The library

The stacks were a legend. Aaliyah had grown up reading about them. She was fascinated by how her ancestors once used to learn from houses that had a large collection of things called 'books', made of an interesting material called 'paper'. She learned some even had leather or hide on the outside. As an archaeologist, her love of life was to find rare things considered extinct. She had already discovered the lost city of New York, considered one of her greatest finds. She had stumbled upon it, quite literally, while she was searching for something else in the woods. In the same dig, she had discovered 'steel', the material of legend that was said to have once dominated human constructions.
The only sample ever found belonged to her, and she had donated it to the museum of antiques. It now adorned the central square of the massive museum as one of its most prized displays.

 And now she just needed to find the library.

The glacier had worked its way through the valley and now it looked flat, with jagged peaks flanking it on both sides. There was no visible life here, there could not possibly be. She was literally searching for a needle in a humongous haystack. Also, none of her sensory devices would help her as far as she knew since they could not detect paper. She had heard some books had metal etchings on them, so if she got lucky she would soon hear a beep. She wondered what it was like millennia ago where people communicated with written words. Limited, but still interesting. Today, she could just tap into the mental field of any person in the world and as long as they allowed her in, she could communicate directly to any of them. That is how news was communicated now, as well as just about anything that was not person to person verbal. She wanted to show the world how written words were done in the past.

Her sensor notes pinged, to her right side. She had setup her search tool in her brain earlier to find anything that was not recognizable material. She had developed this tool herself and since then many other people had made use of it. She would upload updates once in a while.

Something had been detected. She started an exact location search on it, which pointed her toward what looked like a barely noticeable opening in the floor of the almost hardwood-floor-like valley base. Her digging tool had barely traveled about 10 meters, when she hit something. She pointed her visualizer in her vision field toward it, and started a deep mapping of the area underneath. Her mapper could go as deep at 300m and scan an area as large as 500m x 500m in a single sample. She had it. She adjusted a few times and now she had a sample that showed her the underground structure. It was mind numbing - she had found an entire structure that looked like a building!

She could dig it out later with her team helping her, this could be a big dig. But she did not need to right now, as she was able to rummage through the area in her projected map. She started navigating it. Soon it was clear that she was looking at the legendary stacks! Virtually thousands of them in this area, buried under the sands of time for millenia. She had found them!

It was being called the greatest discovery of modern times, the much fantasized collection of the books that was considered the last remaining collection of human race's written words from thousand of years ago. They had collected every book they could to save humanity's knowlegebase, before the world as was known was decimated by a cataclysmic storm. They had hoped someone would find it some day and be able to learn about their race and life. They would not just disappear into the emptiness of space without a trace.

Their efforts had not gone to waste. Aaliyah was considered one of the few descendants of the early human race that had lived on this planet before a now dominant new species had emerged from the ashes of the last cycle of destruction. Her biological footprint was known to contain rare content that had more than half of what people thought was the original human genome. That is why they revered her, and believed she was the only one capable to locating traces of the human life. And now she had shown that she was deserving of it.

She had finally fulfilled her life-long dream of connecting back to her original race, the humans. The library would teach them all about the human's lives and how they started and how their spectacular reign on this world had ended.

She ordered the dig to start the next morning.