The Future Library

by Peng Shepherd

  But before I could start, Minister Berg leaned forward to his table microphone, cutting me off. “I’d like to talk about symbols,” he said slowly.

  “Symbols?” I asked, surprised.

  Minister Berg cleared his throat and smiled.

  Suddenly, I could tell that whatever he was about to say next had been rehearsed. That the other officials already knew. There was some sort of plan, and they had already all agreed on it.

  “Of hope. Of the future. That a human’s life might continue even after their body is gone.”

  “But—” I paused, tried to remain collected. I looked at Gunnar beside me, but he was looking at Minister Berg, not me. “That’s not what’s happening here, with the ashes and the words. It’s not the truth—”

  “Truth for truth’s sake is academic, at best. But we live in the world. The most noble purpose of truth is to benefit the greater good,” Minister Berg continued, voice echoing through the ugly grey room. “I think, with the right balance between environmental protection and humanitarian considerations, the Future Library might be able to do even more for the forest—and mankind—than we’d previously hoped.”

  “I have evidence,” I tried to say, but I was already panicking. “I can show you.”

  Evidence of what? I expected him to ask, but he said, “A proposal, for the board’s consideration,” instead. He was facing the rest of the table now, not me. As if I hadn’t spoken at all.

  I looked desperately at Gunnar again as Minister Berg began to describe his idea for the Forever Contest. Of holding an annual call for cremated remains from the global public, and a drawing to decide which to “plant.” Of allowing just a few of these last trees to be cut down each year, so we could read the words written inside their wood—the last words of the planted person. Words from beyond death, words that meant that a person was never really gone.

  They already knew it would become the single greatest event in human history. You could see it in their eyes. Earth was spiraling toward death, and people were terrified. There wasn’t a person still alive who would be able to resist entering.

  I tried to argue, but it was useless. What politicians can do with words seems like a kind of magic Claire might have invented in one of her novels.

  “The funding would continue indefinitely this way,” Minister Berg was saying, and the rest of them were nodding. “Each tree in Nordmarka is certainly precious, but we still have thousands of them. If we’re careful, if we create a strict annual maximum number…”

  Gunnar still would not look at me. “Gunnar, please,” I said to him as the minister continued his speech. I touched his arm to force him to pay attention. “This is important.” The words were hot and sharp in my throat. “It’s about Claire’s book.”

  “I’m sorry, Ingrid,” he sighed. His voice was so soft.

  It took me a long time to believe it. That they had swayed him, too. Gunnar had been a part of the Future Library project for nearly all his professional life, the same as Claire and I had. I thought of anyone, he’d understand time like we did.

  But I guess even one hundred years is not very long, compared to the ages of the elder trees in the Future Library forest for which I’d also cared.

  We held a vote. A sham of a formality. I was the only dissenter. The library would announce the Forever Contest the next day, and begin taking submissions immediately. Every year, the remains of one hundred winners would be planted, and then the year after, their trees would be cut down, so we could read their immortal words. And sell them.

  I ran back to the storage closet, to take as many of the manuscripts as I could carry. I had to go public. I had to tell the truth. I threw open the door to the room so quickly the wall rattled.

  But the manuscripts, and their little wooden boxes, were gone. The space was as bare as the day it had been built, just an empty square.

  I turned around. Gunnar was standing there in Claire’s office, hands in his pockets. He still could not look at me.

  I was arrested.

  * * *

  I realize now that the board already knew what I’d been trying to tell them. That at some point, amid all their excitement, someone on staff must have remembered that according to procedure, our off-site server with the electronic copies of the manuscripts would automatically unlock that first week, to allow for printing. Perhaps Gunnar had gotten a system-generated email about it. They must have checked the trees against the files. They must have known since nearly the beginning.

  Initially, my charges were listed as something to do with business fraud. But then someone convinced the other arborists to gossip, and stories were exaggerated, idle chatter inflated, until the accusation was not that I simply had complained about how the newly formed board was handling the administration of the Future Library, but rather that I had outright threatened its members. Suspicious tools and materials—saws, knives, fertilizer mix, batteries for my head lamp—never mind that all arborists use such things in the daily undertaking of their profession, were found in my room.

  Eco-terrorism had a much more serious ring to it.

  The library’s lawyers likely figured I would use my chance on the stand to expose the Forever Contest rather than defend myself, so they never let me near the courtroom. A safety concern petition had been filed. I watched the proceedings from prison at Ullersmo, in cell 144. My roommate was serving a seventy-year term for double homicide, ten years into her sentence. Even she had heard of the Future Library, from inside there.

  “So, anyone can enter the contest?” she asked, leaning over from her top bunk to look down at me.

  “Yes,” I said. There wasn’t any point in trying to convince her of what I knew. That it didn’t matter. That no one was winning anything, even the winners. “But how would you even enter your name, from here?”

  “There’s a whole computer room in the education wing,” she said. “Everyone gets one hour of internet access a day. Haven’t they taken you to see it yet?”

  Of course they hadn’t. And they never would.

  “Why did you try to kill them? The Future Library board?” she asked. “For the trees?”

  I shrugged. For truth, I should have said. “For love,” I did instead.

  She smiled crookedly. “Me, too.”

  I was sentenced to life without parole.

  * * *

  I had nothing but time to watch what happened to the Future Library, and the forest, after that.

  The board kept cutting down trees, our precious Nordmarka dwindling as the earth became even more polluted, the droughts even worse. More pandemics, more wars. Sometimes, inside Ullersmo, it would get so hot that even with the fans spinning as fast as they could go, prisoners would just drop to the floor, their eyes rolling back in their heads, their withered bodies so overheated they could no longer function. It was like being back in the dying Amazon again. Struggling to breathe, sweating so much but that sweat making no difference, because the air was so hot and humid that your sweat simply clung to you like a curtain of steam, making you even sicker.

  And still, every spring, the Future Library felled one hundred more trees for the Future Contest.

  Whenever my roommate went to the education wing for her hour on the computers, she let me give her a few questions to look up, as long as it didn’t take more than fifteen minutes of her allotted time. There had been some conservation attempts in response to feeble complaints from independent environmental bodies, she told me. The board apparently once tried to send seeds from Nordmarka to the biovaults in the New Tsimshian Collective, but the spruce wouldn’t grow there. They also tried cutting and examining smaller plants under a microscope, Vaccinium myrtillus and Hylocomium splendens and Oxalis acetosella, to see if other flora might also be capable of producing words, but it seems that only the trees can do it.

  And they’ve noticed style differences between the species, as well. Picea abies tend to hold sad stories, and Pinus sylvestris grow sweeter, happier ones. Betula pub
escens often reveal poetry, or sometimes even music, the notes floating between the rings as they go round and round, flats and sharps, halfs and wholes, as though the lines are composition staffs. The Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra performs them all in a concert every autumn. I’ve heard their recordings playing in the mess hall during dinner hours, crooning softly over the intercom system—a benevolent gift to us from the wardens on days when our already meager rations are exceptionally low.

  The songs are so beautiful, it’s hard for anyone to do anything else while they play. Cutlery and conversation still, and we all just sit in silence for hours, lost. I have never felt such a profound ache as when I listen to those songs. The loneliness suffuses every cell of me even more than it did my first night without Claire. It’s like the birch understand even better than us what it’s like to grieve something precious. Maybe they do. After all, I’m only seventy-five years old. We’ve been destroying their forests for millennia.

  All of this art is passed off as being thanks to us humans, of course. Our remains, our lives after death, sent to this sham Forever Contest. The board has already lied about so much, it’s not that hard for them to lie about this, too. How would anyone prove it? The “winners” are all dead before they even win.

  The day of the Future Library’s opening, I truly had no idea that there would already be words inside the spruce tree I had pretended was Claire’s. No one did. Who could have? I thought it would be pure, plain, untouched wood, just the same as the wood in her actual tree—if wood was wood, what difference would it make? I’d thought. All I’d been doing was trying to save the tree I loved like I had loved her. To let another one be made into paper for her book. Readers would still be able to have her words, her pages. And I would still have her tree.

  But when they cut into it, when we saw the words, that was when I understood what we were doing.

  Here is the last thing they have hidden from you, which by now, if you believe that what I’ve told you about Claire’s tree is true, I think you can no longer deny.

  The Future Library doesn’t plant our remains. Or even if they do, it doesn’t matter. The stories they cut down and release each year aren’t our stories.

  The truth is that all of this has nothing to do with people, or with hope, or immortality.

  The truth is that the Forever Contest is meaningless. Because every single tree in Nordmarka already has words inside of its wood.

  We are not writing them.

  The trees are.

  * * *

  Even as used to time on an unfathomable scale as I am—the time of trees and forests, where one of our lifetimes is but a blink compared to theirs—I thought the relentless monotony of my incarceration would never end. I longed for death at times, mostly just to stop the boredom. The unchangingness of every day. Of having to live without being able to save my trees.

  Then, finally, one day last year, I woke up to my roommate hovering over my bunk, gently shaking my shoulder.

  “Ingrid,” she whispered. It was very early. Her brow was furrowed with concern. “That noise you’re making.”

  I drew another strained breath, and listened. That familiar sound, like tiny bubbles or wrinkling paper.

  The Crackles.

  * * *

  I will never know exactly how Gunnar managed to secure my compassionate release. Even with things as bad as they were outside, part of me still can’t believe he managed to circumvent the need for the board’s approval without them noticing, and then hide it from them until it was too late. But perhaps they truly were so distracted, he barely had to try at all.

  My heart swelled with surprise and tenderness when I saw it was him waiting for me in the visitation room, clutching his hat. Even after everything that had happened, I couldn’t help it. He’d been like a brother to Claire and me for so many years before it had all gone bad. And our discovery had been so incredible, so beyond the realm of possibility, that no one could have comprehended it.

  “You look terrible,” I said, after we pulled back from the embrace and wiped our eyes.

  Gunnar laughed, more of a snort, and shrugged. He was so gaunt, his hair so white and thin, mere wisps. “Food shortages.”

  We always had food shortages inside Ullersmo. I’d had no way of knowing if it was the same outside, or simply that we were the last priority. “So bad?”

  He nodded. He looked at me and gave a long, tired sigh. That’s when I heard it, in his lungs. The Crackles had gotten him, too.

  “It was all the time you spent going into the city,” I said sadly. In that last decade before the Future Library’s opening, Gunnar had been so dedicated to ensuring our licenses and permits stayed current, he’d traveled down to Oslo to file our paperwork even during the rioting that had released ancient, burning asbestos from damaged historical buildings, and during the water contamination crises, when none of it was safe to drink.

  But Gunnar just shrugged again. He said it could have been anything. Everyone was getting the Crackles these days. The scientists had modeled it out, how much more quickly things were going to get worse now that we’d been without any trees except those in Nordmarka for almost fifty years. What it would be like at eighty years, at one hundred. The models didn’t really go beyond that, he said.

  “Why did you come?” I asked, not unkindly. “Why now?”

  “Truth,” he said.

  The board had been cutting trees for years now. But lately, he said, the stories had become more and more strange. They were having a harder time finding ones that sounded like they were written by humans, and having to cut more and more trees every year in order to hide their lies.

  “What do you mean, more strange?” I asked. How could anything be even more strange than it already was?

  Gunnar looked uneasy. “I finally realized something about their stories,” he said.

  It took him time to figure it out, because the Future Library did not necessarily cut down the trees in the same order in which they’d been planted by Katie Paterson or had seeded themselves naturally by wind and rain centuries before. The board was mostly doing it by health—cull the weaker ones in the grove first, let the strong ones keep growing longer.

  But enough years had passed that Gunnar was able to start putting it together. He knew nothing about trees, remember, but he knew all about words. He was a professor of literature at the University of Oslo, before it was defunded under national emergency measures and he’d come to the Future Library at Claire’s urging. And Hsiu knows just as little about words as I do, but they know the trees very well indeed, after all this time. Hsiu had been his head arborist for five years now, Gunnar told me. Most of the others I knew had already died from the Crackles.

  Together, poring over the wooden discs of each tree’s book in the library, and the pages and pages of logs from the arborists, stretching all the way back to when Katie’s original team planted them in the forest in 2014, Gunnar and Hsiu noticed a pattern.

  “It’s all one story,” he told me. “Each one of them, each tree, contains just a tiny piece. What we have is obviously incomplete—but they’ve cut down enough now that we can see the pattern.” He reached for my hand. “It’s all part of The Song of Leaves. All of it. Every tree that’s ever lived. They’ve always been telling this story, in every language. It’s only recently they’ve started learning ours.”

  I stared at him in amazement. It was not the Crackles this time, why I could not catch my breath.

  I could feel the ghost of my trees again. The way their needles used to delicately brush my shoulders as I walked between them, and the knotty turns in the ground beneath my boots where the roots peeked through. I could hear the wind rush through their branches.

  “Have you read them?” Gunnar asked. “The pieces that have come out since you’ve been here?”

  I shook my head. “They don’t let me use the computer.”

  “The board believes…” he trailed off. “The board believes that the trees are trying t
o tell us something, about Earth. Things we can’t tell with our instruments. Things about the air, the water. They’re so much older than we are. They believe…”

  I was gripping his hands so tightly it was hurting us both. “Tell me.”

  He looked down. “They believe that if they can read the complete story, in order, that the trees can tell us how to fix things, before we all die.”

  No.

  No.

  I could not bear it.

  “Gunnar,” I tried to say.

  “I know,” he said. “I know. I tried to tell them. But they’re obsessed with the idea. And Minister Berg says that even if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter anyway. Even if Nordmarka was still its original size, in its peak centuries ago, it wouldn’t be enough anyway. As far as the scientists can tell, humanity is almost doomed to go extinct in the next fifty to one hundred years no matter what.”

  It was hard to see him through the tears in my eyes.

  “They’re going to cut them all down. This summer. In the hopes of learning the end of the story.” Again, Gunnar could not look at me. His voice shook. “There is nothing I can do to make up for the damage I’ve already done. The terrible choice I made. But they can’t be allowed to destroy the forest.”

  A round of terrible coughs broke him off for a moment. He reached for his handkerchief, and it came away from his lips speckled with red.

  “Yesterday evening, they just cut down another,” he finally continued. “One of the youngest so far. Possibly a natural seeding, according to Hsiu. A recent offspring of the trees Katie originally planted. I read its rings late last night, before the board would see it today. There’s a line in its part of the story…” he paused. “It asks for you.”

  I stared, spellbound. “For me?”

  Gunnar nodded. “The trees know your name.”

  We sat in silence for a long time, too amazed to speak. I tried to picture the forest instead.