Lx: the Bibliotron

Lx knew very well the irony of the situation: a robot with the memory capability of storing all the world's knowledge, tasked with a janitorial role of babysitting a (let's face it) relatively small collection of paper-bound receptacles that sat inertly decaying on metal shelves. Their finite life and necessity could be gone in one whiff of smoke. The information, the words and pictures embedded in all of these books in the entire building, made up only several terabytes of his storage. That aside, it knew it had a job to do.

The robot wasn't as mechanically sophisticated as many servile robots, not as heavily armoured and manoeuvrable as the military Qasrar Mark Threes, nor as sharply tuned and attentive to detail as the medical Meditron X-series. The Bibliotron was a metre and a half tall, capable of extending its torso to over four metres to reach high shelving, and was ultra-quiet and effective in its exact tasks. Furnished in alabaster white with a larger than necessary sphere for a head, it had illuminating LED eyes that followed a sequence as it talked to emulate intelligence and authority to clients. All moving parts of the Bibliotron were larger than required due to padding for ultra-quiet and smooth movement. The caterpillar tracks it rolled on were as quiet as you could mechanically get.

When the robot had been purchased by the Library Foundation there was only three changes required to the two hundred and fifty year old library. One was that all cameras needed to be accessible by the Bibliotron for security reasons. Two, that both staircases going from ground floor to level one, where the more important collections were kept, needed to be fitted with a rail on which Lx could attach itself and climb the stairs. The third was to install a laser barrier at knee height, an invisible fence if you like, through which the robot could not pass.

Its main tasks included: securing the books from theft and vandalism - theft by university students who needed texts for a semester or a single assignment (sometimes the books came back, mostly they did not), and vandalism from the wretched secondary school students who thought they had to tag everything they could get their hands on. Its favourite task was answering reference questions, for there was no question too difficult for it to answer. Reshelving books, another of its tasks, was not one of its favourites.

The ground floor contained several general and popular collections of books, along with the obligatory collection of pulp magazines, audio/video collections, e-books, computer ports, etc. Most library goers found everything they needed here on this floor. But head upstairs and you would find the more valuable pieces of work including first prints, religious texts, carefully painted science anthologies; all hidden away in a temperature controlled, fire-resistant vault. Many of these works had to be requested and handled carefully with gloves while turning each page. They were very important: not just to the Library Foundation and the local community but also, in some respects, to the existence and history of Man.

On one particular day, an old man requested a very old book from the secure vault. Lx didn't think much of the request as the old man had the authority to view the book and even though he spent a good forty-five minutes scanning the book - thanking the robot after he was done - his red teary eyes went almost unnoticed by Lx; in truth, Lx was not programmed to sense such emotions as crying. It was when the robot went to retrieve the book from where the man had left it open on the table that it saw what the man had been pouring over. The large broadsheet paper book was nearly two hundred years old, printed in 2001. This type of book was unheard of in today's printing. The paper alone would cost a small fortune. Printers use synthetic sheets now-a-days, and in this book, a single gloss photograph took up a whole double-page spread.

On the page that was opened was an aerial photograph filled up by lush, vast rainforest reaching up to the horizon; a river flowed down the page. So much green. Luxurious green. Lx could bring up the image from his memory banks along with many more just like it. But this book was much more than a collection of photographs. This book was a dedication to the beauty of this forest. The photographer's love of this scene could almost be felt pouring out from the paper.