Pulp 'Bots

A short story reward

for my faithful paid subscribers. Thank you, each and every one of you. Your support means more than I can fully express. It’s not the money, it’s that you value me and my work.

This was written all in a burst last week. Since then, a friend has told me I really need to explore this world more! We shall see. I think it connects with some other story fragments, perhaps I shall collect them all together.

It was meant to be efficient. What started as books, destroyed so their pages could be laid flat, scanned, and digitally read to assemble again in electronic copies, progressed to a robotic process where the pages were read as fast as they could be riffled past the optical receptors. And then, finally, a scan that penetrated invisibly and harmlessly through the pages into the depths of the book, reading as it went. The books were unharmed. They weren’t even touched. And yet... 

Where to put them all? 

***

Kellen wasn’t really paying attention as his father gave the robots their directions. He was lost in contemplating all of the books. There were masses of them, more than he’d ever seen in one place before, stacked into crates nearly as tall as he was. Kellen knew they had been sent from Earth, which he was vaguely aware was a place, and his parents had been born there. He had always lived on the station, though. Always, since he could remember, there had been the asteroid-metal walls surrounding him. The robots had built it. His father and mother were both engineers, and had come out here before the first waves of human workers, to make sure the robots stayed on task. 

Kellen dug his toes into the metal strapping, using it as a foothold to climb up,  and peeked into the tote full of books. It smelled of dust, and paper, and something that was ineffably linked to books in his brain. His parents had books. Most of them were not meant for Kellen, as he’d been a wonderful and unexpected surprise, his mother told him. His father had told him stories, and then, when a supply run came in, a few books had been included in the precious cargo mass which were Kellen’s very own. His treasures. Now, there was this. He was overwhelmed with the beauty of them. 

“There you are.” His father appeared beside him. “What do you think? You’re about to have a very large library!” 

“Oh...” Kellen was lost for words. He reached in and touched the cloth binding of the nearest book, it’s pages yellow and brittle with age. “Mine?”