In addition to trying to move our people outside and form alliances with other communities, I've dedicated my life to also trying to preserve human knowledge. After the Big Death, literacy dropped, and no new knowledge was able to be shared globally due to the loss of power and communications technologies. In the period of time in which we were all growing and trying to survive, many books and papers were destroyed - burnt to keep people warm, taken to trade with others, or simply deteriorated due to lack of attention. Paper is not indestructible, and thus much has been lost in the last 15 years. And nothing new is being produced. What can be written down on paper by people is the one and only copy, for without even a rudimentary printing press, nothing can be reproduced for mass circulation.

Since I started as leader of Thunder Mountain, I've stressed to teams to bring back any books, loose papers, magazines, newspapers, and comics -- basically anything they could safely get their hands on. Council agreed we needed to preserve whatever information and knowledge we could, and a large room was set aside to use as a repository for what was found. Over the years, we've had to move the materials to larger and larger rooms, finally settling upon a warehouse store room that used to host trucks and large equipment. It should be able to be used for a long time - it is a vast and expansive room, and being inside the mountain, there is even a certain degree of temperature control so the books do not get damp or fall apart.

Everyone in Thunder Mountain has to put time in at the library, as we call it, helping to sort, restore, catalogue, preserve, label and file all the materials brought in. The children born inside the Mountain all seem to love the library, and we have live readings there. Though paper and writing materials are rare and treasured, we encourage people to write down what they remember of their lives before, to be stored in the library. It is the only way we can keep our limited knowledge alive, and growing.