The Google Library
by Guillermo Sánchez (http://diarium.usal.es/guillermo) translated by A. Prieto
[Inspired by the fabulous story by José Luis Borges: The Library of Babel, which describes a library that contained all the written books and all that could be written. Not to look for any comparison with that story would be ridiculous].
Google had set out to build the universal library with all the books ever written and all those that could be written. Hence, he created a computer program that would combine in every possible way the letters of the alphabet and the most common symbols (¿?, ¡!, blank space, etc.), a total of 35 letters and symbols. It limited the size of each book to 5 million characters (about 500 pages). In the first book everything would be considered as a; in the next book all would be a, except for the last character which would be a b. In the next one all would be a except for the last two characters which would be b. So on and so forth until the last book, in which all would be z. In this way, 355 000 000 combinations would be needed to complete all of the possible combinations (a quantity that would make insignificant the total number of atoms in the universe: 1080). This was too much, unmanageable even for a quantum computer like the one Google had just acquired. But the programmers realized that almost all of the books thus generated would be meaningless. They introduced spell, grammar and consistency checkers and other subtleties that only Google knows how to do. By using this, they managed to generate all the possible books whose text had some meaning. Although there were tons of them, immensely more than the particles of the universe, they were manageable by the quantum computer. A very small number of these books coincided with written masterpieces of world literature and others whose authors had not yet been born (even those with more than 5 million characters, as these could be distributed among several 500-page volumes). Google rubbed its hands together as it would not have to pay royalties. It put this immense library on the network. One day, an Internet user typed in many names and dates related to his life. A link led him to a book that was point by point his story. When he arrived at the present moment he still had a half to read. A shiver ran through her body and he did not want to keep reading. Insomnia kept him awake and he returned to the book to continue where he had left -off. When he resumed reading, he found an exciting story. His anodyne life took a radical turn and went in directions he had never imagined in his dreams. When he woke up he had lost the Wi-Fi connection. He retyped the words that had led him to the book, but he clicked on another link by mistake. He started reading on the page where he had left off but something didn’t fit. He went back to the point in the book that matched the present. The story that followed was very different from the one he had read before falling asleep. Now everything was changing and the fascinating life was turning into a nightmare. He typed over and over again in the search engine different words trying to locate the book, but each time the story was different. Each day he lived a different life from the day before, but none was like the one he had read the first day. He spent hours and hours trying to locate that first book. One day he was found in his bed with his eyes half-open, staring at the computer screen and a face that denoted happiness. He had died a peaceful death. Perhaps on that last day he had finally finished reading that longed-for book and knew that he had had an immensely happy life.
