The Story So Far
It was only when they discovered the book that their world really took off. The priests insisted that they should be the ones to look after it, but they became overprotective of the knowledge it contained and kept an old stick buried in the spine of the book to ward off any unwanted intrusion. Of course, that isn’t the stick you see here, which is a later replacement taken from an old seer and repurposed.
They still celebrate the discovery of the great book in the city square, once every circuit. Today, it’s Tandy’s turn to read the story of their origins.
Here’s the text he’ll be reading…
It was at least two thousand years ago. In the desert. A shepherd went into a cave to rescue a stranded sheep. We don’t know his name, but the shepherd was called Yani. Whilst grappling with the beast, his eyes fell on a large dusty object in the corner of the cave, and he set about cleaning off the dirt. He was disappointed to find it was simply a book. His grandfather had always said that it was numbers, not words, that counted, and when it came to money or sheep, all you needed to know was how much made a lot. So he didn’t rate the find at all, but it did have one redeeming feature. The clasp. It was gold and encrusted with tiny jewels, but he couldn’t get it off the book. After much pulling and shaking, he enlisted the help of his friends, and they dragged the whole thing out of the cave.
The next morning saw Yani in the local market shouting his wares.
“Solid gold jewel-encrusted clasp with free attached book!”
Eventually, a local priest heard his cries and asked Yani to show him the book. You can imagine his astonishment when he opened the front cover and read the following words.
Here is the Detail of All That Abounds, a Manual Attesting to the Nature of All Things.
Over time, ‘Detail of All That Abounds’ or DATA as they would call it, became their only source of knowledge, and they would start to lose the ability to think for themselves. So convinced were they of the value of its absolute truth that they outlawed anything to do with the imagination, and even the people that had any. That was the origin of the two hemisperes, the left and the right.
Back on the stage, the suited man took up the microphone again. “And so it was that D A T A revealed the nature of the two hemispheres: the left and the right. She has shown us that detail is king and method is our salvation. How we, the Saviours, suffered from the wild dreams of the Rest. We had to act. They had to be removed.
This is our time,” he intoned. ”A time of method and solution. When whole truth triumphs over imagination and knowledge over anecdote. We have D A T A, we have the manual, we have the power to make our world.”
But it was the stick that changed everything.
That object of punishment used by the priests to punish any unhealthy thirst for knowledge was the inspiration for what followed. Perhaps the old stick in the spine of the book would have remained if Majesty hadn’t tricked Ridul into handing over Misteri to replace it.
If Jinx hadn’t been persuaded to pass it off as something to be revered, then this catalogue of unfortunate events would never have occurred, but then the Authority knew how herd psychology worked, how giving the masses something to look up to would bring them together, so they looked around for some way to make the stick special.
It was Kydd’s idea to turn it into an artificial intelligence and train it on the whole contents of the book. Jinx, of course, was more concerned with his image and suggested allowing the Commons to interrogate it twice a day, just so they could appreciate just how resourceful he had been.