Moon Clipper Systems Access

To Nightlight, the concept of a book is rather abstract: this flat object made of square leaves and leather means something, certainly, for his very favorite people seem to collect and treasure them— his Katherine in particular meticulously curating a hoard of them for herself and Ombric, making new ones to replace those too worn out to be repaired, or just because she thinks there ought to be more, or gifting books of nothing to North so that their Nikolaus may fill them— but Nightlight comes from a people and time where available information is primarily found on screens, holograms, in moving diagrams and audible through speakers.

Books existed in the Golden Age, sure, and the Clipper has her private library, but the books are old and precious things, preserved in airtight shelves and sealed away like treasures, not to be touched or breathed on.

You cannot make a book scroll, and you cannot zoom in or rotate the images to see every angle; books do not read themselves out loud to you at two in the morning when a fussy Small One needs a feeding and a change but you need both hands to care for them. Books cannot be stored by the thousands in tiny chips of meteor and filaments of thread, so transporting any great number of them means stretches of labour and only having access to the ones you’ve carried with you, whereas a single standard-issue Army caliber datapad can download, upload, and share any desired information in the span of a few heartbeats from any civilized planet with uplink capabilities, whether the information be for education or pleasure or work or any number of things.

A book is an object.

The things books hide inside of them are more important, and yet dreadfully inaccessible.