By that point, early 2113, Nordmarka was the last forest remaining in the world, and had been for some time. The Valdivian Rainforest in Argentina and Chile, the Miombo Woodlands in central Africa, Arashiyama Grove in Japan, all gone. We’d heard that in the hermetically sealed biovaults in the New Tsimshian Collective in former western Canada, there were a handful of lab-grown saplings struggling to put down roots in the synthetically enhanced soil substitute the Tsimshian botanists were trying to perfect, but they always curled inward and d
ied a few years after germination. Outside their vaults, the last scattered wild specimens that had survived whatever killed their forests had also slowly weakened and shriveled to husks, despite the UNEP’s best efforts to save them. Every so often there would be a report of a living tree, but it always turned out to be a mistake, or a hoax. The ground was just too poisoned, the rain nonexistent, the sun too corrupting.

  Nordmarka was truly all that was left. Every tree that remained in the world lived in the Future Library.

  “It’s all a cycle,” I finally said. Gunnar, whom Claire had chosen to take over management of the library for her, set the syringes and IV bundle down on the table beside us, and kissed her on the forehead before withdrawing to wait with the physician outside the room.

  Her lung cancer had become so bad that she could no longer bear it. Not for even one more night, let alone one more year. The Crackles, they were now calling it, because of the sound. Without the rest of the world’s forests to help Nordmarka clean the air, the PM2.5 particles were so dense that even with respirator masks, which were at a shortage anyway, the Crackles had become an international epidemic.

  “All things must grow, and then die, so that new things can grow. No tree can live forever, just as no person can,” I told her, taking her hand.

  “But a book could, my love,” she whispered desperately.

  I knew what Claire was hoping. She was hoping that a year from then, when her tree fell and they turned it into her book, that when I finally held a copy of it in my hands I would feel that I had the last piece of her, after she’d gone.

  But I already had the last piece of her, in her tree.

  It was not that I loved the forest more than I loved her. It was that to me, they were one and the same.

  “For Claire,” Gunnar said to me a year later, the day of the Future Library’s opening, as we stood in the early morning light on a makeshift stage. The audience clapped while my arborists waited beside us, handsaws politely clutched behind their backs. Gunnar and the librarians had decided we would start with her tree, to pay respects to her. Her book would be the first one the library would publish.