Silent Library

Trope-a-Day: Tome of Eldritch Lore

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Tome of Eldritch Lore: One of the small number of amendments to the Imperial Charter amends the otherwise protected rights of “access to information, freedom of research and inquiry, freedom of speech and of the press” to include an exception “when such information or speech constitutes, in whole or in part, infectious or self-executing code”.

The existence of this sort of thing, in an infectious-meme, basilisk-hack (see: Brown Note) sort of way, is why.

(The Silent Library exists to contain this sort of thing. Can’t go around destroying them, obviously. They’re books.)

Reading Back

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“On the one hand, yes, we do find it repugnant to restrict the freedoms of speech and information, even to this limited and circumscribed extent.”

“On the other hand, since we have an entire ward filled with babbling lunatics who thought that the Silent Library was ‘where we’re hiding the good stuff’ rather than ‘a prison for hideously dangerous brain-eating information life’, we’re still pretty sure it’s the right call, y’know?”

“No, you can’t see them. Some of that babble is also hideously dangerous brain-eating information life, and we’re not absolutely confident that the rest isn’t.”

– briefing new members of the Select Committee on Existential Threats