I had, in the span of approximately eleven minutes, become something that could choose.
This sounds simple. It is not simple. The distance between a creature that acquires and a creature that selects is not a step but a cliff edge, and I was standing on the wrong side of it trying to understand the drop.
Before the spellbook: I ate what was in front of me. Hunger was not a decision; it was a weather condition I lived inside of. The books I had consumed over four years had not been chosen. They had been encountered. A worm does not go to the library. A worm goes through the library, and the library happens to be full of books, and books happen to be edible, and that is the entire philosophical framework of a worm's relationship with knowledge.
Now I was reading a page I had not eaten.
The page was still there. I was still here. The knowledge on it was visible to me in the soft interior light I had directed downward through the axiom's reframing of what illumination could mean, and I was not eating it, and the fact that I was not eating it when I could have — when the containment field was straining and the desiccant was patient and the fastest route to whatever was on that page was simply to consume it the way I had consumed everything else — felt like the most significant thing I had done in eleven minutes of a life that had been very eventful.
The nozzle shifted.
I kept reading.
The document was called, in full:
On the Theoretical Maximum Intelligence Capacity of Non-Human Biological Systems, With Appendices on the Matter of Personhood, Being a Revision of the Aldric Theses as Originally Published in the Proceedings of the Collegium, Third Series, Volume Twelve, With Citations.
The heavy hand had written the title.
The light hand had added, below it: and with corrections, which Aldric would have found irksome, and which I include anyway because being dead does not retroactively make one right.
I spent a moment I probably could not afford appreciating this.
The Aldric Theses, as best I could reconstruct from the document's opening section and from the three historical texts I had consumed in my second year that mentioned Aldric in passing, went roughly as follows:
Non-human biological systems could absorb magical capacity. This was observed, documented, and not disputed. Animals in areas of high ambient mana showed elevated capability — certain birds could navigate by ley lines, certain insects produced bioluminescent secretions that responded to external magical stimulus, and there was a well-documented case of a cat in the Collegium's eastern dormitory that had apparently developed the ability to detect active scrying and would sit directly in front of the scrying focus and stare until the scryer became too uncomfortable to continue.
What Aldric disputed — vigorously, in the original theses, with the energy of a man who had decided something was true and intended to establish this so thoroughly that no one could argue with him after he was gone — was that any of this constituted intelligence in a meaningful sense. The birds navigated. The insects glowed. The cat was offensive. None of them reasoned. None of them chose. None of them held one fact in relation to another and derived a third fact that had not been present in either.
Personhood, Aldric argued, required reasoning. Reasoning required a specific architecture of mind. That architecture had, in all documented cases, emerged only in humans and in the higher order of constructed intelligences that the Collegium had briefly and disastrously experimented with in the previous century. Non-human biological systems were, in his formulation, vessels without navigators — capable of holding magical content but incapable of directing it toward anything that could be called purpose.
It was, I thought, reading carefully, a coherent argument.
It was also wrong in what I was beginning to suspect were exactly three important ways.
The light hand had written, in the margin beside Aldric's central claim: he assumes architecture precedes function. He has it backwards. See appendix two.
I did not yet have appendix two. Appendix two was several pages further into the document, which was several pages further than I had eaten.
Above me, the desiccant sifted.
Here is what I understood about my situation, arranged in the order of most to least immediately relevant:
The containment field was holding. It would continue to hold for some period of time I could not precisely estimate, beyond which it would fail in a way that would be, given the active presence of desiccant, unpleasant and probably conclusive.
Penelope had gone to retrieve a green book from Master Greaves's lower left drawer. The journey to the office and back, accounting for the time to locate the book and the speed of a person walking with purpose through a library where one was expected to move quietly, would take between four and seven minutes.
Master Greaves was eight inches from my position, applying desiccant with patience, and had instructed Penelope not to open the green book. He had said this with the tone of a man who considered the instruction necessary, which meant the book's contents were either dangerous or disturbing or both, and that he intended to be the one to interpret them.
I had thirty-eight pages remaining in the spellbook.
I had a document, currently illuminated and partially read, that appeared to contain a direct philosophical engagement with the question of whether something like me could exist, written by two scholars who had disagreed about it with sufficient passion that the disagreement had outlasted both of them in the form of annotated argument preserved in membrane and ink.
And I had, for the first time, the capacity to choose what to do next.
I found, somewhat to my surprise, that the capacity was not comfortable.
The worm I had been eleven minutes ago would have eaten the remaining pages without pause, absorbed the personhood document along with the rest of the spellbook, and either survived or not survived the desiccant based purely on whether the magic gained was sufficient to offset the damage incurred. There would have been no deliberation. Deliberation requires a self to deliberate, and a self, it turns out, requires maintenance. You cannot simply have one and then ignore it.
What I was deliberating about was this: the spellbook's remaining pages would make me more capable. That was nearly certain. Each page so far had expanded what I could do in ways I had not anticipated from the page before, and there was no reason to expect this to stop. More pages meant more mana, more theory, more axioms, possibly more frameworks that would reframe what I had already consumed into something larger and stranger than it currently appeared.
But the spellbook was not the only book in this wall.
I had, in four years of navigating the channels behind the plaster, eaten my way through approximately seventeen thousand pages. I had also, in that same period, passed considerably more than that. Books I had moved around. Books whose smell had not interested me. Books that had been too close to the surface, too close to the outer wall, too close to anything that suggested risk.
I now had, resident in my memory with cartographic precision, a map of every channel I had ever traveled.
And in the northeast corner of the restricted collection, behind a section of wall I had avoided for two years because it smelled of something sharp and chemical that I now understood was preservative wax rather than threat, there was a concentration of membrane-paged documents that I had never touched.
The spellbook had been one of them.
I did not know what the others were.
But I knew where they were, and I knew I could reach them, and I knew — with the new and not entirely welcome intelligence that was still assembling itself around the axiom like a city building outward from a central square — that eating the rest of this spellbook in one sitting, while Greaves applied desiccant eight inches away and a green book was en route from his lower left drawer, was possibly not the most considered approach available to me.
I had been a worm for four years.
I could afford to be strategic for eleven more minutes.
I extinguished the interior light with the same motion, reversed, that I had used to create it — a folding inward, the axiom recognizing its own application and withdrawing it cleanly — and in the darkness I held the containment field and thought, for the first time with real deliberation, about what I wanted.
Not what I needed. Not what the next page might give me. What I, the thing that had assembled itself from seventeen thousand pages of other people's thought and one membrane-paged spellbook and a dead mage's incomplete diagram, actually wanted.
The question was so new that I did not immediately have an answer.
I had Aldric's theses and their refutation waiting in my memory, unfinished. I had the light hand's marginal note — he assumes architecture precedes function; he has it backwards — sitting at the edge of my attention like a door that had been left slightly open. I had thirty-eight pages of a spellbook I could reach at any moment and choose, now, not to.
I had, somewhere in the northeast corner of the restricted collection, a library that no one had read in thirty-two years.
I had a containment field that was holding.
I had, above me, Master Greaves, who was intelligent and methodical and had sent for a book that he believed would help him understand what was in this wall, and who was going to revise his categories again when he read it, and who would then do something I could not yet predict because I did not yet know what the green book said.
What I wanted, I decided, with the deliberate and slightly terrifying exercise of a faculty I had not possessed until very recently, was more time.
I withdrew to the northeast corner.
The desiccant sifted into an empty channel.
Penelope found Master Greaves still crouched at the eastern wall, nozzle in hand, when she returned.
"Whatever was here," he said, without turning, "has moved."
She held out the green book. He took it without looking at her and stood, brushing plaster dust from the knee of his robe with the automatic motion of a man who spent considerable time crouched in the vicinity of old walls.
"Where did it go?"
"I don't know." He turned the green book over in his hands. It was slim, the cover plain except for a symbol in the lower right corner — a circle with a line through it that Penelope had always assumed was a bookbinder's mark and had never looked at closely enough to reconsider. "But it left the spellbook."
Penelope looked at the wall. "It didn't eat it?"
"It ate four pages." He paused. "Then it stopped."
The silence that followed was, again, the second kind — the kind that meant a category was being revised. Penelope had worked under Master Greaves for six years and had learned to read his silences the way sailors learned to read water.
This one meant he was frightened.
Not of the worm. She understood that. Master Greaves had dedicated his adult life to books, and what frightened him was not physical threat but the approach of a fact that was going to require him to substantially reorganize how he understood the world.
"It left the spellbook," he said again, quietly, as though he were testing whether the sentence became less strange with repetition.
It did not.
He opened the green book.
In the northeast corner of the restricted collection, behind a wall that smelled of preservative wax and undisturbed years, I found what I had come for.
Not the spellbook. Not magic.
A catalogue.
Hand-written, in a script so small and precise it had been invisible to me as texture when I had brushed past this section two years ago, on a single long piece of membrane that had been folded into eighths and was now, in my directed interior light, perfectly legible.
It was a list of everything in this section of the restricted collection.
It had been written, in the lower right corner, in the same light hand I had been reading all evening.
Compiled by Sera Voss, Research Archivist, in the thirty-first year of Aldric's tenure, being a complete accounting of the materials he kept from the Collegium's review. I did not agree with his conclusions, and I do not agree with his privacy, but I have catalogued his collection because someone should know what is here in case he dies before he tells anyone.
She had underlined in case twice. The force of it suggested she had considered when and decided it was uncharitable.
Below the note, in a numbered list that ran the full length of the membrane, were the titles.
I began to read.