-- Mon Hecatonchieres --

-- By The Exile --

Exile, I thought, exile is even harsher when you can see your home from your bedroom window.

If I was shipped to some remote, harsh country - Siberia, maybe, or Svalbard - never to see another human face again, maybe I would eventually be able to forgetwhat it is I lost. Here, overlooking the dangerously rickety twenty-story tower that was stronghold to the crusaders of Lady Academia, was no exile. To be able to walk among the laughing, joking students, talk to them, maybe even touch them, but still never be one of them, share their warmth or their life, like a spectre stalking its
haunting ground - this was no exile. And didn't exile presuppose a crime, or at least a transgression? I had done everything they asked of me. I studied hard. I read books. I wrote essays and handed them in on time. I took my exams and passed them. My results, although shamefully below my standards, were adequate to pass. I attended the graduation ceremony. Through that ceremony, though I knew, I still unable to believe that I was actually undergoing an excommunication, a shunning, a ritual of banishment as old and dark as the bell, book and candle. Handed a diploma, stricken off the roll and shoved out of the door again, my life effectively ended there.

Still, graduates were allowed in the old University library. Not the newly built library, with its newer, shinier books, but as a Philosophy student I had no need of new, shiny books. We were the same species - consigned to a darkness born of lack of purpose, left to rot in the crypts of the old masters whose pictures lined the wall. I stood and stared at the Tower for a while, blinking in the harsh light of the midday sun, before entering the building. The security guard on the door did not even look at me as I signed myself in and he raised the drawbridge.

--

I signed myself in at the reception desk.

I don't use my birth name any more. I use another name - the misspelling of my name on an official document. I sort of adopted it, replying with the same name every time a new form came in the post, until the Government left it on their database, by now firmly convinced that it was my real name. If The Government say its my name, I suppose it has to be. It suits me somehow. Faulty. A mistake.

Then I looked for a nice book for myself using the library computers.

The library computers contained an archive of all the books, periodicals, tapes and other media in all the departmental libraries as well as the main University libraries both old and new. I looked for a book about Golems. Golems were such fascinating things. Only simple things, born of the most raw materials, but they gave rise to so many concepts. They were the precursor to the modern AI, a machine with a life, a spark of its own, not just a tool. I never really understood what it was about me and golems. I had been obsessed with them for a long time now. I always imagined that I was descended from the Maharal of Prague.

But that was silly. That fiery-eyed old Rabbi with a spirit of iron and intellect like a razor blade. He was nothing like me. Anyway, I'm not even Jewish. I understood Golems because they, like me, were incomplete. Soulless. A religious paradox. In the eyes of the Lady Academia, I guess that's what I am.

It was then that I discovered that the library's only copy of the film 'Der Golem' was missing.

--

This puzzled me. At the same time, it lifted slightly the dark cloud over my mind. I had something mildly interesting to ponder. For some reason, it seemed
important. First, I wandered over to the counter and asked them if they could tell me anything at all about the book - when it had last been seen, when it had been reported missing, who had last checked it out. The librarian looked on the computer records herself, her brow furrowed, seemingly as baffled as me.

"Have you checked the shelves for it?" she asked, "Maybe its been deleted from the records by accident."

I nodded and walked to the multimedia shelves, where rows of videos, CDs and DVDs were lined up. They were on the same floor as the counter, although I could see the books on the balcony above me and the stairs leading down to the dusty archives below. I felt that I was being watched as I searched the shelves - a prickle on the back of my neck, or a dark shadow flitting through the corner of my eye. Just paranoia, I told myself, your mind is grinding to a halt.I found the place on the shelves where the movie should have been. It was, indeed, not there. Wedged between two DVDs immediately before and after it in the alphabet - a placeholder, maybe, like a bookmark? - was a small black slip of card.

I took it out. It was a business card. Black and white, with a symbol of a smith's hammer in the middle of a fire, licked by intricately drawn flames that seemed
to actually surge with power, writhe with life, the company advertised itself as:

DARK BARGAIN INDUSTRIES.
Anything you want, at the right cost.

I examined it closely, not only because of its beauty, but because there were no contact details on it at all - no phone number, no address, no email address, not
even the name of a person or place. Was it a real business name at all, or a card from a game? With illustrations like that, it must be an excellent game, she
thought, and an unusual one if she hadn't heard of it. There weren't that many independent role-playing companies left.

"Did you find the book?"

I had not noticed the librarian approach the shelf. I shook my head and pocketed the card.

"Its been missing since May." she said, "It went missing before, but then it was found in February, but by May it was lost again."

"Only May? How odd. That's when I..."

"When what?"

"Never mind." I shook my head again, "Thanks for looking."

"There are lots of copies on Amazon that are quite cheap if you..."

I had already walked away to continue my search elsewhere.