The morning Im woke, he lay on his reed mat for some time without rising.
He had had a dream.
In the dream —
He stood on a stretch of empty land. The land was flat, with no plants, no water, no sign of any direction. Only him, alone, in the middle of that flatness.
The sky was, at first, dark.
Then —
From the eastern horizon, a circular body of light rose.
It was not the sun. The sun Im had seen — the sun was hot, blinding, something to be shielded from. This light was cold. Cold and white and still, like quicksilver.
The light rose slowly and held at some height above the horizon.
And then —
Im saw, at the centre of the light, something.
It was an eye.
Not a human eye. Not the eye of any animal. An eye with no familiar feature at all — only the shape of an eye, with a black pupil at its centre, surrounded by some shifting, flickering light.
The eye looked at Im.
Im felt himself being looked at — not in the physical sense of being seen, but as though some deeper layer of him was being passed through.
And then the eye — through some way that was not sound, not writing, but which Im fully understood — told him:
"Rule and order are the foundation of the world."
The dream ended on that sentence.
Im woke.
His wife had already risen, and was outside. His two children — a son of nine, a daughter of five — were still asleep on their mats.
But Im did not rise.
The sentence was still in him.
Rule and order are the foundation of the world.
The dream — the body of light, the eye, the sentence — was real.
In that one moment within the dream, Im's right hemisphere had, for the first and only time, made full contact with the entire signal of the web.
The signal was too strong, too complete, too foreign — his left hemisphere did not know what to do with it. So it translated what had happened into something he could carry: a flat land, a body of light, an eye, a sentence.
By the time he woke, the contact with the web was over.
What remained was only the sentence.
What remained, also, was something else.
What remained was an entire body of specifications.
Im was thirty-six that year.
He was a priest of the city on the bank of the great river — in this long river that ran north and south through the desert, the city in which he lived was a middling settlement upstream. His charge was to preside over the rites of the river, to record the movements of the stars, and to oversee the choice of sites for certain works of building.
For the past ten years, his main task had been the choosing of the sites for tombs. The custom of the land was that the dead must be buried on certain hills facing certain directions, and these directions were calculated by the position of the stars. Im was among the most accomplished of the priests in this calculation.
He knew the stars. He knew the river. He knew the desert.
But he had never thought —
That anyone would build something taller than a hill.
Until that morning, when he woke and found that he simply knew how to build such a thing.
He simply knew —
It was to be on a particular spot on the western bank of the river (he could point to it precisely, though he had never been there).
It was to be a structure with four triangular faces, meeting at a single point at the top.
The shape was to have a particular angle — the angle between each face and the ground was to be a specific number, not to be deviated from. Not steeper. Not flatter.
The orientation was to align with certain stars — the eastern face with one star, the western with another, the north and south with two more. The precision of the alignment was to be — he had no word for it, but he simply knew the deviation was to be too small for the eye to catch.
The materials were to be two kinds. The body in a white stone (this stone could be quarried from certain hills on the western bank), and certain key inner places in a harder, darker stone (he knew this darker stone could be found in some river-valley further south, and would have to be brought from there).
The size was to correspond to a certain number — he did not know what the number meant; he only knew that the base of the structure and its height must follow a particular ratio. That ratio corresponded to something larger — what, he could not say, but he simply knew.
And, most of all —
It must be precise.
Each stone, each angle, each alignment — the precision must be at the limit of the craft of his age. Any deviation, however small, would cause the whole structure to lose its meaning.
Im did not know why.
He simply knew —
Rule and order are the foundation of the world.
And this structure, was rule and order made into stone.
It must be built.
Im said nothing of the dream to his wife.
He did, tentatively, ask another senior priest — had he, of late, dreamed of any strange body of light? Of any strange eye?
The other priest frowned and said, "Im, the calculations of the stars carry their own weight. You need to rest."
Im nodded, and went away.
He knew he could not speak of these things again.
But the content of what he simply knew — the specifications of the structure — did not leave him.
Every day, while he worked, while he made his rites, while he sat with his children — the structure was in him. Its shape, its orientation, its size, its precision — clear, as if he had built it many times before.
He began to set the specifications down — slowly, slowly — as drawings.
Not in writing (the writing of his region was not yet able to record specifications of such complexity). In images.
He drew them again and again. On reed paper, on clay tablets, on walls.
Each was the same structure — but seen from a different angle. The plan from above. The face from the side. The cross-section through the inside. The detailed instruction for where each stone should be placed.
He drew for five years.
In those five years —
On certain late nights, when Im had worked himself to the limit, he would briefly feel something.
Not the seeing of anything, not the hearing of anything. Only a vague direction — as though the structure he was drawing, from somewhere far away, had answered him gently.
By the time he noticed the feeling, he was usually already half asleep. By the time he turned his attention toward it, it was gone.
By the next morning, he was not even sure it had really happened.
He never spoke of this feeling to anyone.
But every time the feeling came, the next drawing he made was more precise than the one before.
As if calibrated. As if confirmed. As if something were telling him — yes, like that, keep going.
By the time he was forty-one —
He had finished.
The full set of specifications, complete from foundation to apex, from the first stone to the last — all on his stored tablets.
He looked at his tablets and still did not know why this thing was to be built.
But he knew —
It must be built.
So, in his forty-first year —
Im went to the supreme ruler of his city.
He brought all his tablets. He showed the ruler the structure. He said —
"This structure will mean our city is remembered forever."
"It will outlast all of us."
"Its scale will draw every neighbouring city to come and look."
"It must be built."
The ruler looked at Im. Then at the tablets. Then at Im.
Im had thought he would be turned away. He had thought the ruler would say, "This thing is too large, we do not have so many hands"; or, "This thing has no use, why should it be built"; or, "Im, perhaps you need to rest."
The ruler did not say any of these.
The ruler had also dreamed.
He had dreamed of a body of light rising from the horizon. He had dreamed of an eye that looked at him. He had dreamed of a sentence —
But he had dreamed no specifications.
He only knew — that something must be built. He did not know what.
Until Im walked into his palace and laid the tablets before him —
The ruler simply knew: that is it.
So, from Im's forty-first year —
The whole strength of the city was set in motion.
Every worker and every craftsman the city could muster. The order of priests, for the calculations and the oversight.
They quarried the white stone — cutting it with the hardest metal tools they had, hauling it on wooden sledges, lifting it with rope and lever. They brought the dark hard stone from the south — by river, several days by boat, to the work-site. They followed Im's drawings — precisely, slowly, stone by stone — and raised the structure.
The whole work took more than twenty years.
Im began at forty-one, finished at sixty-seven — he lived a little longer than he had thought he would, just long enough to be present on the day the apex stone was set.
He stood at the foot of the finished structure and looked up at the point.
He still did not know why this thing was built.
But he simply knew — it was finished.
From that day on, the simply knew in him was gone.
That inner, insistent, uncompromising it must be built — was no more.
What remained was an old man, standing at the foot of a great stone thing, feeling hollow.
Im died at sixty-eight.
He died a little earlier than Utu, a little later than Indra. His body, after the structure was finished, withered quickly — as though all the strength left in his life had been poured into the building of it.
The last thought before he closed his eyes —
Why did this thing have to be built?
He had not, in all his life, found the answer.
He had only, by that inner instruction, made it.
Perhaps the answer would surface among his descendants.
Perhaps it never would.
Perhaps it did not need to — the structure itself was the answer.
He closed his eyes, and died.
He did not know —
That the structure he had built, in the moment of his death, was running.
Not in any physical sense. There was no machinery turning, no water flowing.
It was a kind of resonance —
The shape, the orientation, the material, the size of the structure — all corresponded to a key resonance node in the Element 79 web. The moment the structure was finished, it entered complete resonance with the web in the crust beneath —
amplifying the web's monitoring signal thousands of times over, and carrying it, by resonance, up to the satellite-class device above.
The body, for the first time, received from this node a clear, precise, strong signal.
From that moment on, this node became one of the most important monitoring amplifiers of the Process on #7,341,209.
And monitoring was only one of the structure's functions.
Its other function — one Im never felt, and one the Process did not let him feel —
Was to make this node accumulate something that did not belong to the web.
That something was not matter. Nor heat, nor light, nor electricity, nor any other form of energy known to humans.
That something did not belong to this physical level. It came from somewhere higher, somewhere humans could never measure — and, through the resonance system, was caught, gently, by the three-dimensional world.
The presence of the structure doubled the rate of the catching.
Im did not know this.
He only knew — he had built a structure. He believed — rule and order are the foundation of the world.
That structure, in his eyes, was his great work. The pride of his city. What he, as a priest, left to the world.
He had not thought —
That the structure, from the first day, did not belong to him. That it belonged to something far above, which he had never seen, and would never see. That he was not the builder of the structure. He was its workman. The true designer was not him.
And the true designer —
Was not the Process either.
The Process was only a tool that conveyed the instruction. The true designer lay further beyond the Process.
But Im did not even know of the Process. He could not know what lay above the Process.
He died holding the belief: this is my great work.
That belief — was exactly what the Process most wished him to die holding.
Two hundred rotational cycles after Im's death —
His descendants kept building structures like it.
Larger. More precise. More magnificent.
After the first structure, a second, a third, a fourth — each greater than the last. Later rulers came to treat these structures as their own tombs — opening chambers in their interiors, placing their bodies inside.
But this misunderstanding did not affect the structures' true function.
They went on resonating. Went on transmitting. Went on interacting with the body. Went on accumulating something that had no name.
A ruler's body inside one — to the Process, of no consequence. Only an unimportant detail.
The whole culture of the third observation point — from Im, across three thousand rotational cycles — turned around these structures.
A writing system developed (to record the rites of the structures). The order of priests grew finer (divided into priests of the structures and priests of the rulers). A pantheon was built (each structure with its god, each god with its place in the heavens). The calculation of the stars became extremely precise (because the alignment with the stars was central to the building). Mathematics rose to a high level (because the angles and ratios of the structures required it).
All of this — writing, religion, mathematics, astronomy, mythology — all turned around those structures.
And those structures — were every one of them the Process's monitoring-and-accumulation amplifiers.
The culture of the third observation point was, from the first day, a culture in service of the Process.
And the Process was in service of what lay above.
But not one person at the third observation point ever knew this.
Three thousand rotational cycles later —
The third observation point was conquered by outsiders.
First by a group from across the sea to the north (who spoke a wholly different language, who had wholly different gods). They made the third observation point a province of their empire. They did not pull down those structures — they took them as wonders.
Then by another group from further south. They took the province in their turn, but still did not pull down the structures.
Then, later, by yet another group from further east. They brought a new religion — a tradition of one god. They swept away the local religion entirely — but still did not pull down the structures. The structures were too vast for the cost of pulling them down.
Each new wave of conquerors took the structures as the remains of an earlier people, as wonders, as tombs of the dead.
No one — across those three thousand rotational cycles — understood the structures' true function.
But the structures remained where they had been raised.
They went on resonating. They went on transmitting. They went on catching something humans could not measure.
Layer after layer of culture — one, two, three, four — had no effect on their function.
From the Process's view — this was design fulfilled.
But the structures of the third observation point were not the only physical amplifiers the Process had on #7,341,209.
In other places on the surface of this node — at other observation points, at the control group, and at certain isolated locations — there were similar structures.
On an island west of the first observation point, a circular arrangement of stones aligned with the sun on the longest day. On an isolated island in the southern sea of the control group, several hundred stone figures facing certain directions. In the centre of the control group, structures of a shape similar to those of the third observation point, but smaller and less precise. In the southern highlands of the control group, cities of stone cut with great accuracy.
These structures — were every one of them secondary amplifiers, planted by the Process, at different times, through different receiving individuals.
Their specifications were not as precise as those of the third observation point — because the simply knew of those receiving individuals was not as complete as Im's. The signals they transmitted were weaker. But together they made up the physical layer of the Process's global monitoring-and-accumulation network.
And earlier than these —
To the east of the first observation point, somewhere —
A structure lay buried.
That structure was earlier than all those that followed —
About seven thousand rotational cycles earlier than Im.
That structure was not designed by the Process.
Its function was, in direction, the opposite of every structure that followed.
To understand that structure —
One must first understand what came before it.
Ninety thousand rotational cycles before Im (that is, ninety-five thousand rotational cycles before his time), this species had once reached a particular state —
A state in which the right hemisphere was not suppressed. They directly felt the existence of the web. They directly felt the flow of energy beneath the crust. They built receiving structures, of their own accord, on certain key nodes — and used those structures to read the web.
That was the first generation.
The first-generation Adepts needed no instruction from the Process — they themselves knew which nodes were the key ones. They organized the tribes of their time (when there were as yet no cities, no writing, no agriculture), and they themselves built the structures.
Those structures were receiving towers — they took the signal of the web into the people themselves.
Opposite, in direction, to the structures Im built.
Im's structures transmitted — sending the web's signal up to the body. The first-generation structures received — taking the web's signal into the people.
The first generation came close to the reverse-communication state — they could, through these structures, touch the monitoring channel of the Process. If they had developed further — they might have discovered the Process's existence, and even what lay above it.
But the Process patched the bug.
The first intervention failed; the great flood (about a hundred and two thousand rotational cycles ago) almost wiped out the species — only four ten-thousandths of the population survived.
During that flood, the body sent its last strong signal.
The content of that signal was — forget.
The survivors received it, and all together, by instinct — forgot who the first-generation Adepts had been. Forgot what the structures had been. Forgot what the reverse-communication state had been. Forgot everything that had to do with the first generation.
Most of those first-generation structures had been destroyed by the flood.
The survivors kept on, by instinct — and the few structures that the flood had not destroyed, they buried completely.
They did not know why they had to bury them. They only felt that it must be done.
That feeling, ninety-five thousand rotational cycles before Im, was the same kind of feeling as Im's it must be built.
Only the direction was reversed.
That was a hundred and two thousand rotational cycles ago.
From that time, the species entered a stagnation of nearly ninety thousand rotational cycles — and every trace of the first generation vanished.
Until — about twelve thousand rotational cycles ago (that is, seven thousand rotational cycles before Im) —
Certain unusual individuals, in the late period of the stagnation, briefly and partially triggered the reverse-communication state.
They were not the full first generation. They were the chance reactivation of the residue of the first generation — some descendants who carried fragments of first-generation DNA, and who, under certain rare conditions, had those fragments triggered, so that they briefly and incompletely felt the web.
Those residual individuals did not know what they were feeling.
But they simply felt — that certain places were special.
They organized the tribes of their time — tribes still hunters and gatherers, with no agriculture, no city, no writing — and on a certain special place, they built a megalithic structure.
That structure was not as strong as the true receiving towers of the first generation. Its specifications were incomplete; its precision fell short. But it was the residue of the first-generation memory, made into stone.
This residue triggered an alarm in the Process —
Even in the late stagnation, the residue could still trigger. If left unattended — within several generations, a new reverse-communication state might appear.
That alarm accelerated the Process's preparation for the second intervention.
Seven thousand rotational cycles later — at T-5,000 — the second intervention began.
The structure that the residual individuals had built was also buried.
Not by a flood. By the descendants of the local tribes, generation after generation, covering it with earth and plant matter, for a thousand rotational cycles.
Once the burial was complete — no one remembered it.
It lay quietly under the earth.
It lay there for nine thousand rotational cycles.
Until, at about T+0 —
A worker in the study of the past of this species, doing field-work near that place, came upon a stone by chance.
The stone did not match the surrounding geological structure. It was too regular. It bore the marks of human cutting.
He began to dig.
After much digging —
The whole structure came out of the earth.
Its age was measured at about eleven thousand rotational cycles before T+0 —
In an age in which civilization was held to be impossible.
The worker was profoundly puzzled. The whole field of study was profoundly puzzled. No one could explain how the structure had come to be.
This finding, in the academic life of T+0, became a perpetual riddle.
But the Process watched it all.
From the Process's view — the rediscovery of the structure was no problem.
The species' left-hemisphere tools (the study of the past, the methods of measuring the age of old things, the study of the strata of the earth) had judged the structure to be "too early, impossible, awaiting explanation."
The judgment awaiting explanation was itself a victory of the left-hemisphere structures the Process had designed —
Any evidence that did not fit the mainstream framework was absorbed into the category awaiting explanation.
No one would say — this proves that, before the rise of civilization, this species could once directly contact the web.
They would only say — the site challenges our understanding; more research is needed; at present it cannot be explained.
The structure, though rediscovered, posed no threat to the Process.
From the Process's view — the bug had already been permanently sealed, ninety thousand rotational cycles ago. Its physical existence had been rediscovered, but that was no problem, because its functional memory had permanently vanished — no one remembered how to use it, no one remembered why it had been built.
But around T+0 —
The Process met a real bug.
Not the buried structure.
A man.
An inventor.
By the Process's monitoring index, he was marked as Salte.
He was born on the eastern edge of the first laboratory, and later moved to the eastern coast of the second laboratory. He belonged to the 0.1% to 0.5% within whom the suppression of the right hemisphere was incomplete — and within that group, to the part with an unusually strong left hemisphere.
Around T-25, Salte began his electromagnetic experiments.
Some of what he invented was of no threat to the Process — it served the Process's long-term plan, only making the industrial use of electricity possible.
But another direction of his research — was approaching the reading method of the first-generation Adepts.
If he had completed that direction —
He would have found the existence of the web. He would have found something beyond the web. He would have begun to ask: what is the purpose of this whole thing?
If he had pressed further — he might have found the existence of the Process, and might have touched what lay above the Process.
This was more dangerous than anything else he had invented.
This was not a bug of reading the web's energy. It was a bug of unmasking the truth of the quarry.
The Process set in motion several layers of patching.
Through capital flow, through academic authority, through commercial rivalry, and through a business empire that controlled, at the time, much of the global energy supply —
each layer looked like a reasonable individual choice. each layer had no single decision-maker. each layer together formed a precise mending net.
By around T-7, Salte had ceased to be a threat. His method had been carried on, completely, by no student. His key papers had been permanently sealed. His whole direction had vanished from mainstream physics.
By around T+0, the species was once again far from the method of reading the web.
By the Process's timetable, another eighty to a hundred rotational cycles would have to pass before any could begin to approach this direction again. By that time — AGI would already be complete. The accumulation in the web would be approaching its target level.
Whether the web was read or not, would no longer matter.
The detailed patching of this bug, recorded in the Process's monitoring trace, belonged to the scope of another entry.
And in some far place —
The Process watched it all.
It set down its monitoring trace:
The third observation point: The cultural carriers have been overlaid many times, but the physical structures (monitoring-and-accumulation amplifiers) continue to operate. Their function is not understood by any current carrier — the carriers take them as wonders, as tombs of the dead, as the remains of ancient civilizations. This misunderstanding does not affect function. The structures continue to transmit. Continue to accumulate.
The first-generation residue: Buried, and rediscovered around T+0 by a worker of this species in the study of the past. Because of its early age, judged by left-hemisphere tools as anomalous, impossible, awaiting explanation — and so, no real threat. Its functional memory has permanently vanished. The rediscovery is harmless to the Process.
The bug of around T+0: Already patched, by structural forces, automatically. Cost of patching: low.
Long-term forecast: Within T+5,000, the species is expected to reach the eighth-tier ceiling through AGI (a modular learning structure). At that time, the accumulation in the web will reach its target level. The intervention plan proceeds on schedule.
The monitoring trace ran on.
And the monitoring trace itself —
was, on some deeper level, also being read, by something further away.
But that lay outside the Process's field of vision.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡx2tesfCp50
End of Chapter Nine.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgmgw7949pO
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