Fable
The giant records tower began taking over the city's documents
In the royal city there was a tower of ten thousand scrolls, home to a scholar who could continue any text. He had read poetry, law, medical cases, business letters, and plays. Give him an opening, and he could produce a fitting continuation. When the city residents first heard him speak, they often thought the tower housed an all-knowing master.
At first everyone marveled, thinking he understood everything. A merchant asked him to write a contract, and his writing flowed smoothly; when the pharmacy asked about prescriptions, he could also list the medicine names. But as soon as the old physician looked, several ingredients merely sounded similar, and using them for real would cause trouble.
Mr. Library explained that this scholar's greatest strength was judging what to say next based on the preceding text and the vast amount of writing he had read. He would form many patterns of language and knowledge, but he had no responsibility to personally check the stacks, inspect the goods, or take the pulse. Fluency cannot automatically equal verification.
The city's first fix was to make the scholar answer more humbly. His words became cautious, but wrong medicine names still appeared. Later they gave him rules: writing poetry could be free, writing contracts required checking legal provisions, and answering medical matters required citing medical cases and having a physician review. When action was needed, it also had to be handed to someone with authority.
The scholar also has his strengths. Drafting, summarizing, translating, and explaining—astonishingly fast; ordering messy materials is also much faster than an ordinary clerk. But the closer it gets to real consequences, the more his words must be tied to evidence, tools, and accountable people.
Once he wrote a beautiful reply for the merchant guild, but treated an old price as the new one. After the bookkeeper found out, a step was added to the process: anything involving numbers, inventory, and commitments had to be checked against that day's ledgers. The scholar still wrote letters, but key facts no longer relied only on memory.
The Ten Thousand Scrolls Scholar is still useful; the city residents have simply learned to separate the ability to keep a conversation going from facts personally verified. The library is large and the text is plentiful, but responsibility cannot be handed over only to smooth-sounding sentences.
Later a line of small text appeared at the entrance of the library: you may ask the scholar to draft, organize, and explain, but anything involving money, medicine, contracts, and action must be connected to evidence and a responsible person. The townspeople did not use him less because of this; they used him more steadily, because they knew where he was strong and where he should stop.