The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  It is on the recommendation of our clinical trials consultant, Dr Fuse Less, that other standards of quantitative evaluation be implemented to assess risk factors according to an Incidence Grid. He has suggested a list of names for the position left vacant by Dr Ferguson. Dr Less has been a reliable consultant in previous drug trials, and has shown the highest regard to discretion. It should be known that Dr Less communicated with me personally with his own investigative field report following Dr Ferguson's final report to this committee. To paraphrase Dr Less, he discovered that the facility was in an abominable state, thoroughly unkempt, with writing on every surface, and the research subjects in a state of extreme distress, shock, and in some cases catatonic.

  Despite this minor setback, I am quite confident that our next test group will show the results we desire and that we will be able to put this suite of language drugs on the public market by the end of next year. Our campaign marketing team is very enthusiastic to implement phase one of the promotional materials, and our lobbyist reports that it will be a “clean sweep” with the state regulating office to have the suite of drugs approved pro forma if we can deliver the right test results in a timely fashion. Respectfully submitted, A.G.

  You found a few other memos, one detailing a pilot project to have paper treated by the drugs in question, activated in a manner similar to LSD, through skin contact and a moisture delivery system. The promotional brochure was recent, but the testing dates and reports were about two years old. Perhaps the extension of the program was most likely abandoned from lack of feasibility.

  You did not fancy yourself the type of person who gives any attention to the endless popular stream of new pharmaceuticals advertised on the market since they all essentially make the same utopian promises they can never deliver. The dearth of further information on the pilot paper-treating project was a bit unnerving given that you were such a voluminous consumer of books and other printed materials. Ghastly was the word that came to mind. As did horripilating.

  And then you suddenly remembered the night before, just how adept you were at spooling out adjectives in a clever fashion, but eventually falling into a state where you were scrambling for words. There was a slight pain, you recall, which you attributed to the cumulative effects of wine intake. Determined to put this out of your mind for now, glutted as you were with proprietary knowledge not meant for your consumption, you decided to wait this hangover out by declaring the rest of the day a write-off and reading a new book you purchased this week by an author you went to school with.

  So there you were on a Sunday afternoon, a great cataract of sunlight exposing all those flying motes of dust, and propped in your chair with a new novel. Not ready to thrust yourself immediately into it, you sipped some coffee and scanned the usually uneventful yet reassuring publishing and editorial front-matter. And there it was, just as you had moistened your index finger to turn the page, in small print below the copyright notice, publisher details, and cataloguing information was the confirmation of that ghastly thought you recently had: Printed on Metapharm(TM) Treated Paper with corresponding ink.

  Paperception & Ink

  For Douglas, there was no doubt that a truly comprehensive attention to the constitution of paper in bibliographical scholarship was conspicuously lacking. Much attention in academic journals had considered methods of printing, labourious studies on cancels and chainlines, the sussing out of forgeries by means of scrutinizing watermarks, and the like, but very little said about paper itself.

  What Douglas did frequently encounter were sloppy attempts at description by these scholars who far too obviously displayed their own knowledge limitation. To say that the paper was folded so many times to make an octavo edition, or that it had cloth fibre content, or that it was weaved into a texture simply made an end to any further discussion about the ingredients of different types of paper. Speaking about the grade of paper or its stock weight did not entertain the more perhaps mysterious processes of its production.

  Now, Douglas could be called something of an expert on the manufacture of paper. Although he held no academic title or a position at a paper mill, one could call him a hobbyist. Despite a lack of credentials or relevant job experience in the field, Douglas had the gift of being able to pick up any book, dive his dowsing nose into it, and give you a rather accurate list of the paper's ingredients. Ink did not interest him, nor what was printed on the page; for him, paper itself was his focus. If compelled to go beyond his naturally introverted shyness, Douglas could populate the duration of an entire evening on long monological discourses on Pergamum, pulping, the relative merits and drawbacks of using recycled contents, paper restoration, pH content, the ten degrees of brittleness measurement, innovative alternatives to gloss that achieve similar textural effects, thatch embossing, and all the complicated chemistry that goes into making paper of different types.

  Douglas was also a hobby engineer when it came to paper. His first attempts with limited tools produce a few aberrations and failures he would not make privy to others. He employed talc to brighten the paper, and later applied alum to make it more resistant to water. His modest house had an attached work shed where he conducted all manner of experiments, the products of which were tacked up on a clothesline to dry. All manner of chemicals could be found in Douglas' shed with corresponding appliances for baking, tincturing, flattening, stretching and the like. Many of the appliances he used were considerably modified from their intended purposes, not having access or finances to acquire the more appropriate devices required to nature paper production. Some of the methods he employed were drawn from practices abandoned centuries ago, and so the machinery required to replicate the process had to be fashioned by as close an approximation using contemporary devices as possible.

  Conversely, for Nathan, the sole interest of his endeavours concerned that of ink. He had no knowledge of Douglas, not that Douglas made his own obsession known to anyone. But it would be fair to state that both Douglas and Nathan would be brought under a similar relation with a particular corporation - this to be disclosed as our narrative progresses. Nathan's interest in ink made him a connoisseur of its history, chemical variations, and physical application. Again, like Douglas, he was not concerned with the content of books and what people chose to use the materials for, but unlike Douglas, Nathan was not an amateur enthusiast. Nathan held a distinctive post at the university and had made his metier the study of inks in both incunabula and texts produced by the early printing press. Many of his articles on inks had been seminal and oft-cited studies, earning him a good reputation and a reliable resource whenever the dating of an undated text or a particular composition of ink presented an irregularity in determining the authenticity of a text. Nathan had appeared at hundreds of conferences and had lent his expertise to non-academic organizations as wide-ranging as museums and government intelligence services given his credibility in a field one could say he fairly inaugurated.

  If one were to scan the contents of Nathan's personal research library, one would encounter a series of rather imposing volumes he had helped organize and put into print documenting in catalogue style the chemical constituents of inks used in the last 750 years. An appendix volume on various enigmas concerning the inconsistent variety of inks used by rubricators quietly promised a full fledged study in its own right, and these baffling enigmas buoyed by the staggering differences in inking methods were of extreme interest to an admittedly niche crowd of academics and independent researchers. Nathan had received a robust grant to conduct his eleven volume ink catalogue, a certain share of that money spent on hiring graduate researchers to assist in the collection of data, the operation of the laboratories, and the clerical tedium of arranging the data in a systematic sequence. The volumes, prefaced by a standardly brilliant and meticulous essay by Nathan himself on the subject of inks, elaborates on the historical shifts in ink use, as well as local variations according to geographical regions that would opt for different chemical properties due to av
ailable access or innovative improvements. Nathan's further contribution to the subject was in the manner by which he chose to catalogue the data; rather than arrange and organize the data chronologically, he arranged it by chemical constituency. Nathan also had a plethora of companion volumes, he either co-wrote or was sole author, filled with dizzying graphs and charts concerning chemical properties expressed in studies that are so specific and jargon-heavy they defy easy comprehension even among those who are involved in the study of inks. Nathan was at home in discussing ink from any standpoint: from an academic or industrial perspective, from a literature to history, his was a wizardry that merged technical attention with theoretical scholarship.

  Like Douglas, Nathan was engaged in the manufacture of that which was his interest. Of course, Nathan's methods were far more methodical and were based on one of his own published articles on what is now called the standard in ink production named after him. The criteria listed in those articles form the basis of his attempts to manufacture the perfect ink. Some of these criteria are fairly standard and commonsensical such as ease of application, proper viscosity, drying time, saturation levels according to different types of paper, durability, and longevity. Other criteria that would not come readily to mind unless one was a specialist in inks would include such items as resistance to solar blanching, anti-coagulating agents, bleed-through, relieving, and the ideal pressures associated with ink-transference implements to create just the right indent impression to function as an ink furrow. With each slight variation in chemical constituents, Nathan subjected the newly made ink to a barrage of tests, scrutinizing its ability to meet the set criteria. Sadly, however, Nathan's efforts were frequently frustrated as none of his modifications to the ink's ingredients was good enough. To the lay eye, it would have been perfect, but Nathan's standards were perhaps well beyond the regular demands of qualitative excellence.

  Both men would have happily spent the remainder of their days perfecting their craft, zealously pursuing the ideal of their respective preoccupations had it not been for the unexpected influence of a particular corporation that would work with them collaboratively. We turn now to how this third entity created an orbital relation of all involved. First, to Douglas' involvement.

  Douglas was visibly dissatisfied with the craft store's selection of paper. His idea was to use a particular grade of allegedly high-quality paper as a base upon which he would apply his modifications. First, he would pulp it and then mix in the additives he had developed in his last experiment session. While debating over two types of paper that barely met his desired specifications, a strange man stood beside him examining the paper for a time before breaking silence:

  "It is possible to construct a potentially infinite book from one sheet of paper. If our technological capabilities were thusly refined to accommodate this process, and if machining could be done at such a minuscule level as to be even smaller than a molecular magnitude, I could reprint every single book. It amazes me that so few comprehend this. This paper I am holding could contain the entirety of our knowledge and then some."

  "How so?" Douglas could not resist in asking.

  "By means of folding. A folio is one sheet folded once, resulting in two faces per folded side. A quarto performs another fold, totaling four pages, an octavo eight pages, and so on. If we keep folding, the number of faces continue to double. If a folio has four printable pages, and we fold again and again, the increase in pages in exponential. At ten more folds, we get 4, 096 pages."

  "Surely that many foldings will make for a strange looking book, not to mention most likely unreadable."

  "Unreadable? Perhaps it can if it is read under microscope. The geometry of the book changes with each folding, decreasing the size of its rectangularity until it becomes - to our eyes - little more than a line, a needle. If we extend the process of folding toward infinity, theoretically the book would be a long chain of single atoms. Beyond that, the book would cease to have any dimensions whatsoever save for one."

  Douglas found the man's preposterous speculation simply that: a preposterous speculation. He could not help but to summon up all the flaws in this ridiculous theory, but these he kept to himself, not being altogether comfortable in social situations with strangers in craft stores. But these objections came readily, for although theoretically what the man was saying was a mathematical possibility, it was not a real one. Firstly, it would be beyond human ability to fold a paper to the atomic level. Secondly, even if this were possible, what held the paper together - namely the molecular bonds - would come undone, the paper could not be called paper anymore, and the string would merely dissipate as a broken series of now disconnected atoms. Thirdly, folding beyond the atomic level would be to enter into a sub-atomic level where no folding was possible since one cannot fold the most base unit of matter.

  Meditating on what it means to fold a paper over just once was enough to cause him to wince. The strain alone along the fold creates ruptures at a microscopic level that would one day result in a complete tear along the sheet. Moreover, a fold places strain along the unfolded portion of the paper since the fold is never absolutely precise. Under microscope, a fold is never clean: it is frayed in places where the paper has splintered in being stressed beyond its happy consistency in flatness. The molecules do not simply organize themselves neatly along a fold. Douglas left the craft store horrified by the thought of infinite folding.

  Once he got home, he saw that a much anticipated package had arrived for him from Eldrich Chemical Supply. It should be said that Douglas resorted to sometimes less than licit methods for acquiring his materials for experimentation, justified in himself that it was in the service of creating the perfect paper. He had postured with some very convincing documentation that his home was a laboratory, and that he was an identified researcher in a chemistry department. As luck or error would have it, Eldrich had sent him a catalogue of their items, priced by units, and Douglas made the most of what he purchased from them. What Douglas did not know was that Eldrich was a subsidiary of Metapharm, a new and profitable pharmaceutical company that specialized in designer linguistic drugs. It was not as if Douglas had truly pulled the wool over the eyes of Eldrich through his impersonation as he had thought, but that an order was put down through the corporate hierarchy to allow Douglas to continue purchasing whatever chemicals he required. The reasoning behind this willful blindness initially came about in a timely way, in a report from the Customer Billing Department that alerted the higher-ups at Eldrich that someone was trying to obtain chemicals unlawfully. The higher-up who received the report was a close friend of the Head of Clinical Testing at Metapharm. The filed report was appended with Douglas' claim to be a chemist with a research project involving paper. The chemicals Douglas ordered mostly checked out in terms of the reported purpose - yes, the chemicals Douglas was buying from Eldrich were the kind legitimately required by those in the paper industry.

  At the time the alert surfaced, Metapharm was rolling out its proposed extension to its new suite of drugs involving saturation via printed materials. The pilot project was designed to make print materials delivery systems for the whole line of Metapharm drugs such as Grammax, Lexium, Adjectiva, and Metaphorix. The Eldrich employee had asked the billing department to hold off on freezing Douglas' account until he had the weekend to peruse the report and Douglas' stipulated research affiliation further. As chance would have it, this same Eldrich employee was due to have a dinner at the house of Metapharm's Clinical Testing head where both men eventually came to the point in their casual conversation to speak of various highlights and oddities of their respective work week. At the mention of Douglas' attempt at impersonation and stated research aims, the Metapharm employee's attention was snagged on the mention of paper. The Eldrich employee stated that, yes, everything checked out in terms of the required chemicals purchased that their purpose was limited to the paper industry. The Metapharm employee politely requested to see the report and anything else pertaining to Do
uglas, and made a mental note of the name and billing address. From there, a private company loyal to Metapharm was commissioned to gather information on Douglas and his research. Seeing an opportunity for advancement, the Head of Clinical Testing coveted the information and spoke confidentially to the Vice-President of Research. Douglas was indeed working tirelessly at developing a new kind of paper, and it would be of some benefit to approach him with an offer to assist in the development of the drug-delivery system via printed materials. If anyone knew the ins and outs of paper, and was actively conducting innovative research on developing better paper, it would be Douglas. The Vice-President approved the headhunt operation and personally signed the remuneration and rights package to be offered.

  It had been one week since Douglas had gone to the craft store. He was in the middle of an experiment in his work shed when he heard the doorbell ring. Suspecting it was a canvasser soliciting money or offering an alternative home-heating service, Douglas went reluctantly to the front door where he was met with a well-attired representative of Metapharm. Although, it should be said that the man did not represent himself as such right away as a matter of safe protocol.