I am the warden of the Floating Library. An intergalactic archive of encyclopaedia and books donated to the Floating Library so that they can be kept safe from invasion, occupation and general disasters.

Today, is the archival reshuffle. This happens when donated books have become large enough to become a hindrance for visitors to navigate the corridors. So rather have them wander and get lost and disoriented. I send them home regardless of how many light years they have travelled and the library is closed while this reshuffle takes place.

A common occurrence of an archival reshuffle is that the forces, let’s say magnetic forces so that you can understand, are reduced so that the books can swap indexes more easily. This simple decision can make the difference of several days when we use Intelligent Navigational Directory Equilibrium X system (INDEX system for short). The X represents that tenth iteration of the system after many debates and discussion on intergalactic policies for sorting.

And now the books are starting to detach from the shelves and float to their new index positions. Thousands of books of all colours and sizes doing the equivalent of a mass musical chairs. I’ve put on classical music on the speakers as I like to think it makes them feel happy. Happy books means happy visitors and happy visitors means happy stakeholders and happy stakeholders mean happy me.

Suddenly, something quite unexpected happened. The floating library was moving. This is unusual because when the library is the archival reshuffle status, it mustn’t be moved. For this exact reason, that was happening right now. The floating books become disarrayed and the pages begin flicking and books start flying all over the place, hitting walls, hitting me. It’s quite mad really. I struggle to regain balance and make my way to the control reception.

After several failed attempts of entering my very long and secure password and being whacked several times by volumes of the human race. I log in. I check my notifications under travel destinations for the Floating Library and it turns out there was an emergency recall of the library to Sector ICU2. This policy grants any planet to call for the Floating Library to instantly make its way to the planet. And so it seems that this emergency call has really messed things up for me.

I look at the ‘Reason of Emergency’ and the requester had put “Birthday”. I make my way to the toilets and curl up into a ball as I await the nightmare to be over. The flapping and thudding of books continue like a sad and relentless storm.