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Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Microstory 1177: Ildemire Lorenz

Ildemire Lorenz was a writer, but more than that, he was a researcher. He was obsessed with gathering and organizing information. He was born on the wrong planet, though, because Earth had been working on such an endeavor since at least 1998. Ildemire was a Durune, and while he enjoyed a vague connection to all information in the multiverse, he didn’t really have access to it. There was just so much information, and it was so fuzzy, that he couldn’t actually use it. Unless he wrote it down. He realized he could channel the secrets of reality by externalizing it. Now, he could do this via spoken word, if he wanted. If someone were to ask him a question, the answer to which was locked away somewhere remote, in the head of someone far removed from Ildemire’s present, he could answer correctly. But if he wanted to just reflect on this truth, he would not be able to. He had to let it out, or his brain couldn’t process it at all. This made his life quite frustrating. He didn’t much like talking to himself, let alone anyone else, not that he wanted to necessarily involve other people in his precious secrets anyway. He couldn’t write it all down either. Even if he were immortal, there wasn’t enough time in any given universe to create an encyclopedia for all universes. He had to find a way to take all this information at once, and put it all in one place. He scavenged the First Town for old technology, hoping to cobble together a means of maintaining a database. He didn’t really understand how any of it worked, though, which meant he was neither able to create even a small operable storage device, nor fathom how much memory that would require in the first place.

After years of failing at everything he tried, an associate suggested he go at it from a different angle. There was no need to bring all that information to one place; it was perfectly fine where it was. All he needed was a way to call upon that information on an as-needed basis. Basically, the information network was already there. He just needed to build a computer that could connect to it. He drove himself deeper into his work, unavoidably isolating himself from everyone who knew him. He developed a reputation of being a recluse, a nihilist, and even possibly a sociopath. Some called him autistic. None of this was accurate, nor fair. He wasn’t as apathetic as people thought. People actually only assumed this about him, because he was so passionate about his ideas, that he didn’t have the bandwidth to care about anything else. When he started a project, he had to finish. This was his greatest project ever, because it was finally going to work. After years of searching his own mind’s link to the cosmos, for anyone’s insight into this matter, he completed the first draft of what he called the Time Book. This book was limited in scope. He couldn’t figure out how to codify all the knowledge ever, but he did find a way to do so with all the other written words. Many more things are known that are not authored, but at least this was a start. He didn’t know what he was going to do with this book, or if he would ever let anyone else read it, but he knew that it wasn’t enough. Now knowing that at least part of his dream was possible, he almost immediately started working on the second edition. He died without ever having finished it, but his final thoughts were of peace, because he came to realize that no one needed to know everything anyway.

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