fandomhigh | Fandom Library, Wednesday, January 7th

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Fandom Library, Wednesday, January 7th

It had taken Arden a few minutes to figure out what was off about the library when she'd walked in. Nothing seemed awry at first glance: the gremlins were there, but being an acceptable level of rowdy, the books were all in their shelves, save those she had to shelve, and there weren't any weird tableaux, weather patterns, or voices anywhere that she could spot.

So now Arden was twitchy for no good reason that she could spot. But she was definitely twitchy. Was this what going crazy felt like?

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Good lord! Caleb had never seen this many books in his life! Had barely imagined this many books even existed!

"Hello?"

"Hello!" Arden said, glancing up from her phone to recognize one of the new kids. Or, well, realize he was new by dint of not recognizing him. "Welcome to Fandom Library. I'm Arden. First visit?"

"Pleased to meet you Miss Arden, I'm Caleb. And yeah it's my first time. This is...impressive." For all he knew this was average for libraries outside of tiny mountain towns.

"Isn't it, though?" she said. "It's crazy. I mean, for one thing, it also has books that haven't been written or published yet, so it stands to reason it would be huge, right?"

Definitely bigger on the inside than the outside.

"What can I do for you? Here to check something out in particular? Or just looking around and getting acclimated to the school?"

"I'm partly explorin', but I was specifically hopin' to find the library. I'm from 1935 so I got some catchin' up to do. For that matter, when you say books that ain't been written, do you mean, even as of..." What year was it now? "2026?" Yeah, still not used to that.

A slight flash of concern crossed Arden's face. Look, she was pretty sure that no state had really great race relations in the thirties, and especially no state that produced an accent like that his, even if she couldn't place it to Kentucky specifically (anymore than he was likely to place hers as North Carolina).

"Yup!" she said, giving him a thumbs up while she pushed her misgivings down. After all, he'd been polite to her so far, even giving her an honorific when she didn't expect one. "Exactly right. I don't know what happens to media here when it is published or produced--probably sticks around, just requires different filing." She gave him a sympathetic smile. "Ninety years is a hell of an adjustment. How you doing?"

Caleb sadly had that kind of non-racist white privilege where he sometimes forgot that just because he wasn't like that, didn't mean other people weren't. So he wasn't sure what the brief look on her face meant, in fact maybe he'd imagined it.

Later perhaps it would all strike him at once and he'd facepalm.

"I'm doing...mostly okay? There's a lotta culture shock all around but I guess the time travel is the most...personal? If that makes sense? Just the difference in kitchen technology was bafflin'." He smiled self deprecatingly. "I was half afraid I was gonna burn the place down just tryin' t'make breakfast on Sunday." Maybe three quarters.

"Honestly, you'd be surprised how many people are in danger of doing that and they're used to modern stoves," Arden said with a laugh. "Uh, let's see. Have you been told about cell phones, the internet, or the radio yet?"

A beat.

"I mean the island's specific radio broadcast, I'm pretty sure y'all had radio back in the 30s."

...Didn't they?

Oh Caleb loved the radio! Even if his options for listening were limited due to Granny having the only wireless. Fortunately she wasn't too stodgy about the adventure programs.

"I have just t'day been introduced to modern phones and the internet...though I'm still not clear on just what that is. Mr. Constantine just said 'we're gonna use the internet' and he had a...something.

"And yeah we had a radio back home but no I didn't know the island had it's own broadcast."

"Okay, um, I can answer that for you!" Arden said, hoping she could. "It's basically the sum total of humanity's knowledge up to this point, which is great, but also the sum total of humanity's opinions and beliefs, which is less so."

Because, y'know. Humanity.

"So, uh, basically, people create these things called websites on their computers. They use computer coding and programming so that the website looks like how they want it to and contains the information they want it to. And then through your phone or computer, you can access their website. Each website has its own unique address so that when you put that into the address bar, it leads to the website you want to go to. And the internet is the, uh, network? Of millions of websites."

Honestly, the hardest part was not using words that would confuse him, like 'cloud' or 'tablet' or whatever. Saying, 'websites are stored in the cloud' would just be confusing all the way around.

Caleb recognized most of that as english. But there were unfamiliar terms and context that still left him a little baffled. Once again he was reminded of the pulp magazine with an illustration of cavemen poking at an automobile.

"So the device that Mr. Constantine was using was a computer, and the internet is a bit of a double edged sword. And can be used to procure..." Surely if the school was literally offering a class on how to hustle people then talking about false identification was safe enough? "Necessary papers." Because poor Caleb might just not be ready to say that out loud without the proper context.

"Probably a computer," Arden said. "He's a wizard or something, so he could have used whatever if he'd like...done the magic right, or whatever. I'm not a wizard, so I have no idea how they work. But yeah, the internet is definitely a double edged sword. A lot of people seem to forget that just because it's written down doesn't make it right. And sometimes people like to be jerks, but the internet means they can be jerks to people hundreds of miles away and what they say sticks around."

Surely that helped. "Would you like to see what I mean? Cause I could just show you the internet."

She snapped her fingers, remembering something. "Right! Mr. Constantine is a wizard, like I said, and he casts Wards on the library. So if something scary is happening and you want to go somewhere safe? The library's a good place, cause you'll be able to get in and nothing bad can follow."

Caleb had heard similar talk about the Great War, how the advanced weapons had allowed the killing of people from such a distance that you never had to see the other side. Mark muh words, it'll be th' end o' us ahll! one of the "old timers" in Baker's Gap had proclaimed.

It had tickled Caleb and his friends at the time (they were only ten or eleven) and they'd taken to randomly crying out "it'll be the end of us aaaaaaaaaalllll!"

"Yes please, if it's not too much trouble. I was too busy with the class activity to pay much attention to what he was actually doin'. I'm beginnin' to suspect I'll have a hard time distinguishin' between magic and technology for a while. And the sanctuary is greatly appreciated too."

Edited 2026-01-08 12:59 (UTC)

"You know what they say," Arden declared as she pulled out her laptop. "Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Although, now that I think about it, you might not know that saying, I have no idea when it was coined. But you know what? That seems a great place to start."

She doubleclicked on the Microsoft Edge icon ~~because I am role-playing, dammit,~~. "So, this is your web browser. There are a bunch of different ones, it doesn't really matter which one you pick, but you need one to access the internet. Basically, it acts as a translator for you. There are a bunch of different coding languages, all of which are putting letters and numbers and symbols in a particular order and none of which make any sense just looking at them, unless you speak the language."

Arden couldn't really even name the coding languages. One was Snake, maybe? Gemstone? C double plus? Who even knew? "You need the web browser to translate all the code that people use to build various websites into something we can see and interact with, the same way you'd need a translator to translate a speech in Javanese into English. With me so far?"

Caleb hadn't heard that phrase, but it was catchy.

"I think so. The web browser translates the coding languages into somethin' we can understand."

His brain had latched onto the code concept because it was a common motif in the pulps. "It sounds somethin' like when a spy in a story needs a key t'decode a message." Though he had never really paid too much attention when authors tried to actually explain how that all worked.

"Yeah, exactly that!" Arden said, excitedly. "Your browser is the key, perfect analogy." She beamed at him. Yes! She wasn't messing this up too much!

"Now, the internet is made up of--" porn and viruses "--websites. And websites are mostly made up of webpages. It's sorta like a book; a website is the entire book, and a webpage is the pages that make up that book. Different sites and pages do different things, but the most basic is providing information. Each page has its own unique URL - I don't know what that stands for - that can bring you to the exact thing you want, so long as you know it. Like, if you enter in the right web address - another way of saying URL - you can immediately pull up a single image from a specific webpage five layers deep on a website. But, if you don't know the URL, or don't even know if there's a website for what you're looking for, you run a search."

She typed 'google.com' into the address bar. "So, as you saw, I put in the URL and it brought me here. This is a what's known as a search engine. You put in a thing you want more information about, and it quickly scans the whole internet, and comes back to you with links - hyperlinks - to bring you to those pages. It goes in order of popularity, with the sites that the largest number of people go to most often. And since it's really, really good to have a lot of people choose your website, some companies will pay to have their names listed at the very top. But since what we're looking for isn't something anyone can sell us, that probably won't come into play."

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic was typed into the search bar and mere fractions of a second later, they got their list of potential pages. "So these are our search results. See all these words in a larger blue font? Those are hyperlinks - we usually just call them links - that we can click on and they will bring us to a different webpage. So this top one here, Clarke's Three Laws" will bring us to the website Wikipedia, and the webpage devoted to explaining Clarke's three laws, which will, presumably give us the information we're looking for." She turned her laptop more fully towards Caleb. "You try using the link to get us there, okay?"

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