Codex Born

River on a Tuesday, and by that Thursday, Tori’s bar was fully stocked and ready to go.

The smell of peanuts, pizza, and stale beer poured over us as I opened the door. Old logs paneled the walls, giving the place a woodsy cabin feel. Framed newspaper articles from the local paper hung on the wall closest to the bar, along with color photos of high school football teams going back to my parents’ time. Sheets of acrylic plastic covered the tables, preserving graffiti carved into the wood more than a hundred years ago.

A handful of people called out greetings. I waved and forced a smile, then hurried to snag a small booth where we would be able to keep an eye on anyone coming in.

I brought out Bi Wei’s book while Lena ordered a late dinner of pizza, chocolate ice cream, and a Long Island Iced Tea. “And Isaac will have a pasty. With extra rutabaga.”

“I’m not hungry,” I protested.

“I don’t care.” Her eyes dared me to argue.

I surrendered as gracefully as I could. After double-checking the instructions in the New York Library Bulletin, I donned the glasses and pressed a small button on the right side of the frame. A cheerful ding rang through the earbuds.

“Translation on,” said a pleasant but stiff female voice. I opened the book and studied the vertical characters on the first page. My vision flickered, and the image froze for a quarter second. A second picture appeared over the first. The new layer was semi-transparent, but easy enough to read. The [UNTRANSLATABLE] of Bi Wei.

“Sweet!” I turned the page and waited while the glasses translated the text.

“How do they work?” asked Lena.

“Optical character recognition networked to the world’s largest translation engine. At least, that’s the theory. The translation database doesn’t exist in the real world yet. So far, the company’s prototypes only do very basic word- and phrase-level translations, and their software is limited to English, Spanish, and French. But by the end of the decade, they’re hoping to create and market a set of glasses that will translate any language pretty much instantly. That’s what I used for the spell.”

I tapped the hinges of the glasses and read aloud. “‘The palace lady takes no delight in idleness, but devotes her mind to the latest verse. For poetry can be a substitute for the flowers of oblivion.’ Remind me to have Jeneta look through this thing.”

I flipped ahead to the handwritten portion of the book and continued reading.

At thirteen I raised my gaze from the moss-covered paths to the angler with his brush and ink. As the slivered moon smiled down, he gathered me to his net of words. My grandfather’s tears shone from Heaven, and his pride opened the waters of the world.

The glasses converted everything into a simplistic computerized font, but I could also see the characters Bi Wei had brushed onto the page, the precision and the artistry with which she wrote.

“The angler could be Bi Sheng,” said Lena.

“Or another of his followers or descendants. Bi Sheng died centuries before Gutenberg’s time. Bi Wei wouldn’t have known him.” Or maybe we were reading too much into it, and Bi Wei just liked fishing a lot. Poetry wasn’t my strong suit. “She really did it. She wrote herself into the book.”

How many weeks had she spent preparing? How desperate must they have been to believe such precautions were necessary?

Words alone couldn’t create a complete mind. No author could. The amount of text it would take to capture a fraction of the complexities and memories of a human being would make Jordan’s Wheel of Time series look like a child’s board book. That was part of the reason intelligent characters went mad when they interacted with the real world. There simply wasn’t enough to them.

I thought about Smudge, remembering the damage he had done when I first created him. He was smart for a spider, but not intelligent or sentient enough to lose his mind. Not completely. Even so, he had been terrified, and nearly burned down my high school library before I managed to calm him enough to get him out of there. I had taken him to one of the old mine sites by Tamarack and let him scurry about in an empty cave for hours until he finally began to trust me.

From that standpoint, what Bi Wei had done should have been impossible. But maybe you didn’t have to perfectly transcribe the entirety of someone’s experiences. Nobody remembered every second of their life, right? I had a near-eidetic memory, but I couldn’t have said what shirt I wore two months ago, or what presents I got on my third birthday, or what color our first dog’s eyes had been.

Was it the total of all of our experiences that defined us, or was it the key moments and choices that truly mattered? How much of who I was today stemmed from the day I discovered magic? From my first kiss with Jenny Abrams in seventh grade? From the road trip I took out west after high school, and seeing mountains for the first time?

If I could capture those moments in text and somehow imbue them with magic as Bi Wei had done, would that be enough, not to create a new me, but to anchor myself to this world after my body was gone?

Bi Wei had preserved herself for centuries. How long could such magic last? How far into the future could you travel? Assuming someone was waiting to pull me back out, I could watch the evolution of mankind. I could see rocket cars, colonies in space, everything I ever dreamed of and so much more that I couldn’t possibly imagine.

“You know it’s a one-way trip, right?” Lena asked.

“Since when can dryads read minds?” I said grumpily. Mostly because she was right. I would lose my family and friends. I would almost certainly lose Lena as well. But the chance to glimpse the future, to see what we would learn and discover and become…I would pay an awful lot for that chance.

I set up my laptop, waited for our waiter to finish putting down our food, then logged into the Porter database. Magical Internet access: one more gift from Victor Harrison.

I began with the poem from the first page of Bi Wei’s book. The vagaries of translation complicated things, but by plugging different phrases into the search engine, I eventually identified it as a snippet from New Songs from a Jade Terrace, a collection of Chinese poetry published almost fifteen hundred years ago by Xu Ling. I e-mailed a copy of the text to myself to study later.

I had less luck finding information on Bi Sheng. The earliest reference to his work was a book written by Kuo, decades after Bi Sheng’s death. I did manage to dig up some basic biographical information. Bi Sheng was a commoner, born in 990 AD during the Song Dynasty. He died in 1051, only a few years after developing the first known system of movable type. I sent myself a copy of Dream Pool Essays, Kuo’s book, and kept reading.

“Did you know there was a crater on the moon named after this guy?” I had spent many nights examining the lunar landscape, but Bi Sheng’s crater was on the dark side. Much like the man himself, who seemed to be little more than a historical shadow. Johannes Gutenberg’s life had been endlessly detailed and distorted with a combination of historical records and random speculation, not to mention deliberate inaccuracies spread by the man himself, like his alleged burial site, which just happened to have been destroyed during the Napoleonic War. Bi Sheng, on the other hand, appeared to have been all but forgotten. For all I knew, it could have been Gutenberg himself who had erased Bi Sheng from the history books.

I shut the laptop and forced myself to eat a few bites, though my stomach grumbled in protest. Next, I turned my attention to Bi Wei’s book. I skimmed one page after another, searching for anything that would tell us more about how she had grown so powerful and what the limits of her power might be. I found nothing but a brief prayer that she would never have to use the book’s magic. I yanked off the glasses and rubbed my eyes. “This isn’t working.”

“You need sleep.” Lena licked the last of the ice cream from her spoon. “Magical healing fixed the cuts to your body, but your mind is exhausted.”

“I need better information.” I traced my fingers over the carefully brushed characters. Five centuries of readers had imbued these pages with magic, preserving Bi Wei’s life and experiences.

“The last time I saw that look, I ended up driving you to Chicago so Nicola Pallas could try to put your mind back in one piece.”

“This book anchored Bi Wei for all those years,” I said. “That connection wouldn’t just disappear when you