amazing book. Hard to describe; but a far-far future, where the Library is supposed to protect the Treaty between three main powers.
Main protagonist is a "secondary AI", talking to gods (material ones) via communion...
"The library is a dream, Nameren - a dream of peace built on a grave, guarded by four drowsing gods. The Library is where all stories start, and where they all return before they die. I know I'll never see it again."
"Why not?"
"You're not the only one who wants to kill me."
The god is curious, as the girl intended him to be. "This Library of yours has four gods?" he asks. "There were seven material gods when I fell asleep."
I exist, and so I love. And so I am loved. Nadi named me Freida, Freida of the Library.
When I die, they will say of me, "But remember how she loved!"
Only Nadi ever looked at me like that. As a puzzle to deciper. To everyone else, I was the secondary AI of questionable humanity whom the librarians had adopted and did not now know what to do with.
Nadi nodded. "I am still that. Who are you?"
The ghost's lips twisted. "A failed model, as your kind would have it. I'm a projection of Xochiquetzal, nineteenth trained-to-completion special weapon, Library-property, but never a librarian, who in refusing to die for the Nameren chose to die for herself."
