A choice. The word seemed laughably small in the face of planetary extinction. What choice could possibly matter now?
"You have two paths," the Librarian's voice filled the sanctum, calm and inexorable as a rising tide.
"Path one: you may stay. We will heal your companion fully. You will become our first apprentices in five thousand years. You will have access to all our knowledge—histories that predate your own, sciences that would seem like magic to your people. You will help us preserve this library through the coming cataclysm, and you will become the seed from which a new, wiser humanity may one day grow. You will be safe. You will be immortalized. But you must abandon the surface world, and everyone on it, to their fate. Forever."
The offer was biblical. A new Adam and Eve, sheltered in a technological Eden.
"Path two," the Librarian continued, "is your return. We will heal your companion, provide you with supplies, and guide you back to the surface. You will be allowed to live out the remainder of your lives with your species. But you must take an oath of absolute silence. You can never speak of us, or of this place. Any attempt to lead others here will be met with our intervention. The alternative—a global panic, a greedy, violent rush to claim our knowledge and technology—is an outcome we will not permit. You may return to your world, but you must return to a doomed world, and watch it die."
Silence descended. The choice was monstrous. An impossible decision between personal salvation at the cost of your soul, and a noble, pointless death alongside everyone you had ever known.
"You're lying," Maya spat, her face pale. "You're making it up. The world isn't ending." It was a desperate, childish denial.
"Your science already shows you the signs, though you refuse to connect them," the Librarian replied, its tone unchanging. "We do not lie. We merely state what is."
A frantic, whispered argument erupted between the three of them.
"We have to go back!" Maya insisted, tears streaming down her face. "We have to warn them! It's our duty!"
"Warn them of what, Maya?" Chloe countered, her voice shaking but her logic cold. "That a disembodied voice in a cave said the sky is falling? They'd lock us up! And if they did believe us, what would happen? Chaos. War. Anarchy. Nothing would change the outcome. Here… think of the knowledge we could preserve! A legacy for the entire human race!"
They both looked at Ethan. He was the historian, the keeper of stories, the man who lived in the past. He looked from Chloe, the pragmatist tempted by infinite knowledge, to Maya, the idealist who refused to give up on humanity.
To stay meant abandoning billions, erasing the present. To go back meant condemning all this—this impossible, magnificent library—to be forgotten, while they returned to a world of certain death.
The choice between the future and the past. Between saving the knowledge of humanity, and dying with humanity itself.
He took a deep breath, the clean, sterile air of the sanctum feeling like poison in his lungs. He looked up at the glowing, perfect ceiling.
The Librarian's voice echoed one last time, patient and eternal.
"Have you decided?"