Once upon a time, there lived a boy who loved only books.

Comic books, textbooks, crime noir, Westerns, romance, classics, pop-science, esoterica, ancient philosophy and mythology. Trilogies, prequels, sequels, reboots, stand-alone, shared worlds. If it had ink and paper, he'd read it. And he had his favourites, oh yes – but Bookboy knew better than to judge a book by its cover. So he gave every book a chance, and he read hem all... and found something to love in almost every one.

He would read them at home, sitting motionless for hours as his mind roamed far-away worlds from dawn to dusk, and then read again when the rest of the household had gone to sleep. He would read at the local library, where he made his way through the whole of the children's section before starting on the adult section, where the books were more interesting and his fellow readers less sociable (which suited him just fine). He would read on picnics in the park, on family vacations by the seaside, as he walked to school, on the bus ride home.

Others loved computer games, and augmented reality, and taking instapics and ultra shaping online, and got their information from apps and chatbots and so on, and their entertainment from videos beamed around the world by ever-advancing technology.

But the boy made his own pictures from the words, and his entertainment from the slowly and simply devouring books (though not literally, at least since that incident where his mother had spilled ice cream on a tiny teach-your-baby-to-count book and... well, that's not important right now).

And for this reason, he was dubbed BookBoy – a nickname he pretended to despise, but secretly delighted in.




The Set-Up: The World Is Not Enough

Now The World, the people around BookBoy, inhabited was not one in which books were treasured. No, their world (for it was theirs – he had many others to choose from) was one that valued instant gratification and utilitarian satisfaction of needs.

But BookBoy lived between the pages. He roamed worlds that were long gone, or yet to come or never were. He explored the spaces between the stars and inside the atom. He solved crimes and went on adventures and battled barbarian hordes and ancient monsters and zombie accountants.

And as he grew, The World grew ever more distant from his own, and its inhabitants came to treasure their Data and their Algorithms and their ability to find and share anything they wanted anytime they wanted.

Books were inefficient, people said. Outdated. Not interactive enough. Pretentious. Not as data-rich and easily useful and fun as videos of cats and online talk-you-through-it plumbing tutorials and snapshots of vacations and so much more.

They were appreciated as objects of art, and then despised as talismans of elitism, and then just ignored. And as time went by, there were fewer and fewer readers, and eventually, books were mostly forgotten.

But not by BookBoy.

The World went its way. And BookBoy ambled along somewhere off the path, his nose and mind and heart and soul ever in a book.

He didn't quite withdraw. He got a job, paid his bills, his taxes. He'd hang out with his friends and help out with his family, and marvel at their swift lives, swimming in the ever-expanding data streams, as they would marvel at his strange preoccupation with the incomprehensible squiggles and scribbles of those long gone.

For above all, BookBoy continued to read – and read and read and read. He lived adventures in the pages that no super-realistic virtually augmented computer-generated reality could hope to match. And there was nothing in the world out there he loved as much as the worlds inside.

Until he met her.

The Part Where He's Happier Than He Ever Imagined

Alexandria, her name was, and she was the most amazing thing in the world – in all the worlds. Her smile was like the sun (but in a good way). Her eyes were always filled with delight. And she loved books at least as much as he did.

They didn't meet at the library, or at the bookstore, or while reading in the park. They could have – they often happened to be in the same place together, geographically speaking. But they were in totally different worlds; faces buried in beloved books.

Even when they met, they didn't really meet.

It was at a party, and they were both there under duress, being forced by friends to join the fun. They chatted amiably, all the time thinking of the books waiting for them back home, and when they left, they swore to keep in touch.

They didn't.

And then one day they did meet in the park when their two worlds collided... literally(ish). Reading and walking, they crashed right into each other and dropped their books.

“That's one of my favourites!” they both exclaimed, as each picked up the other's world.

And they smiled, shyly and delightedly, and they started talking, and they didn't stop until the sun had gone down and risen again. And that was the first of many nights they shared.

In all the books they'd read, there was never a love like theirs.

They made A World Of Their Own – the world where books were celebrated and shared and exchanged as tokens of love. They read to each other at night, and in the park, and on vacation. They traded quips from books, tested each others' knowledge, shared their favourite passages, the words that defined the deepest core of their beings.

And in all that, they made their own adventures, they found their own words – and found that the words “I do” were among them.

So they were wed, and they built a library of books for their children and their children's children to adventure in, more books than there were in all the rest of the world, and they called it – what else? - the Library of Alexandria.

And they lived happily ever after.

Until.

One day.

One day she was gone.

Things Fall Apart

It was a morning like any other. They woke up, exhausted but happy, in a tangle of limbs from a night of reading and other things (“one for the books,” he said, and got a playful pillow to the face for it). They showered, ate, laughed, kissed, read, and left for work.

And as Alexandria stepped out the door, already absorbed in a book, a car careened towards her. The human driver was too absorbed in taking a selfie to notice her. And the auto-driving programme had never even heard of a book and had never factored in how a human reading one might not be able to dodge a speeding vehicle, especially if she didn't have her own warning devices on.

And so, like that, Alexandria was gone.

And BookBoy was crushed (not literally, like... no, he couldn't go there). He mourned deeply, and soulfully, and lengthily, and perhaps even melodramatically. He wept, and he wailed, and he gnashed his teeth, and he drank, and he read. And repeat.

But The World moved on. And eventually, he had to as well.

So BookBoy put down his books, and he sealed up the Library of Alexandria, and he threw himself into the World. He worked hard, he played hard; he mastered the data stream, and he attained success after success.

But it didn't mean anything without her. And the books called out to him silently in the night, begging him to remember them, to tell their legend, to think of what they'd meant to her.

And the world got faster and more connected, and the data streams grew. More data. More. More. More.

And then one day the oceans of data dried up, and The World stopped.

The End (Of The World)

The day the data died, nobody knew what to do. Or even why it had happened.

Some pointed out that data degrades – that all storage is imperfect, and all copies even less so, and that actually, physical copies of things didn't seem so inconvenient now. Some pointed out that data formats were constantly changing, and eventually changed so much that old information was no longer legible to new systems. Others noted that data was constantly hacked, and stolen, and traded, and hacked and stolen and traded again, and again, and again, and all the pieces put together didn't make much sense. Some pointed to malicious interference by secret government conspiracies, or aliens, or demons, or The Old Man In The Sky, or all of the above.

Whatever the case, the data vanished - and the systems were rendered deaf, dumb, blind, mute, and generally unhelpful.

And the people of The World stared at their empty screens, and found no answers, and emerged, blinking, into the light of day, looking emptily and confusedly about, terrified to meet each others' eyes.

What would they do now? The pictures were gone. There was nothing to share. There was nothing to do. Their memories were lost. Humanity's memories were lost – like tears in the rain, someone said, but he had no idea why, or where he'd heard it before.

But BookBoy remembered.

He remembered the words. He remembered the worlds. He remembered the books calling out in the night.

And he went down to the Library, and he opened its doors once more to the light

He took out a book. And he began to read aloud, his tongue tripping over the words, but slowly gaining confidence.

Presently a child came up to him, and marvelled at the strange technology he was using, and listened, transfixed.

Then a woman came up to join them, and she, too, marvelled and listened. And then another child joined them, and a man, and another, and another, and the crowd swelled.

And they listened, and they marvelled.

And when BookBoy was done with the book, he grabbed another, and he read. And the crowds listened in rapt attention.

And when he was done, they called out to him.

“Master,” they said, “will you share the wisdom of these strange objects with us? Will you tell us how you conjured such beautiful worlds with your words? Will you help us make this broken world new again?”

And BookBoy smiled.

A chance to make a new society. To honour the memory of Alexandria. To make things better. To share the endless joy of the worlds with the rest of the world. A reboot.

But where to start? What tale could encompass the whole world and make the people understand what had happened, and why it must never happen again?

He looked at the Library, and all the thousands upon thousands of books in it, and he knew that none of them could do what must be done.

And he thought of Alexandria, and his heart swelled, and he knew.

So he picked up a pen, and an old notebook, and began to write, telling the tale aloud to his new disciples as he did so.

“Once upon a time,” he began, “there was a boy who loved only books.”

(NEVER) THE END