"I am large, I contain multitudes." — Walt Whitman, 'Song of Myself', 1855 (Bureau annotation: this line has been observed blooming, uninvited, in at least three language-flower specimens that should not be capable of producing it)
=== AGENT: Sylvia Glossspinner === RISK ASSESSMENT: HIGH HIDDEN MOTIVATION: Sylvia is not preserving languages for posterity. She is searching, with increasing desperation and decreasing subtlety, for the specific phoneme that her grandmother spoke in the moment the library burned — a sound she heard and memorized as a child but has never been able to reproduce or identify, which she believes exists as a specimen somewhere in the Conservatory's deeper rows. SURVEILLANCE NOTES: Bureau surveillance of Sylvia Glossspinner has produced seventeen months of observational data, the most consistent feature of which is her habit of arriving at the Conservatory at hours not officially recorded in staff schedules — between 3 and 4 AM, when the glass panels contract in the cold and produce a faint metallic singing that she has been observed pressing her hands against, eyes closed, as if reading the building by touch. She does not know she is observed during these visits, or if she does know, she h...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.