Stephenson:Neal:Snow Crash:The Librarian

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A different path to immortality ... " 'Disaster' is an astrological term meaning 'bad star,' " the Librarian points out. "Sorry--but due to my internal structure, I'm a sucker for non sequiturs." "That's okay, really," Hiro says. "You're a pretty decent piece of ware. Who wrote you, anyway?" "For the most part I write myself," the Librarian says. "That is, I have the innate ability to learn from experience. But this ability was originally coded into me by my creator." "Who wrote you? Maybe I know him," Hiro says. "I know a lot of hackers." "I was not coded by a professional hacker, per se, but by a researcher at the Library of Congress who taught himself how to code," the Librarian says. "He devoted himself to the common problem of sifting through vast amounts of irrelevant detail in order to find significant gems of information. His name was Dr. Emanuel Lagos." "I've heard the name," Hiro says. "So he was kind of a meta-librarian. That's funny, I guessed he was one of those old CIA spooks who hangs around the CIC." "He never worked for the CIA." Perhaps the Puzzle Factory then - eh?

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The Librarian is an archetype, generally known as the impersonal sage, the rational detached observer, and embodied in myth, legend, and popular fiction by Merlin, the Magician of the Arthurian legends, Hypatia of the Library of Alexandria, as well as the TNT movie "The Librarian" starring Noah Wiley, Bob Newhart, Jane Curtin, and Sonya Walger. However, it is the 2002 movie adaptation of H.G. Welles' "The Time Machine" which features an incarnation of The Librarian, named "Vox", played by Orlando Jones, which most closely hews with the character depicted in Snow Crash as a piece of software.

"Vox", the interactive virtual librarian of the future, in the move "The Time Machine"

It's in the pursuit of Lagos' and The Librarian's leads that Hiro at one point goes borg.