A Visit to the Archives

The Lab - The Labyrinth

Deep within The Labyrinth - or The Lab, for short - near the dark woods of CASC and the Enchanted Lake of Hausmann (beneath which live two great dragons, one blue and one white, each cautiously and perpetually circling around the other, generating enough energy to power the Labyrinth), in close proximity to the perimeter of the Forbidden Realm of Old and Powerful Magic - or The Fence, for short - beyond which Wizards vie to control forces beyond human comprehension, twixt dusty, rusted corrugated iron magnetic flux reactors, abandoned laser mainframes, mothballed plasmonic flux capacitors, and in the shadow of the Superblock, the ominous nuclear complex that is home to perpetual chemical suns harnessed by the Wizards, there lies a angry, squat, gray building: The Archives.

The previous day, I had sent an electronic messenger pigeon across the Labyrinth to inform The Archive that it would be receiving a muggle (or, non-Wizard) visitor. Preparations had to be made: documents shuffled and stuffed into locked drawers, boxes sealed shut, locks secured, portals deactivated. It was a rare occasion for a muggle to visit The Archives.

The Forbidden Realm is not, strictly speaking, forbidden - Magical Councils of Wizards are able to bestow on muggles the capability to enter the Forbidden Realm without being torn asunder by the powerful forces contained therein. It just requires the right paperwork. In fact, The Archives lies on the outer rim of the Forbidden Realm, a veritable cave of wonders sealed off from the rest of the Forbidden Zone. As I rode up to The Archives on my bright yellow horse, passing through the shadow of the Superblock, my horse became uneasy, restless, and began to screech. I dismounted, and left it some distance outside of The Archives. I had a sneaking suspicion that, when I returned from The Archives, my horse would be gone, having fled away, frightened, from that place of dark magic.

I approached the large door to The Archives, covered in colorful warnings, caveats, and bright symbols, looking like a warnings label design firm met Sesame Street and the letter of the day was Q. Nervously, I rang the bell to solicit admittance. I heard shuffling. A massive door creaked open slowly. I strained to see beyond the door, from which a soft, diffuse light escaped.

A benevolent-looking female Wizard of the Forbidden Zone poked her head out. The Archivist. "You're Charles!" she said, without hint of uncertainty. "No magical devices - leave all implements capable of magic out here, in the locker." I took a phone out of my pocket and put it into a cage with a hastily scrawled sign saying 'Faraday Cage' taped onto it with a strip of yellowed, ancient tape that looked like dinosaur skin, and followed her inside. "It doesn't lock. The locker, I mean. But no need to worry, no one will steal your magical implements, nothing's ever stolen - unless, of course, you're lucky." She cackled to herself, and the enormous door swung shut with a deep clang that had a ring of finality to it.

Before I could look around, she pointed at a leather register containing the names of past visitors. "Sign in to the register here," she said, and as I did so, she sized me up. "Don't get many muggles in here. They weren't even allowed in at all, until recently. They'll only allow you in under condition that I keep my eye on you," she said, eyeing me. "Is this research part of your job? What do you do?" I told her I was an engineer - "Oh," she said, "one of those," with a knowing smile - and that I was just interested in poking around and learning how to use The Archives. She nodded approvingly. "We have lots of information here. I'm sure you'll find what you need."

I finished writing in the register, looked up, and saw a long row of storage shelves, ends capped with cranks tipped with black knobs, which, when turned, would move shelves sideways along rails, squishing and compressing shelves together. Useful, but dangerous: say you were pulling a box out from the back of a shelf, deep in the aisle, and someone decided they'd had enough of you, and twisted the knobs until you were squished like a grape being turned into wine.

I smiled nervously, knees weak, trying to be extra-nice, pushing the image to the back of my mind.

Organic colors dominated The Archive: tan boxes filled shelves, olive drawers containing maps and oversized documents, ashen gray shelves, brown wooden panels with hundreds of small drawers, slate colored boxes filled with photographs, diffuse yellow lights. But contrasting these organic colors were sterile mechanical colors, black plastic cases with anonymous white labels, metal film reels with pasted white squares and scribbled names in permanent black ink, black leather bound volumes with gold lettering on the sides filling low shelves.

The Archivist began by putting a pile of photographs in front of me - the photographs I had requested using the electronic messenger pigeon – and asked me to pick out which photographs I wanted scanned. Then we moved on to a movie I had requested. "It needs approval," she said, "from the Wizards Upstairs Who Approve Such Things As Need Approval For Muggles To See. But I'll describe it." She described it. "Do you still need it?" Yes, I said, I do still need it.

We then proceeded to discuss some documents whose nature had remained a mystery, even after reading their titles. I asked her about a logbook. She walked me down the aisle full of shelves with cranks, cranked the knob for a shelf, and picked out a shelf. "The logbooks are in... let's see... this one." She pulled out a box with cryptic black lettering on the outside, marked "1982-1990." It was neatly filled with notebooks, neatly stacked sideways, filled with engineering paper, engineering paper neatly filled with notes, legible scribbles detailing what had been done and what remained to be done for that day, black and white photographs of oscilloscope readings yellowing with age pasted onto page after page, equations detailing what these oscilloscope readings meant, histogram plots, calibration curves, to-do lists, invoices, receipts – in short, a meticulous record of the minutiae of daily life of a project engineer operating this reactor or that accelerator.

In the back of The Archive, behind the rows of moving metal shelves on rails chock full of boxes, were still more wooden shelves chock full of movie film canisters, and next to those wooden shelves were dusty, retro film players, covered with black and red and white knobs and dials and slots and mounts, waiting eagerly to be used, looking like they had been waiting for decades.

We then moved on to old Newsline newspapers - what you might call, Analog Newslines. We dug through April 1980, August 1981, and September 1985 Analog Newslines to find relevant articles. We dug through old Science and Technology Review magazines to find other articles. Shelf after shelf of old newspapers and old magazines, annual reports and draft reports, logs and notebooks - a whole history there in those shelves.

With modern technologies, we have the capability to record details down to the microtwitches and keystrokes of every millisecond of every hour of every day. We can obtain information dumps more massive than we have space to put them – all the information we could ever want. We have the ability to inscribe increasingly fractal details of our present history into increasingly minuscule devices the size of grains of sand, the size of specks of dust, until our entire history is laid out before us like a dust bunny in some remote corner of the universe (until reality sneezes, and we’re left to pick up the pieces). There will, perhaps, never be a box in a shelf labeled "2012," filled with notebooks. Maybe it will be filled with digital sand, and we’ll lose the ability to read what is in it, a box full of tomorrow’s 5¾-inch floppy drives. It is a sobering thought.

"Wanna see something cool?" She slid open one of the hundreds of small drawers on the wooden panel, revealing a slew of photographic negatives lined up like soldiers drilling on a parade ground, waiting to be reviewed by a judge. "All photographic negatives. All from different historical periods." More drawers, more photographic negatives. Where would one even begin?

I had asked many questions, and had gotten many answers. But my time visiting The Archives was drawing to a close. As she escorted me to the door, she pointed at a desk containing still more historical items. "E. O. Lawrence's desk," she said. "Edward Teller's desk," she said, pointing at another. "And Edward Teller's chair." She showed me historical photographs from the Lab's history, photographs from atmospheric nuclear tests on Pacific Islands, photographs of old accelerators and lasers, photographs of past directors and big groups of physicists and Edward Teller being knighted with a yardstick or pointy implement of some sort in a small ceremony of about 20 cohorts who each signed the photograph for posterity, keenly aware that some 50 or 60 years down the road some young Lab employee would look at the photograph and wonder who on earth all these strange characters were.

I thanked The Archivist, and told her I would be back again. "Tell your friends!" she said, then loaded me up with souvenir bookmarks and souvenir postcards and informational handouts like I was a European tourist in a Las Vegas gift shop.

As the door to The Archive shut behind me, I opened the magical locker and discovered that I was not so lucky after all: my magical implements were still there.

And my bright yellow horse was there where I left it, patiently waiting for me.