The Giftschrank (Dungeon description)

TOMORROW and TOMORROW and TOMORROW
Creeps in this petty pace from DAY to DAY

 <Sound of a button press. Machine clicks. Vocator input track spooling.>

Electric garamond, SEBASTIAN
Deep in the shadow of the MOONLIT CLAY

-- Recorded Analects of the Semiotic-Symbolic Vocator, Sc. III. XV

The Giftschrank is where banned books go to die. 

The officers of the Public Health and Safety Directorate come in the night, between 8pm and 11pm, though sometimes their work keeps them out until the witching hour. They are unfailingly polite, their black trench coats do not mind the rabble on the street. They will always show you their badge and their Extraordinary Warrant authorised under the Defense of National Safety Statute. They will take pains to explain the consequences if you do not cooperate fully and willingly.

Very few find it in them to resist. After all, these are bookshop owners, literary types, poet wannabes, tenured professors in the capital. They can talk of bravery and resistance in their book clubs and seminars, but when the call comes they are so eager to comply that for some time they cannot bear to look themselves in the mirror. Sometimes, when the call comes during some gentle soiree, they must even show their true colours in front of their assembled guests. Then, inevitably, they convince themselves in time that they could have done nothing, that refusal would have mean prison or worse, and most of the time that is true. 

When everything is done the officer leaves a printed affidavit to be signed and sent to the relevant Directorate office in three working days. The books go into the van, into special bookcases with metal shutters and numbered padlocks. (The unmistakeable callsign of the Safety Officer is the jangling of their many keys.) Then the long journey begins to the outskirts of the capital, to the angular concrete fortress they call the Giftschrank, the poison cabinet.

The republic no longer conducts book-burnings. If necessary, excess copies of collected books are mulched, but the policy is always that at least two copies of any book must be kept for archival and evidentiary purposes in the Restricted Document Holding Facility. This is the official name of the sprawling brutalist tumour that at night looms over the wasting grass. Exposed concrete stairways wind up a massive ziggurat-like structure, manned with a circle of watchtowers and surrounded by secondary expansion silos connected to the main building by covered tunnels. It is a nightmare of knowledge, every dangerous and seditious thought contained within a massive barbed-wire hexagon. They say that the foundation is rigged with explosives, in the event of a catastrophic security failure.

Sometimes, abridged or corrected editions of particularly well-known but problematic works are created with vocators and circulated in bookstores. This creates a healthy amount of confusion in the general public about the exact state of censorship within the nation. During this process it is often necessary to consult the original copies, for certain stylistic elements as well as to avoid unnecessary redactions. The rewriters employed by the Literary Bureau are careful and conscientious types. Often they are assigned to work on some of their favourite authors from their university days. Sometimes, an external auditor or reference source must be summoned. This is a possible way in.

Menial staff are also employed for the purposes of cleaning, accounting, and general maintenance. The interior of the Giftschrank is not unlike that of a library, and has similar needs. They are not given keys to the bookshelves and are searched on the way in or out. Still, very little care is given to the janitors, who are presumably too feeble to understand what they are often inches away from reading. This is a possible way in.

A forward assault on the facility is possible, but costly. The guards will shoot those who approach without authorisation after a warning. It will take blood and sweat, but this is a possible way in.

Once inside, the facility is a maze of concrete stairwells, opaquely labelled shelves, and administrative offices. Guards patrol in seemingly random patterns and aides rush to and fro with requisition slips from the writers underground. The archives are also periodically re-catalogued, copied and stored electromechanically for the production of novel vocator designs. The building works through the night. There is a cafeteria and several break rooms. The coffee is less bad than you think. The shelves mock you with their shutters and locks.

Why are you here? For a book? For a memento? To rescue a writer you once had respect for? To destroy something forever? To burn this building to the ground?

Whatever it is, make sure you don't get caught. The basements extend many floors beneath the ground.