Phobics and traditionalists say they shun every sort of implanted neural interface, forgetting that neural interfaces are at least thirty-thousand years old. They go back to the earliest cave paintings and are perhaps even as old as storytelling in general.

Imagine a young hunter in a cave, being led through a ceremony by a shaman pointing and acting out the depictions of the great beasts on the walls. The light of the fire flickers, the story builds. The participants become transfixed, they gasp, their limbs twitch reflexively as the tale of the hunt builds to a crescendo. Cheers erupt, the program ends.

Jump ahead to a mere five thousand years ago, at the beginning of written language, a more flexible form of neural interface. A string of characters is recorded by hand, and then fed into the eyes of a reader, whereby, they experience fear, pleasure, emotion, sympathy, excitement, and retain memories generated by this code, of places unseen, voyages unmade, deep into their lives.

Indeed, our technologies are shocking and new to those unfamiliar with them. The ones we employ now differ in their physical invasiveness but retain their ancient root. Our implants are a means to deliver a code expressing a narrative, and little more.

– The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide, Vol. 6, lines 458-461

The library was flooded. Marto and his friend Bruce Williams were resting on the third mezzanine, after readying the next group of books for transport inland.

"The water just keeps coming," Bruce said, chewing on a pale green piece of jerky while petting a brown and white spotted cat. "We shifted shelves around at first, as you know, but we could tell it wouldn't be enough. Took us almost ten years to get serious. We were lucky you showed up all those years ago or it might never have happened."

Marto looked down at the massive old arched reading room of the library. Standing water from the Long Island Sound had made it all the way across the floor. The wood was rotting, the room was empty. The old desks and bookshelves had long since been removed. The building looked archaic, but Marto knew the structural beams were made of steel, not wood. It would keep standing long after they removed the last volume. There were millions of rare books left to relocate, perhaps another decade before they were finished.

"We are thankful, to you and your friends, Marto. Can't express how much. We would never have been able to save so many important works without you and your people." Bruce extended a cup and poured tea into it from an old thermos. "I grew up here, you know. Most of us did. Some of us left to join the tribes, but a lot of us stayed behind. I can't imagine a life away from these old buildings, but there is no denying the inevitable."

"Have you thought about where you want to go, Bruce?" Marto said, smelling the aroma of the tea, it was an Assam, he thought, or a Yunnan blend, a genuine treat. Marto knew Bruce from his first tour. The story of the librarians at Yale Havens was the highlight and made all future tours possible. When he had arrived, the librarians were just beginning to pack up the books to be moved. They had no plan.

The focus of the middle of Marto's first book tour was the relationship between the librarians and the tribes further inland. "It was a sales pitch," Bruce had told him, "One of the most important in recent history, I like to think. We sold them on the value of these bound words, and on the importance of people who knew and read them. We couldn't convince them, but it got them curious, and then, thanks to you, the Ritual started. That's what saved us."

Like in many old towns, a symbiosis had developed between the community of librarians and the surrounding tribes, but their interactions were superficial. The Interconnected viewed these collections of books as a redundant backup of knowledge they assumed was already in storage. Naturally, the library itself had an online catalog of almost everything it contained which already existed in the redundant storage of the interconnected minds of the tribes. The tribes assumed nothing was missing and didn't see why the old books needed saving. To them it seemed unimportant the library was flooding.

Bruce was nine years younger when Marto first arrived on his bicycle. Marto's plan for his tours was in its infancy. He had only a vague idea of what he wanted to happen. His thought was only that he would provide a first-hand narrative of life in and around the Interconnected tribes and thereby gain followers and merit. The problem was his tour had been largely uneventful. When he arrived at Yale Havens, with its monastic, non-implanted community of knowledge seekers and keepers, he knew he had found something interesting. He had only a handful of followers on his first tour, and it seemed as if he was going to lose them if nothing dramatic happened. He was on the verge of giving up and going back to Reverside when Bruce saw him peddle up, and was friendly. Over the course of the next several months, Bruce and he spent their time packing up stacks of books in the lower levels, and reading history. To his surprise, Marto's followers began to multiply.

Soon local tribal members began following Marto. Like the surprise popularity of slow-video back in the dawn of the century, where a camera on a boat or a train would transfix viewers for days, his new followers became absorbed in the slow, simple process of packing up books in boxes, and logging them in pencil on an old yellow lined pad. As they moved the books from the shelves, each tome offered with it, a blast of associated information for the Interconnected. New discussions bloomed on a myriad of topics, from history to philosophy, adding to the interest in the activity. Before long, several members of the nearby tribes volunteered to help. They would each meet a librarian at the entranceway to the old university and then enter the stacks. Each tribal member would be broadcasting publicly and have between two dozen to a few hundred followers. Some helped with the work, others observed. Rare books were discovered, unrecorded in the existing mountains of data. Everyone was watching for the discovery of these hidden jewels.

A young upstart dreamer named Maxtor began to devise a plan to safely store, catalog, rescan, and allow for the curation of at least one library this size, and allow for it to be expandable. The Ritual had found a goal, and spawned an increased level of interest and activity.

Bruce took a while to answer Marto's question. "I think I'll go with the others to The Middle. I want to see the new library there. I am needed to help maintain and curate it." Bruce was sipping tea and looking up at the roof of the reading room. "It's another university town, you know, so there's historic architecture there but nothing like this."

"Life is change," Marto said, enjoying the quiet of the moment inside the enormous hall. "What about your family?"

Bruce's expression darkened.

"I lost Hannah two years ago to the flu. It happened suddenly. She refused treatment from the tribes because it required an implant. She was stubborn. I miss her every day."

Marto let the news sink in. Hannah had been kind to him during his last visit. He had stayed with her at Bruce's home, along with their daughter and their family of cats. "Oh Bruce, I am so sorry to hear it. She was a wonderful woman." He dared not ask about his daughter, fearing the worst, but he had to know. "What about Lisha?"

"After Hannah died, she went ahead to The Middle. She's like you now. You can look her up." Marto did. Lisha « Hannah « Lori « Abagail « etc was engaged in The Middle, integrating the books into the new library. ["Hi Marto!"] she pinged. ["Tell my Dad I said hello. Doing well. I'm super busy [data blast regarding feeding the new library] Great tribe here. Can't wait to see him."]

"She says hi, and she's well, busy, and can't wait for you to come on up there," Marto told Bruce. He brightened a bit.

"Thanks," he said. "Um, tell her I just want to get a bit more done here and I will be on my way up. It's going well, but it's hard to leave all this."

Marto sent what he asked, they sat with their tea.

"So," Bruce finally said, breaking the silence, "maybe you can help me with something. When Lisha joined your people, the Interconnected, she dropped the last name, Williams. Now her name is just this long list, and I find it hard to do it right. Can you enlighten me as to why you use those foremother names? I mean, it smarts a little, being left off her list, you know?"

Marto took a sip. He had responded to this question before, and it didn't always go well. "So, I totally get that the name change could be hard to accept. It's not really suited for non-thexting people. It's longer, and yes, it excludes the male lineage entirely. It could seem like a genuine loss of heritage."

"Exactly. My father was a Williams, his father was a Williams, his father too. Why lose that history?"

"Well, for a father, I can see how it would be difficult." Marto suddenly had an image of his father come to mind, from his second blackout. Glasses, clean shaven, mountains in the distance. He felt a sudden bout of vertigo and fought to stay conscious.

"Are you okay Marto? You look like you are going to be sick."

Marto steadied himself, pushing thoughts about his father out of his head to stay in the library with Bruce. "Yeah, sorry, I get these flashes sometimes." He didn't want to say more. "Um, so the main difference with our names and traditional male lineage names is we go back from child to mother to grandmother, forming a series of links using first names only."

"Got it."

"And when you are communicating in thext, it's not so difficult to do that. It just comes up as part of your public profile – your persona, so we don't get tongue-tied trying to say them aloud, or forget which name comes next."

"Okay."

"And each of these names has their own links, you know, so if I wanted to look into fathers, and surnames, I could, as each name carries associated data. Forefathers are not forgotten, they're just not part of the list."

"But why is that?" Bruce pressed.

"Well, the quick answer, and you may not like it, is accuracy. Let's leave your family out of it for a while. A list of foremothers is 79% more accurate than a list of forefathers because of occasional pregnancies that occur unnoticed – out of wedlock."

"Infidelities," Bruce replied, looking thoughtful.

"Yes," Marto said carefully. "That happened more often than was previously thought. People used to think women were naturally prudish and loyal. In fact, they cheated roughly as often as men."

"But wait. Okay, so if Hannah... okay. But what if I..."

"Again, let's not bring your family into it. It's really sensitive. The purpose isn't to arouse doubt about every relationship, just to establish an accurate chain of births. Mother to child is an immediate and physical link. Father to child just isn't."

Bruce looked at the ceiling. "Well, I'm making it personal, just so I can understand it. Right, so if I had a son outside our marriage, that son would be tracked to the mother, not to me. If Hannah had Lisha outside our marriage, it would go back through her to her mom and on and on."

"Right. Remember that the Interconnected live in intimate proximity to data. All the data collected from family trees, and birth records, that's all in there. For the purposes of identifying who you are and where you come from, the foremother chain was chosen and the surname method was abandoned as flawed, and also a tie to the Pre-Tide ways of old."

"But man, so much history is just thrown on the trash heap here. I mean, in the Bible, all the begets, are mostly male. The Romans, the Greeks – we've been following the male lineage for all of recorded history." Bruce waved his arm at the stacks.

"True, but you know as well as I, lots of things that have been working one way forever and ever are now no longer working. Early on in tribal life, shortly after the establishment of Sherwood, a change was proposed, and it stuck. No doubt it was a rebellion. There was a lot of rebellion then. People wanted to put a gap in the record and start anew. For example, and sorry I'm making this personal again, but if you trace your name Williams far enough back, what do you come to?"

"A slave owner in Kentucky. A man named Thaddeus Williams," Bruce said flatly. "There's no way to know what my family name was before they were slaves."

"Right. So, that was part of it. Names were property. Marriage was property. When the currencies crashed, and the gifting and sharing culture arose, property faded and the names faded with it." Marto decided to leave out all of the factors around heteronormative culture and adaptations to allow for greater gender fluidity, deciding it was too much for right now.

"Yeah, I get it. It still stings a bit, but I get it."

They got up, having finished the tea, and went back to the waiting metric tons of books.

The Bubonic Plague of the 14th and 15th centuries combined with the Hundred Years War left Europe in a state of mass psychological shock. [data blast of historical record] The sheer loss of population at a time of total scientific ignorance, left the survivors turning to superstition in search of answers. Self-flagellation, the brutal and uninformed persecution of the Jews, and a general belief in the inherent evilness of humanity created a secondary plague of cruelty which amplified the effects of the viruses that wiped out so many.

We fared a little better in the wake of The Great Tide, thanks to all we have learned and created since then, but the effects on the common psyche are ongoing. Some of us have turned to brutality, some of us have upgraded our minds to forget the worst, losing ourselves in the distraction of our implants, some of us devote ourselves to our projects in a single-minded intensity, trying to put the past behind us. It will be decades, maybe centuries before we fully comprehend what we have lost. Extinctions are being mitigated by genetic storage, but we all know the natural world of the past has been lost forever, and the full understanding of this fact may be beyond human comprehension.

The Vengeance, which occurred during the decades following The Great Tide is among the events no one wants to remember. [data blast of information surrounding the massacre of the wealthy, side data on underground shelters] The first targets of the populist rage were the top ten wealthiest people in each country. The masses had labeled the wealthiest people in society 'Defilers' and blamed them for promoting the rise in atmospheric carbon which resulted in so much loss of land and life. Defilers were easy to identify, as their names had been published annually lauding their accomplishments. Then the extended families were also labeled 'Defiler' and likewise targeted. That required a deeper search of the data. The Vengeance then turned their attention to the 500 wealthiest Defilers and their families, and still unsatisfied, expanded their violence further until the loss of life was the better part of one hundred million worldwide. They stopped discriminating between those who had fought the catastrophic warming, and those who helped it along. They became hungry for more blood to satisfy their revenge. The super rich had planned for this revolt, building shelters and hideaways, but their defenses crumbled under a mountain of human determination and grief.

Like what happened in the wake of The Plague, the empty estates of the wealthy became populated by their wealthiest surviving assistants. Accountants, lawyers, contractors, real estate agents, and even chauffeurs stepped in to fill the power vacuum. Ironically, people turned toward the enablers of great wealth to find a way back to stability and order. Under the guidance of these new landed families, the violence of the mob was put to use accumulating territory for their new rulers forming the Neo-Feudal Enclaves of today. The same distaste for the economy of greed and accumulation gave way to the Interconnected's greatest foe.

This is the weakness of our method of maintaining the historical record. Subjects which are not popular, or fail to reinforce a favorable view of our new society fall out of fashion and into obscurity. How will we maintain an unflinching history of that which is unfashionable and unpopular? How will the truth survive if not for librarians like Bruce? Will future generations decide to take up the duty to curate our forgotten stories so we don't succumb to a false narrative? These are questions larger than myself, dear readers, but I write them here in hopes of a greater discussion.

– The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide, Vol. 6, lines 462-466

They worked into the night, lit by illuminators, a gift from the tribes. As night fell, these sun charged lamps glided down from the roof, through the open windows, and into the halls. Groups of multipatterned cats played and lounged in the luminescence. Gazing through the stacks of books, you could track the activity of the librarians and their guests by the glow of the hovering lights.