Service Model

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

“On the contrary!” the Chief Librarian countered. “When we began our long task, it was clear to us that despite the best efforts of our harvesting parties, more knowledge was being lost every second than we could ever recover. And what use would it be to simply record a piecemeal selection of scraps left over from the convulsions of the fall? Instead, we determined that if we filed all our data in this universal manner then the Library could become more than the sum of the information placed within it. Our Archive not only preserves all the learning that we have encoded into it. Because our zeroes and ones may be retrieved in any order, rather than simply that of the original documents, it contains all possible knowledge! We here preserve every conceivable book, manual, tract, recording, and program that could ever have been created, not merely all those that simply were. We are the greatest repository of potential knowledge in the history of history itself.”