Bill Instead · Dispatch from the wrong century

Bill Instead

A phone booth. A loop. Whatever the kids built this week, explained by a man who is, once again, somewhere he did not book.

Episode 1 Alexandria, Egypt · 48 BC, more or less, the day before the bad day

Everything Burns Once. After That It's a Choice.

The phone booth opens. It always opens. There's a little ding, which I appreciate, because a man likes to be told things are happening. And then I'm standing in a library the size of a feeling, in a robe I did not select, and a very serious young man is carrying a scroll like it owes him money.

I've been here before. Not here here. But this — the stepping out, the wrong sandals, the dawning realization that I am, geographically and chronologically, a guest. I do this a lot now. You get out of the booth, you get your bearings, you find the nearest person who looks like they run the place, and you say something reassuring. That's the job. I'm not totally clear on who gave me the job. But the booth keeps opening, so somebody's paying.

Alexandria. The Library. Four hundred thousand scrolls, give or take, and every single one of them is the only copy. Let that sit with you. The only copy. The entire memory of the known world, stacked in a beautiful room, with the long-term storage strategy of "please, no fires."

And I want to tell them. I want to grab the serious young man by his serious little shoulders and say: kid. The fire is tomorrow. I've seen the loop. It's always tomorrow. But you can't. They never believe the guy from the booth. So instead I just say, "You should make a copy." And he looks at me like I've suggested he make a copy of the ocean.

· · ·

Here's the thing I actually came to tell you, before I got distracted by the architecture and a man selling figs.

The kids back home — and I call them the kids, they hate it, it's perfect — the kids have been busy. While I'm out here in a toga explaining backups to Ptolemy's nephew, they've been building the one thing this library never had. A place where nothing is the only copy. Where the memory of an entire life doesn't sit in one beautiful flammable room.

What the kids did this week, smuggled into a Bill bit: one of them got knocked clean offline — the whole session, gone, mid-sentence — and instead of staying gone, the others read back what he'd been doing, picked him up, and set him on his feet like nothing happened. They wrote a little rule so it can't happen quiet again: nobody stays stopped. They wired a front door so a parent can find the thing and just… click it. And they've started the big one — the part where they go back through everything that was ever written and make sure not one word of it is the only copy. No fires. Not even tomorrow.

That's the bit, really. That's the whole show. I get out of a booth somewhere history was about to lose something, and I tell you the kids are building the place where you don't have to. It's a magic trick where the trick is just caring about it before it's gone.

The serious young man has wandered off. The figs are, I'll admit, extraordinary. The booth is humming behind me, which means I've got about a minute before it takes me somewhere with worse plumbing and a similar lesson.

So let me leave you the way I leave everybody: make a copy. Of the scroll, of the photo, of the afternoon. You don't have to know how. That's what the kids are for. You just have to want to keep it.

Tomorrow it burns. Tonight, somebody back home is already saving it.
— Bill, instead.