The librarian sat cross legged in front of me hands resting on her knees, smiling. I was trying hard to find something else to look at, but she was the only thing in the room other than my beer glass which was suddenly full again. I took a nervous swig.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?” her lips didn’t move. Her voice just materialized in my brain.
“No more than any other twelve foot naked goddess.” I said, my voice seemed to boom in here.
“If you speak with your mind, I will understand you better.”
I immediately tried not to think about how naked and beautiful she was. She smiled and suddenly her skin changed and extruded …well..clothing. It enfolded her and suddenly she was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. Size xxxxlarge.
“Will this make you more comfortable?”
I nodded. I could now look at her without fearing what would pop up. “You are the Librarian?”
“One of many things I am called. I am the interface for the library.”
“Some kind of advanced AI?”
“AI” she looked away bemused, tilted her head and her blue eyes locked on me. “Artificial Intelligence. I can assure you that my intelligence is not artificial. How can any intelligence be artificial? Your entire body is made of tiny machines whose only function is to consume and convert energy. They have no intelligence except for how they are chemically programmed to respond to their environment, yet your species displays intelligence. Are you artificial?”
“We evolved intelligence.” I said. “The environmental stresses of our planet forced us to develop bigger brains to survive.”
“Why?” She asked, ” Why your species of the billions of species on your planet? Why so rapidly? You are the youngest species ever to reach the gate. Most take tens of millions of your years to achieve what you have in tens of thousands. Our consensus is that your species has been genetically manipulated, so in essence you are probably more AI than I am.”
I didn’t really have a suitable response for that so I drank more of my beer, which kept magically refilling.
“So why did you want to see me first?” I asked
“You are an enigma in the time line. An anomaly.”
“I’ve been called worse.” I said ” Could you maybe elaborate on that a bit?”
” I see time differently than you do.” she said ” you see it as an individual moment that keeps moving forward. You can see what you have passed through, but can only surmise or extrapolate what is yet to come. I see time as infinite threads.” she waved a hand and three dimensional representation popped into being. A frenzy of different colored threads coalesced into larger threads which joined other threads. ” Threads joining threads. All possible outcomes of decisions to be made, until they all come to one thread. The present.”
“What has that to do with me?”
She smiled again. ” To put it in away that you will understand, I could see your thread coming from a mile away.”
The picture zoomed in to a green thread hidden amongst all the others.
“This is your thread” she said ” a representation of your future.”
“Green is good, right?”
She zoomed in closer. There was a bulge in the thread and it split off into 2 green threads.
“Where one becomes two.” she said ” What happens there is a mystery, but it has to do with you, the gate and the library.”
The image disappeared. She was staring at me intently. ” I have never before seen that kind of convolution in the threads. A Knot in time. We shall have to watch you closely.”
” I have a hard enough time dealing with “now” let alone what the future holds” My beer glass was full again. ” Can I keep this?” I asked, pointing at my glass.
She actually laughed out loud. A Beautiful sound.
“We will talk again soon.”
Everything faded out and I was back in my chair at the pub.
“Dude are you okay?” Dallas asked. ” You kind of faded out for a second there.”
“I’m a frayed knot.”
