O Time, Thy Pyramids
Or: The Diary of Horace Chimp
Monday
For one brief moment, I thought I’d managed to type a whole soliloquy. Then I read it back.
To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die — to sheep
Once I’d spotted the first typo, others came thick and fast. Aye, there’s the rub was repeated three times. I didn’t know what dispriz'd meant, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t spelt with a seven. By the time Hamlet reached the undiscovered cuntry (another unfortunate typo), the page had dissolved into a random sea of letters and spaces.
“Anything good today?”
I looked up. Terry was peering over our shared cubicle wall and munching on a peanut bar.
“Thought I was on a roll there for a minute, but… then I wasn’t.” I finished lamely. “What about you?”
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t play tennis, do they?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Shame. It was quite funny.” Terry scratched an armpit absent-mindedly. He reached out a long arm and leafed through the other pages in my outbox. After a moment he stopped and stared intently at one sheet, then thrust it towards me.
“What’s this?”
I plucked it from his outstretched fingers and scanned it. Like most of what we wrote, it was complete chaos; a chaotic assortment of letters, numbers and punctuation marks strewn haphazardly across the page. He stretched over and tapped at four words nestled in the middle of the page:
O time, thy pyramids
I shrugged. “Just a fluke.”
“What is it, Anthony and Cleopatra?”
I shook my head. “No idea where it’s from.”
“Hmmm.” Terry mouthed the phrase a few more times, rolling it around in his mouth. “O time, thy pyramids… I like it. Lovely turn of phrase.”
I slammed the paper back down.
“But it’s wrong!” I said, unable to keep the frustration out of my voice. Terry gave me a sympathetic smile.
“Some days are harder than others. All you can do is put one word in front of the next.”
I laughed bitterly. “Not much use in doing that if they’re not the right words, is it?”
Terry thought for a moment, scratching his chin. “Right for who, I wonder?”
Before I could come up with an answer, the low gong of the evening bell reverberated around the room. All around us, other figures started to get up from their chairs, stretching out their arms and cracking their knuckles.
I reached down under my desk and pulled out a metal cylinder. While I used my feet to unscrew the lid, I grabbed the stack of typed sheets from my desktop, gave them a shuffle and rolled them up. I stuffed them into the cylinder and gingerly fed it into the pneumatic tube next to my seat. The air inside tugged at the fur on my arm as the current caught the tube and sent it rocketing into the sky.
“Quittin’ time!” Terry shoved the rest of the peanut bar into his mouth and clambered out of his chair. “C’mon,” he added, clapping me on the back. “I’ll buy you a drink before we turn in.”
Terry did this little routine every night, but it never failed to make him smile.
“No, no, Terry,” I dutifully responded. “It’s my round, isn’t it?”
Terry waved a large, leathery hand. “That’s the good thing about being infinite monkeys — we get paid in infinite peanuts!”
Tuesday
Dave — the gibbon who worked on my other side — tried to get my attention during my afternoon tea break.
“Did you hear about Cornelia over in Comedies?” I shook my head.
“She’s typed out a whole act of Much Ado About Nothing!”
OK, that was impressive. I put my mug down.
“What? By herself?”
“I know!” Dave was practically vibrating from excitement. “Imagine being so in tune with the Bard that you could conjure so much of his word in one sitting! That’s true talent right there!”
“Or luck,” scoffed a voice behind me.
I looked around. Terry was leaning back in his office chair, sipping his coffee and languidly typing with a foot. Dave gave a strangled squeak of disbelief.
“Luck?! We have been here since time immemorial trying to recreate the Word of the Bard, and most of us would be lucky to produce a single scene! To produce a whole act by oneself is a work of genius!”
“I mean, it would be on a normal typewriter, but…”
Terry had a point, of course. The typewriters we work on are far from normal. Maybe the keys are all entangled at the quantum level. Maybe the ink ribbons are cursed. Or maybe they’re just cheap knock-offs instead of actual Coronas.
Whatever the reason, it’s what makes our work so difficult. If I tried to type the word HAMLET, there was almost no way of knowing what combination of characters would appear on the page.
“I mean think about it,” Terry continued, idly stirring his coffee with a pencil. “If I sat here and rolled a die for millions of years, I’d eventually roll a thousand sixes in a row. Doesn’t make me a genius at rolling dice. Every time you press one of the keys on that typewriter, you’re just rolling a die with 44 sides.”
Dave bristled. “Well, I don’t see you writing anything interesting today,” he snapped, jumping back to his desk.
“Au contraire, my friend.” Terry grabbed a page from his desk and presented it with a flourish. “I have a page here which contains twelve different spellings of the word ‘haiku’, followed by a very suggestive limerick about a young woman from Phuket. Not sure ‘bucket’ works as a rhyme, but still…”
Wednesday
Terry had more questions than usual today.
His speciality was questions that absolutely nobody had a hope in hell of ever answering. “How did we get down here?” was his favourite, closely followed by “Who put us in front of these typewriters in the first place?” and “Why do we need to record the Word of the Bard, anyway?”
This afternoon, he spent as much time staring up into the air above him as he did down at his typewriter. When I finally decided to ask him if he was alright, he answered my question with yet another question:
“Where do you reckon all these pipes go?”
I looked up. All above us, there was the sound of air through the pipes, occasionally broken by the soft hiss-clatter of a tube racing through them on its way to the shadows above us. I shrugged.
“Bard knows,” I muttered. Still, I found myself craning my neck upwards just like Terry, trying to get some glimpse of a shape in the gloom. I was brought back down to Earth by a sharp tutting in my ear. Dave was staring at us, wearing a pitying expression.
“Come on, Terry,” he scoffed. “Everybody knows what’s up there.”
“Oh? Enlighten us.”
“The humans,” said Dave, in the tone of voice an exasperated parent would use to explain to their child that you’re not supposed to eat the tough bit on the outside of a banana. “The ones in charge of determining when our great work is actually completed!”
Terry shot him a quizzical look. “Oh yeah? You’ve seen them, have you? These humans?”
Dave deflated. “Well, no. Nobody has. But they’re up there — and they’re checking everything we write against the Word of the Bard to see if it matches their Great Folio.”
“Great Folio?” I repeated, unable to keep the incredulity from my voice. Dave clearly heard it, because he scowled at me.
“Of course! How else will they know that we have found the True Words and become worthy of ascending to join the humans above?”
I tried to suppress a smirk. “Well, what about all the papers that don’t mean anything? Why do we have to put those in the tubes as well?”
Terry held up a finger and made a noise dripping with learning and gravitas. “Ah, well, everybody knows that pages which do not contain the Word are then fed into the Great Paper Shredder in the Sky, and then used to line the cage of the Hamster Who Stores the World in his Cheeks.”
With a baleful look at the two of us, Dave scurried back to his desk to work, muttering about wasting time. Once we were able to stop laughing, Terry gave me a wink and ambled back to his desk. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, but every so often I would see him out of the corner of my eye, lost in silent thought as he stared up at the tubes.
Thursday
Terry wasn’t in the dormitory this morning when I woke up. He wasn’t at his desk, either. And he still hadn’t turned up nearly two hours into our shift. It wasn’t like he was at risk of getting fired — I don’t know if we even had bosses, never mind who they were — but it was troubling nonetheless.
I looked over at Dave, typing furiously with his tongue jammed between his teeth. “Have you seen — ” I started to ask, but Dave waved his hands like he was shooing a hyperactive fly.
“No, I haven’t seen the bloody orangutan,” Dave muttered. “Frankly, I don’t care where he’s gone. If he wants to go off looking for Shang-Ream-La or whatever it is he thinks is out there, I say let him.”
We’d all heard stories of apes who got sick of typing one day and decided to see how big the Writing Room really was. Every so often, tales would make the rounds about a society that lived in huge structures made from spare boxes of paper and sent gangs of roving marauders to bludgeon any poor, innocent typewriters they happened across.
“Besides,” Dave continued, hammering away at the keys with only his index fingers, “I can get so much more done without having to listen to his stupid bloody questions all day.”
Dave’s typewriter gave a loud ding as he reached the end of his page. He pulled the sheet triumphantly from the carriage and scanned it eagerly. His face fell with an almost audible plop.
“Bard damn it!” he cried, tossing the page onto his desk.
“No luck?” I asked, trying to sound sympathetic. “Maybe you should take a break, give yourself a rest?”
Dave shook his head sharply and reached for another sheet. “Excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse. You know what that means?” I shook my head. “It means I won’t get the work done by sitting around complaining how hard it is. Just have to keep pushing through.” With that, his fingers resumed their manic dance across the keys.
As I watched him typing, brow furrowed in concentration, I remembered another quote from Troilus and Cressida that Terry was fond of: Things won are done. Joy’s soul lies in the doing. I wondered: when was the last time Dave found joy in the doing? And on the heels of that thought came another, much larger one: what would happen if we ever actually finished?
Friday
Terry still hadn’t returned.
Dave was long past caring; when the shift started, he sent some poor sod to the Comedy Division to spy on Cornelia’s progress and report back with an up update. Word eventually made it back to us — she was on Act IV of Much Ado, with no sign of slowing down.
With each passing hour Dave grew more and more unhinged, yelling at us to “dig deep” and “find the words.” But between his motivational pep talks and my increasing worries about Terry, writing felt like trying to catch a fish while wearing greased-up oven gloves.
By the end of the day, I was running on autopilot. Paper in, type type type, paper out, repeat. I wasn’t even reading the pages as I went. At one point Dave started “inspecting” the work of everyone else around him. He snatched a page from a poor bonobo mid-sentence and waved it wildly over his head.
“What the fuck is this, Charlotte?” he screeched. “If I rubbed my faeces on this piece of paper, it’d be closer to the Word than this Bard-forsaken shit you’ve been typing. Start over!” He scrunched up the page of type, lobbed it in the direction of the nearest bin and stalked off, making strange humming sounds in his throat sac.
I snuck a glance at the page on the top of my outbox:
All work and no play makes Jack a dull chimp. All work and no play makes Jack a dull chimp. All work and no play makes Jack a dull chimp. All work and no play makes Jack a dull chimp. All work and no play makes Jack a dull chimp.
Sunday
I woke in the darkness to a hand clamped over my mouth.
My eyes snapped open. Terry was standing above me. He raised his free hand and pressed a finger to his lips. I nodded my understanding and he let go.
Without waiting for me to follow him, Terry turned on his palms and sped towards the entrance to the dormitory, swinging over the heads of sleeping apes. I clambered out of my hammock and went after him.
He was waiting for me by his desk, leaning casually on his cubicle wall like he was waiting for the start of a shift. The lights were still on but turned low, and unfamiliar shadows spread over every surface.
“Where the hell have you been?” I hissed at him. Terry simply grinned.
“Want to see for yourself?”
With that, he leapt up and grabbed the pneumatic tube bolted to the side of the desk. “I got tired of wondering where these went. So I decided to find out.” He started to climb. When he was about 20 feet up he stopped and looked down at me. “You coming?”
I eyed the tubes nervously. We’d all thought about climbing them from time to time, but nobody had ever been daft enough to do it. And yet there was Terry, now closer to 40 feet up and still climbing, the tube barely swaying under his weight.
“Fuck it,” I muttered, remembering a snippet of the Scottish play I’d seen typed out a few years ago. “Returning would be as tedious as go o’er.”
I jumped for the tube. The metal was cold against my hands, and though it juddered for a moment with the force of my impact, it held firm. I looked up at Terry’s ginger arse swaying above me and set off after it.
The first few minutes were easy going. Then I made the mistake of looking down, and my heart lurched into my mouth. From this high up, I could see that the Writing Floor really did go on for miles; groups of six desks arranged into hexagons like the world’s most boring honeycomb. I shuddered as I pressed my body into the tube, which rattled with the impact.
“Don’t look down,” Terry chuckled above me.
We quickly climbed further than the office lights could shine and continued on into the darkness. The only sounds were my breathing, and the muffled slap of my palms against the metal of the tube.
After a stretch of time that could have been an eternity or three quarters of an hour, Terry’s voice drifted down again.
“Nearly there,” he panted. He sounded as tired as I felt.
I looked up, and was surprised to find that I could see him — he was being lit from behind by a soft, orange glow. Eventually, the pipes reached a hexagonal balcony and disappeared from view. Terry climbed over the latticework and extended a hand, which I gratefully took. My arms burned from the climb, and I was relieved to be back on what felt like solid ground. I looked around. Unlike the endless concrete of the Writing Floor, this room looked almost cosy. The floor was made of dark wood, and the stone walls were lit by flickering torches.
Terry coughed behind me. I turned and saw him standing in front of a pair of large doors, covered in beautiful, intricate carvings. As I looked closer I could see letters in the pattern, but couldn’t make out any words. It was as nonsensical as most of what I’d typed that week.
I looked up at Terry. “What now?”
Terry pointed behind him. “Just knock on the door. Don’t be afraid,” he added, obviously sensing my uncertainty.
I knocked. For a long moment, nothing happened. Terry gave me a smile that said ‘be patient’ — and suddenly the door creaked open. Beyond I could see a spiral staircase illuminated by torchlight, but then it was blocked from view by a tall figure in a plain, hooded robe. I stepped back as the figure raised its small, hairless hands and removed the hood from its face. I found myself staring at a thin, tan-coloured face with brown eyes, framed by hairs that stood at attention like black wires.
The human looked down at me and Terry and smiled broadly.
“You’re back!” she said brightly to Terry, before turning to me. “And you brought a friend!”
I looked up at the human and coughed nervously.
“Erm… hello,” I said. “Sorry, but… who are you, exactly?”
The human laughed. “My, your new friend’s eager, isn’t he?”
I looked to Terry, who shook his head at me. “She can’t understand us,” he said, giving her a pitying look. “None of them can. I tried talking to them and they just laughed and said ‘ook’ at me a lot.”
“Ook?”
Terry shrugged. “Must be what we sound like to them.”
I turned this over in my mind for a moment, before Terry’s last word finally reached my brain. “Them?”
Terry smiled broadly at me, then looked up expectantly at the human.
“He wants the tour as well does he?” she smiled, opening the door further. “Alright then, come on!” And with that, she turned and walked up the steps, the hem of her robe swishing against the stone. Terry raised his eyebrows and went after her, leaving me to follow dumbly behind in their wake. The stairs climbed in a claustrophobic spiral, which I somehow found more distressing than climbing in the dark over a million-foot fall. Luckily, my discomfort was short-lived; just a few twists later we reached the top of the stairs and emerged in another hexagonal room.
“Welcome to the Library,” said the human.
I stared at the room which we’d just entered. Four of the walls were taken up by bookshelves, each shelf packed with slim books identically bound in black leather. The two remaining walls contained archways, beyond which I could see two more rooms each with their own sets of shelves. When I looked at Terry in amazement, he pointed at the ceiling above me. I followed his finger. There was a hole in the ceiling, and the railings of a balcony were just visible. Beyond that hole was another room, and another, another.
“How far does it go?” I whispered.
“No idea,” said Terry. “I’ve been here for days, seen hundreds of rooms. Don’t think I even scratched the surface.”
“The Library provides us with new works every day,” said the human. She pulled a book off the shelf at random and opened it. “We read the pages, bind them, and place them on these shelves so that new generations might one day discover them and uncover their meaning.” She paused and gave an awkward chuckle. “Well, that might be easier said than done with most. Like this one.”
She held the book out to me. I gently took it from her and opened it. Every page was covered in a jumble of random letters, numbers and spaces — all typed in a font that I was shocked to recognise.
“This is…”
Terry nodded. “It’s our work.”
I looked up at him and frowned. “But why? Why go to the trouble to turn all of this nonsense into a book?” I looked down at the volume in my hands again, staring uncomprehendingly at the pages full of gibberish. It was bad enough seeing pages like this come out of my typewriter in every day. But seeing them here, dressed up for all the world to see as if they could be compared with the Words of the Bard? As if they meant anything?
I hurled the book at the wall in disgust, hoping it would burst in a shower of paper. The human ran forward to try and save it but Terry got there first, catching it one-handed. He clutched it tightly, almost reverently, to his chest and turned to give the woman a reassuring smile. Then he turned back to me, his expression serious.
“It’s wrong, Terry, it’s all wrong!” I knew I was shouting now. Terry and the human were both staring at me in concern. “Look at all these shelves… all of these books… all filled pages like this one, full of shit that we bashed out on our stupid typewriters!” I pointed at the book in Terry’s hand. “This is a monument to our failure!”
I stopped, breathing hard. Terry just kept on staring. For a moment I thought he was going to punch me. Instead, he reached out a hand and squeezed my shoulder.
“I thought the same thing, at first,” he said quietly. “When I first got here, I was overwhelmed by all of this. Then I saw this place the way they do.”
I looked at him, puzzled. He passed the book back to me and pointed to the margins. Some of the pages contained new letters: not typed, but written by hand.
MCV… 105 in Roman numerals? There’s another book with the same pattern going backwards (see X: 223, Y:85843, Z:199, shelf 4.2, book 6)
“Did they write this?” I asked. Terry nodded. “But why?” It made no sense. There was no deeper meaning to this — it was just the wrong keys on the typewriter, over and over again ad nauseam. Trying to find meaning in this was like trying to read the future the peanut bar crumbs on my desk.
Terry took the book from me, and gently returned it to its shelf.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s one more thing I want to show you.”
He turned and clambered up a shelf, nimbly catching the underside of the balcony above before leaping up through the ceiling. I turned back to the human in the robe, who nodded encouragingly at me. I made my way up and through the hole, following Terry’s form as he clambered up and through row upon row and column upon column of shelves. We passed dozens of other humans, all wearing the same simple robes. Some pointed and laughed as we went by; others barely looked up, so engrossed they were in the books they were reading.
All the rooms blurred into one, but Terry seemed to know where he was going. Finally we arrived at a hexagon that seemed identical to all the others. As I struggled to catch my breath, he ran a finger along one bookshelf, counting the spines. Eventually, he plucked out a single volume, found a particular page and handed it to me.
“Look,” he said proudly.
I took the book from him, and stared at the typed words on the page. Nestled there in the middle of the chaos were four random words:
Oh time, thy pyramids
This nonsense again? Why was Terry so bloody fixated on it? It didn’t mean anything! I glared up at Terry, who saw my expression and hastily pointed back at the page.
“The notes!” he said quickly. “Read the notes.”
I scanned the page again. Surrounding those four words were a kaleidoscope of new sentences, written in a dozen different pens by a dozen different hands. The words themselves had all been underlined and circled in every combination imaginable. People had counted the number of letters, the number of syllables, the number of characters including spaces — everything they could think of that might explain these pyramids and their time.
As I stared at the comments, I realised they were all being had in conversation with each other:
Time? Pyramids?
Sounds a little like a SUNDIAL
WERE PYRAMIDS USED FOR TELLING TIME?
Pyramids are used for holding dead people (see X: 857, Y:10106, Z:42, shelf 3.8, book 7)
BUT ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA WEREN’T KINGS
Well, Cleopatra was a queen, wasn’t she?
The sound of heavy breathing from behind me drew my attention from the page. The first human was standing against the archway, holding a stitch in her side.
“I told… your friend…” she panted. “We only got that book in this week… but it’s really made an impression on the other Librarians.” She stood upright, breathing more naturally now. “They’ve spent days arguing over what it means, trying to figure out if it’s a reference to some other story or poem.” She smiled and looked at the debating notes. “The only thing we can all agree on is that it’s beautiful.”
I looked down at the four words on the page.
“They don’t mean anything…” I said quietly. “They’re just… words.”
Terry gently prised the book from my hands and passed it to the Librarian.
“You’re not the only one who decides what the words mean,” he said. “Even if you wrote them.”
“But I didn’t write them,” I protested. Terry turned and looked at me in puzzlement.
“Really? I thought it came from your typewriter?”
“Well, yes, but — ”
Terry held up a hand. “Your fingers,” he said simply. “Your typewriter. Your words.”
I looked down at my own hands. “But I wasn’t even trying to — I was trying to write Hamlet and…”
“Why?” asked Terry, raising an eyebrow.
I looked at him in amazement. “Why?”
“Yeah. Why? Why do we have to spend our little eternities trying to recreate the words of some old sod who’s probably been dead for centuries at this point?”
“It’s our job, Terry.”
He ignored me and spread his arms to encompass the universe of shelves around us. “Look at this place! It goes on for miles, just like our Writing Floor — maybe forever! I’d wager that somewhere on these shelves, every one of the Bard’s works has already been written out. Maybe twice.”
“Then what’s the point of us all banging away at our desks for the rest of our lives?!”I cried.
Terry put his knuckle on my chin and dragged it up until I was looking him in the face again.
“So we can write something better.”
Monday
Monday
I shuffled into my cubicle just as the morning klaxon sounded, having completely and utterly failed to get any sleep. My mind was filled with hexagons and flickering torches and notes scribbled in margins.
As I lifted the cover off my typewriter, Dave poked his head into my cubicle.
“She finally finished it last night,” he said.
“Hmm?” I muttered, fiddling with the ink ribbon.
“Cornelia.”
I looked up. “She finished Much Ado?”
Dave nodded bitterly. “First of the Great Works we’ve managed to finish, and it was a comedy.”
I took a long sip of tea as the news percolated in my brain.
“Good for her,” I said, returning to my ink ribbon. I could feel Dave’s disappointment radiating in waves.
“Good for her?! We need to figure out a plan!” The cubicle wall shook as he rocked back and forth. “We’re falling behind, Jack! We’re never going to get any dramas finished if we don’t knuckle down and…” he trailed off, looking at a spot over my shoulder.
“Well,” he said archly. “Look who’s come back.”
I turned around. Terry came sauntering into view, his usual coffee and peanut bar in hand.
“Morning,” he said brightly, heaving his bulk into his chair.
“And where have you been?” asked Dave, raising an eyebrow.
“Holiday.”
Dave spluttered for a moment, his jaw opening and closing like he was trying to eat a particularly unripe banana. “Well, I hope you’re ready to get back to work,” he said eventually. “The Comedy Division has already finished Much Ado, and I don’t want us to fall behind.”
“We’ll finish when we finish,” said Terry, leisurely setting up his typewriter as he used his feet to adjust his desk chair. Dave stared for a minute longer, gave a small harrumph, and then disappeared behind the cubicle wall.
As I shifted closer to my typewriter, a ball of paper landed softly in front of me. I unfurled it. One edge of the sheet was jagged and ripped, and the typed words were surrounded by annotations. Four words were circled and underlined in the centre of the paper:
O time, thy pyramids
“Thought you might like a souvenir.”
I looked up at Terry, my mouth flapping.
“Won’t they miss it?” I asked eventually.
“Maybe,” Terry shrugged. “But they’ve got millions upon millions of words up there. These are yours. Besides, you can always give them something new to ponder.”
I stared at the words — my words — and the evidence of all the other eyes that had read them. I felt my own eyes prickle with tears. I looked up to say thank you to Terry, but he had already disappeared back behind the cubicle wall. His voice floated up over the wall.
“I look forward to seeing what you come up with today.” Then he started to type.
I fished in my desk drawer for a pin and stuck the page onto the cubicle wall. Then I fed a clean sheet into my machine, shifted in my chair and cracked all twenty of my knuckles. My fingers hovered over the keys.
“Me too.”
This story was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Library of Babel, which I first learned about in this fabulous video essay by Jacob Geller, and the classic image behind the Infinite Monkey Theorem. I was originally going to call it The Blurst of Times, but thought that might be a tad silly.