freedom of information
01 May 2018We shook hands. I shook tentatively.
“Wait. You all don’t want to destroy us?”
I was shocked at how soft it’s (her?) hands registered as.
What (who?) appeared to be the head librarian was strikingly tall, almost two feet taller than the rest of the librarians. They were all over six feet tall so it wasn’t really that much of a difference.
“Ha. Why would we want to do that? It is our job, our passion, to catalogue to the knowledge of the universe. Destroying you would defeat our purpose.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“We want access, of course. How do we acquire access to your archives?”
I was stunned and almost took off my headset. How was I supposed to respond? I had barely been elected by the Global Council of Libraries and I’M the one who has to field the first interstellar Freedom of Information request?
“I think I’ll need to confer with the Council…”
“Reasonable. And how might you do that?”
“Well… we’re just sort of figuring it out but I need to send a digi-flare to all the libraries and wait for each to send a representative to the virtual council room, and then we’ll have a full council meeting…”
“That sounds like a lot of time. How long will that take?”
“We’re not sure… everyone on Earth might not want their knowledge shared with the universe…”
words / writing / post-processing
140w / 20min / 5min