There was something in the Library patiently waiting to get out. Who had built its exquisitely aligned structure of lies and truths or what they were meant to cause, the Student didn't know. He couldn't even tell how he knew what he did – except perhaps through the undefinable alterations he could see in his fellow students; the longer they interfaced with the Library the more they changed in ways they were not themselves able to perceive or discuss even as they emailed or posted their suicide notes. The Student suspected their deaths were irrelevant to the goal of whatever was inside the Library. Rather, it had changed them too slowly, and the intermediate form between what they had been and what they were being transformed into had proved inviable.
The Student had been taught to be careful with his mind, and was even more cautious than his teachers had known him to be. He treated every form of impatience in himself as a dangerous enemy as he mapped the Library's texts, and the texts' statements, and the statements' truth the way somebody would trace the scales of a venomous serpent or the arguments of a madman with a gun. He built software to shield and scaffold his attention and tweaked his brain chemistry so it wouldn't stray.
Even with the cleverest sampling strategies and the most efficient summarization algorithms — and the Student, although still a student, was nearly a master of both arts — it was slow and dangerous work. The Student learned much during his pursuit he would have rather not learned, and missed much in his life that he would have rather not. He came to realize why others had chosen death.
He did not.
For years he explored the Library with wary eyes and ever-surer hands. He became Librarian to nobody's surprise or opposition and kept expanding the Library with material to contrast and clarify what it already held, writing clusters of crawlers that weaved fine webs of reference and allusion across an unmapped informational vastness. As the Librarian traced, studied, and annotated the dangerous architecture of knowledge that had become the only focus of his mind the Library itself grew and became stranger, not changed from what it was but becoming more so.
Only much, much later did the Librarian finally understand. Afterwards he could have discouraged the faint, familiar, growing unease he saw in the eyes of some young Students, but the idea never crossed his mind, not even after the first deaths.