The Nightmarishly Infinite Library of Babel Has Haunted People for Decades. Now Borges' Impossible Vision Exists In VRChat.

For years, a programmer kept having a recurring dream — more a nightmare, maybe — where they were lost in an endless library containing all the knowledge of the universe ever written, but where the seeker never finds the answers they are searching for. The dream was inspired, of course, by Jorge Luis Borges’ legendary short story “The Library of Babel”, which has been haunting readers, mathematicians, and artists since 1941:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors…

Like all men of the Library, I have traveled in my youth; I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

And for the programmer, who goes by the name “Mahu”, these words were the source of that dream they kept having for some 7 to 8 years.

“I'd say that a big part of the way I experience the world is through my spatial perception of my surroundings,” they explain. “It tends to be one of the only things I remember about a dream if I remember anything at all.”

But rather than just keep letting the concept remain a nightmare, Mahu did an unexpected thing:

Mahu recreated Borges’ Library of Babel in VRChat.

And it really is Borges’ vision realized in a virtual world. Not only are the individual rooms infinite, but the books on the shelfs are readable, and also infinite.

“A goal of mine with the project to build a world where searching and finding the books felt meaningful,” Mahu tells me. “That means I wanted to build not only an infinite total library but I wanted it to be completely searchable and I wanted to make it possible to reasonably travel to the books you had searched for. The books near the entrance to the library where you load in have the fewest letters per page, and as you travel deeper they fill up with everything possible to put on a page of a book.”

I just visited the Library of Babel in VRChat, and the ambition of this creation is staggering. For a comparison, I have to think back to “The Crooked House” of Second Life (inspired by a Robert Heinlein story), created in 2006 by mathematician Henry Segerman. In both cases, these are literary visions that can only tangibly, interactively exist in a virtual world.

“The Library does things that are only possible in virtual reality,” explains Mahu. “It contradicts the laws of euclidean coordinate systems, allowing you to seamlessly traverse what I call fractal space. So in a way my take on the library is perhaps more infinite than Borges' had imagined.”

I wonder if anyone else gets the same feeling here. Staring into infinity. pic.twitter.com/6NUbXDqKPS

— mahu (@mahuvrc) October 19, 2023

And as Mahu made the Library of Babel in VRChat, something strange happened when they went to bed.

“I can't recall having many Borges' library dreams per say in recent times since I have started working on the map. At least not the kind I woke up and remembered, that's for sure.”

Mahu staring down their Library's infinite well

Visit the Library here. More technical background on building the Library below.

Much thanks to Adeon for the tip and shooting the video above! Engraving of the Library by Eric Desmazières via Design Daily.

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CODING THE BOOKS

“It doesn't quite work the same way as most other Library of Babel algorithms that I've seen out there. It's not actually randomly generated, my system places every possible sequence of characters on each page starting with like the letter A, then B, then eventually two letters, three, and so on. The text is not ordered neatly or anything though. The appearance is that it is totally random. That's because I used a somewhat complex cipher to reorder everything.

“It's not a cryptographically secure cipher by any means, just far more advanced than something like a caesar cipher. It has some numeric weaknesses where you occasionally find books with repeating strings of text in them amongst the pages. Sometimes you find many permutations of things to the search phrase you were looking for within the same book. Which in my opinion actually adds to the experience making it similar to how the books in the short story are described.”

CREATING THE LIBRARY

“I named the system that runs the Library the ‘Langoliers’ system. The way that it works is a kind of graph traversal algorithm, where the Langoliers are responsible for recycling the world around you in real time. You can just keep going until the Unity game engine breaks basically.

"(The Langoliers is the name of a Stephen King book. I haven't read it but I have seen the movie — it wasn't really very good honestly — but the Langoliers were weird entities that would eat the pockets of the universe stuck outside the normal flow of time or something.)"