01 / arrival
first floor
you have two shelves in front of you. open a book. go left, right, or straight when you run out. on a phone you can swipe along a shelf row. moving gives you another set of shelves. going left then right will not take you back.
your bag holds three books. you can mark them, rename them, or export them. if you press die and confirm, you lose the bag and the count and wake up at a new arrival. you are still here.
02 / departure
how to leave
find the book titled the life you had. it will open with this is the story of your life. use submit book while you have it open. if it is yours, the library will let you go.
most books look like a keyboard losing an argument with itself. sometimes you will see a word you recognize. sometimes it will be a word you were hoping to see. you can submit it if you want.
03 / our catalogue
your odds here
five pages, fifteen lines a page, eighty characters a line. 6,000 places for something to make sense. these shelves draw from 232 catalogue entries: 4,294,967,296 in all. one is yours.
each book has a 1 in 4,294,967,296 chance of being that one. look through all 240 books in a landing and the chance is about 1 in 17.9 million. the draws can repeat. the next shelf doesn't owe you anything.
04 / the larger library
soren's odds
in Steven L. Peck's A Short Stay in Hell, Soren has to find the book that tells his earthly life. the books there have 410 pages, 40 lines a page and 80 characters a line. each place can hold any of 95 symbols.
the odds of drawing one specified book at random are 1 in 951,312,000. that denominator has 2,594,774 digits. ours has ten.
05 / the railing
if you let go
this game has no falling mechanic. to picture the size, shelve one copy of every entry: two cases, eight rows each, fifteen books per row. that's 17,895,698 landings. picture each one as a bay 4 m wide and 3 m deep, with 4 m of height per landing.
that stack is about 71,583 km tall. at an assumed terminal speed of 55 m/s, it takes about 15.1 days to fall all the way down. seven and a half if you're already halfway. we're leaving out the time it takes to get up to speed.
06 / the other railing
if soren lets go
in Peck's later estimate, two walls face across a 100 ft gulf. each runs about 3.35 × 101,297,370 light-years along and 1.86 × 101,297,369 light-years down. at the same 55 m/s, a drop from the top would take about 101,297,376 years. there is a bottom.
this hell is finite. there is an exit, too. look at the book you just picked up. that exact entry had the same chance of being there as the one you're looking for. it happened. it just happened to the wrong book.
we hope you enjoy your stay :)