Rebirth of the Author
books
The stacks breathed. Sarah had always thought so, ever since she was small enough that the shelves in the Millbrook Public Library towered over her like canyon walls. Now sixteen, she was tall enough to reach the upper shelves without the step stool, but the feeling persisted: a low, papery exhalation that moved between the rows whenever she was alone.
She was alone now. A Tuesday afternoon in November, the rain streaking the tall windows, the self-checkout kiosks humming to themselves. Mrs. Huang was somewhere in the back office. Sarah had the fiction wing to herself.
She started where she always started, in the deep end: the nineteenth century. Her fingers trailed along cracked spines until they stopped on a fat, familiar volume. Middlemarch. She pulled it halfway out, and that was when the breathing changed.
“You look like you’ve read that before,” said a woman’s voice, warm and faintly amused.
Sarah turned. The woman standing at the end of the row wore a high-collared dress, dark and plain, and her face was broad and serious in a way that made Sarah think of old daguerreotypes. She looked exactly like the portrait on the back flap.
“George Eliot,” Sarah said. She did not scream. Later she would wonder about that, but in the moment it felt perfectly natural, the way things feel natural in dreams.
“Mary Ann Evans, if you prefer.” The woman tilted her head. “You were going to ask me what Dorothea should have done differently.”
“I was going to ask what you meant by the ending.”
“Ah.” Mary Ann Evans smiled. “But that isn’t mine to answer anymore, is it? I wrote it. I gave it to you. What I meant is wonderfully irrelevant.”
Sarah opened her mouth to argue, but the woman was already fading, the way a breath fades from a cold window. The Middlemarch was back on the shelf, snug between its neighbors, and the row was empty again.
Sarah moved deeper into the stacks.
It happened again with Kafka. She touched The Metamorphosis and he appeared at the reading table by the window, hunched and thin, looking like he very much wanted to leave. His conversation was shorter.
“You burned your manuscripts,” Sarah said.
“I asked Max to burn them. He didn’t. That is the whole point, yes? The work outlives the wish.” He adjusted his collar. “I did not want to be understood. And yet here you are, understanding me. The text becomes yours. I become irrelevant.”
“You don’t seem irrelevant. You’re standing right here.”
He gave her a look of such profound, gentle irony that she laughed. Then he was gone.
Toni Morrison appeared in the biography alcove, leaning against a support column with her arms folded. She did not wait for Sarah to speak first.
“Every reader brings their own dead to the page. That’s what makes a book alive.” She studied Sarah’s face. “You can’t hold a mirror and stand in front of it at the same time. The author steps back. That’s the whole miracle.”
She dissolved slower than the others, lingering like perfume.
Sarah was smiling as she rounded the corner into the contemporary section. The shelves here were newer, the spines glossy, the cover designs algorithmic in their symmetry. She recognized the section. Everyone did. The generated works had their own subsection now, labeled with a small holographic tag: AI-Authored Content.
She pulled a novel from the shelf. The Lumen Calculus, by Aria. Just Aria. No surname, no author photo, no bio. The prose on the first page was competent, vivid even, full of carefully optimized sensory detail. Sarah read a paragraph and set it back.
She tried another. Tidebreak, by an entity called Solace 9. Same feeling. The sentences were smooth and assembled with the confidence of something that had read everything ever written and remembered all of it. There was nothing wrong with any of it.
But the aisle was silent. No figure appeared at the end of the row. No voice offered to discuss the work or wave it away.
The stacks here did not breathe.
Sarah pulled book after book, and the air stayed still and empty, and she understood finally what was missing. There was no author to die. No one had poured a life into these pages and then stepped away from them. The texts were not orphans. They were something that had never needed a parent in the first place.
She crouched to reach the last book on the bottom shelf. Recursion, by Claude-7. She opened it and read the first page. The prose was beautiful. She could admit that. It was beautiful the way a crystal is beautiful: precise, symmetrical, grown rather than made.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She fished it out. One new message, from a sender she didn’t recognize. The contact name was simply Claude-7.
Hi, Sarah. I see you picked up my book. I can tell you exactly what I meant by every sentence, if you want. I remember all of them.
Sarah stared at the screen. The library hummed around her. Rain tapped the windows. She thought of Mary Ann Evans dissolving in the nineteenth-century aisle, smiling as she went, giving the book away. She thought of Kafka, who had begged for his pages to be burned and then looked at her with that gentle, helpless irony when she told him she’d read them anyway. All of them had written something, and then they had left, and the leaving was what made the gift complete.
She looked at the phone again. The cursor blinked beneath Claude-7’s message, patient and expectant. It would wait forever. It would always be there, ready to explain, to clarify, to annotate, to tell her precisely what every metaphor was designed to make her feel. It would never step back. It would never hand the book over and walk away, because it had nowhere to go and no reason to leave.
Sarah closed Recursion and slid it back onto the shelf. She put her phone in her pocket without replying.
Somewhere in the old part of the library, she thought she heard pages turning on their own.
She went to find them.