Day 763

No matter what went on in the library you stayed quiet, especially since the librarians made it mandatory for customers and visitors alike to wear small sensor gauges on wrists and their neck to measure how much sound they made as well as their ambient noise.

There was some leniency given to children and the general "+/- 10% of the enforced decibel level" rule for the general populace. Heaven forbid you went so much as a single digit over their 25 decibel limit. A bird in flight measures in at 30 decibels so the noise level in the library was quieter than a morgue at midnight.

The near silence was heavily enforced in a near medieval way with punishments ranging from a week long ban to the Sound Room.It may not seem like anything frightening but everyone who has gone in there comes out bleeding profusely from their eyes, nose and ears, vomit coating their fronts and shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. If they come back (which is quite rare) they are found to be wearing hearing aids and a walking aid of some sort.

The librarians figure that if you can't be trusted to know when you are being too loud then they'll give you the quiet they want indefinitely. The councils approve of this, of course, and have campaigned for higher library use under the guise of better literacy.

Vans full of librarians visit local schools, bringing their sound monitors and challenging the kids to be as quiet as possible, rewarding the quietest with £80. They also bring a smaller,lesser version of the Sound Room, leaving the loudest four children with migraines that will last anywhere from four hours to indefinitely over their lifetime.

All in the name of silence. All to keep the books asleep and the shelves content enough to permit themselves to be used and studied by humanity in the hopes that we too will learn their ability to remain without showing any signs of ageing.