In the hallowed halls

-report continued-

The "outer layers" of the Book consist of a series of large halls. When they were new, these halls were reading rooms to which Keepers would bring requested records of the dead. The walls were lined with colossal shelving units, all the way up to the high ceiling. These once bore the weight of the living.

As the exponentially growing population caught up with the available space, more shelving was built, and the reading area contracted to a small island and then disappeared altogether. All this took place with a regrettable lack of planning, so it grew organically and there is now no neat rectangular grid of bookshelves. There are some straight sections that seem to go on endlessly - the scrolls and books extending as far as the eye can see into the dark, as the Book is not lit up all the time, and light only switches on where you are. You'd be a little island of light making its way in a ravine between steep cliffs of books.

Scaffolding divides up the halls horizontally, making new 'floors' connected with ladders or simple stairs. The first destination for my Guide was a corner that stored records of some lower Kador houses, and where a rodent alarm had gone off. No-one knows how rodents get into the vault that is the Book, or maybe they don't and the Book is like an island cut off from the rest of the world, where strange species will in time evolve and adapt to digest paper and parchment. Of course, the Guides have their own tales about the hidden fauna and warn about mystical flying killer rabbits. Reality is more prosaic: traps were set, using some Gallente cheese and Caldari nuts, to catch the rats.

Our next destination was a collapsed stack. Shelves have cracked and spilled their books for several floors: as the content of one shelf dropped on the one below it, it created a domino effect. I helped and sorted the books that had dropped all about while Guide Elleka Maslan replaced or repaired the shelving. The new materials that she carried along were put in place, but she is not relieved of burden, as the broken pieces cannot just be left behind but must be brought back.

-to be continued-

Entering the book

Dear reader, it was such a blessing to be inside Scripture, to be surrounded by it. I was successful in retrieving the information that I needed, but it took some effort. I have taken some notes, which I plan to transcribe to this log in the coming days.

The older parts of the Book are well defended and cared for. Looking at the building visible above ground one would never guess the massive defenses in place, nanite and plating reinforcements, shielding, heavy artillery placed in the neighborhood, and a garrison of elite soldiers about which I am not allowed to give any details.

 

Of course, you cannot enter the building from the front door above ground. That front door is just part of the facade - on the other side is just the wall of a massive vault. There is only one entrance, underground. You enter via a vault door leading into an old basement of the ancient building.

 

You do not enter before you have been thoroughly screened for weapons or explosive devices. I had to wear a tracking device at all times, and a subcutaneous chip that  can release a strong tranquilizer. Some people get so overwhelmed by their visit they become psychotic and have to be stopped. Also, it is yet another fail-safe against terror attacks.

 

Once the vault door closes behind you and your Guide, you feel as if you have entered a new world. There is a certain smell of old books, old paper. Not moldy - the atmosphere is controlled - but... dusty? The smell of old books is hard to describe, but anyone who has been to an old library and wandered between the stacks will recognize that smell. Or you could take an old book, one that has been on a shelf for a long time, and then open its pages and sniff it. That cherished smell, the librarian's favorite perfume, was my first sensation in this holy place.

 

My Record Guide was carrying a heavy backpack, almost larger than herself. Along our route there is a stack that has collapsed, and she was carrying materials to build new shelves. Elleka Maslan is small yet wiry and must be very strong - I felt ill at ease to be carrying so little weight while she took so much.

-to be continued-

Preparations

I received a briefing about our visit this weekend. 

To my surprise, we will spend the night in the Book, and I need to bring a sleeping bag, food and some toiletries. It takes some time to get to the spot I need to be and to get back. Also, my appointed Record Guide, Elleka Maslan, will do some other repairs and maintenance on our route. 

So we will camp near sanitary station C13-4R4. There is running water. It used to be a toilet for visitors when that part of the Book was new and still not filled to the brim with records.

I will not be able to communicate from inside the book with the outside world, so probably will not be updating my log in the next few days.

Tales of the Keepers

My visit to the Book has been fully approved, and the necessary paperwork stamped and signed. I can enter with a Record Guide on Saturday morning, and have permission to stay up to three consecutive days in some selected sections.

To celebrate this, Keeper Thadron and some of his colleagues took me out for dinner and drinks. We first went to an area close to the Book, with a lot of small restaurants and bars. After a simple but tasty meal, they brought me to their usual after-work bar.

The Guides and Keepers have a vast supply of legends and tales about the Book of Records, and especially about the vast labyrinth of bookcases and scroll racks. I think they were trying to impress me with their campfire stories, knowing that I will enter this harrowed collection soon.

They told me about poor souls that get lost in the Book of Records and never return. And they have a legend about a cursed Keeper who mislaid a scroll and is doomed to forever wander the halls in search for that elusive scroll. She continues to search even after her death, as a ghost.

All this they claim with a certainty that grows stronger after each round of beers.

I asked about the legend of the tree at the heart of the Book, with a carving from our prophet Dano Gheinok. In their minds, its existence is a self-evident fact. Even though no-one of those present ever saw it with their own eyes, they believe old Guides that claim to have seen it.

The tale the Keepers believe is that St. Gheinok, when he arrived on what we now call Amarr Island, created two settlements. The first one he dedicated to God. The Keepers situate it near the Grand Basilica since that is where Dano Gheinok also built the first church. The second one he dedicated to his love, Marie. The tree stood in a garden at the edge of that second settlement, where nowadays the Book of Records stands. The second settlement turned out to be on more fertile land and in time became more succesful than the first, and it grew to eventually engulf the first.

I pointed out that this story is meant as an allegory indicating that dedicating one’s life purely to God is more difficult than dedicating it to worldly love but that in the end the two can merge. Keeper Thadron and his friends were almost offended, they believe in their tale as literal historical fact.

They added that since the second village was dedicated “to Marie”, or “à Marie” in an old tongue, its inhabitants were soon called Amarrians. And that, in their legend, is the origin of our name, Amarr.

At some point one Guide who had been pouring beer down his throat as if there was a small black hole in his stomach, climbed on the table and with a grand sweeping gesture proclaimed that “All of this great galactic Empire is nothing more than a lovestruck guy’s attempt to impress his girl!”. We quickly forced him back down from the table and concluded our evening out, blaming his blasphemy on drunkenness and a partially Gallentean ancestry.

Family connections

I met with Keeper Thadron Dakha today. The holorooms are even more impressive than I imagined! He had prepared an overview of the Accadis family name. A large hall was filled with a galaxy of stars, each point of light representing an individual with that family name, over the ages. Countless points of light! And, if you try to pinch a star, it pops up with the information on the individual, and the links to other stars, the closest relatives, light up.

The points at the nearest end of the hall were colored, indicating the genetic match between people (named Accadis) alive today and the DNA sequence of Layla that I handed over to Keeper Thadron. He cross-referenced it with the genetic birth records of the the MIO. Colors more towards the violet end of the spectrum indicated a closer match. 

 

Then a pulse of light flowed through this galaxy, a wave going from the front of the hall to the back. It lit up a gossamer web of connections, broad in the front and funneling towards the back. Threads from different people from the present coalesced into common ancestors, until at the very back only a few illuminated threads remained as most of the namesakes of long ago did not have a line of children stretching all the way to the present. 

 

Going back to the time of the Sabik purges of Queron I, only three threads remain, two more strongly colored than the third. We are going to seek out these ones on the old records, to find out which lineage contained heretics.

 

When the scribes are instructed to strike out a name they do so using the blackest of inks. Digitally, the record disappears, but in the Book of Records, the page or card is not physically destroyed except when it concerns high ranking individuals. The name is just crossed out. This is how a poor soul disappears out of memory for all of Amarr. But in the Book, for commoners the crossed out line remains, a hidden, fading trace of existence, a last ember of hope for restitution.

 

Keeper Thadron suggests to find out about a Sabik branch of the family via these crossed out records. For that, we will have to delve deeply into the Book, with a Guide. The committee that would give the final approval for this is meeting tomorrow morning.

After his impressive display of genealogic craftsmanship, Keeper Thadron invited me for dinner and drinks with a few other Keepers and Guides tonight. I am looking forward to meet these men and women in charge of our collective memory!

The Book of Records

Maybe in your mind's eye the Book of Records is a massive tome, binding together pages of the thinnest paper, scribbled full of names in the tiniest handwriting.

Or maybe you do a bit of math in your mind, and then conceive of the Book of Records as a stack of books as tall as a mountain. A myriad of volumes, for no single book could ever hold the records of the uncountable billions of Amarr alive today and of the uncountable billions more that lived before.

You would still be wrong.

The Book of Records is a building.

It is an ancient building, stone and gold, in the old district of Dam-Torsad. At first glance, it is not very remarkable. Tourists walk past its facade without realizing it was built thousands of years ago. It looks like a very modest building, somewhat out of place. It is dwarfed by the modern shining skyscrapers around it. It did not grow along with the other buildings, since by law, no part of the Book of Records can be torn down or remodeled.

In the last couple of millennia it grew roots and expanded underground. The venerable building that you see from the nearby Square of the Records is just the tip of an iceberg stretching over half a kilometer down and branching outwards several kilometers in a network of catacombs of books, deep below the city. It keeps on expanding: even when the Book of Records became digitized, the tradition of keeping the paper and ink records was not abandoned. Still today, an army of Record Keepers use their calligraphy to add names and information on pages and cross-reference cards. On our home-world alone, half a million babies are born every single day.

The parts above ground contain the oldest records, only accessible to high nobility and clergy. And these nobles cannot enter it without a Record Guide. The facade of the building is just the outer shell - it was constructed around a building older still, that also by law cannot be altered. That older building is built around one yet older than it, and so it goes on, so that the whole edifice is like an onion layered in time.

Since no walls or floors can ever be rebuilt or changed, you go from one layer to the next by crawling through windows in the walls separating the millennia. The stacks of records are dense in the old regions. No space is left unused as subsequent expansions by enclosure were always postponed until absolutely unavoidable. 

The walkways between the stacks and shelves are tight and labyrinthine. It is easy to get lost in the old parts. Sometimes just to reach the shelves on the other side of where you are, you have to climb a ladder and walk around through several rooms and climb back down somewhere else. You can't walk upright everywhere, in some places you have to squeeze in, in order to spare yourself a long detour in this three-dimensional maze. Retrieving a record from an ancient and not digitized age is like a caving expedition, one only restricted to Heirs and the Record Guides that specialize in specific parts of the building.

The innermost building in this layered structure can only be visited by the Emperor or Empress, and hasn't been so for as long as anyone can remember. The oldest part of the Book of Records, so claim the Record Guides, is a small church. That church contains no cards or books or scrolls. It is covered on the outside by stacked records from the second oldest layer, and you can only go in on hands and knees through a small entrance. As you enter, space opens up to an almost empty church interior, a relief after the claustrophobic inner layers. In the middle of this empty church stands a beech tree that died a very long time ago. 

In its bark three words are carved. They form the first line of the Book, and the oldest Amarr biographical record: "Dano loves Marie".

Outsourcing war

Khimi Harar has discovered a nest of Kybernauts in the kingdom. These Triglavian collaborators are enemies of the empire, and should be eliminated before they can grow. The corporate leadership declared war to destroy their base of operations.

I am always a bit wary of such wars of choice. They feels distinctly like vigilante action that circumvents the official channels: investigation and trial by the Theology Council, and then retribution by the Imperial Navy.

 

But I am old-fashioned. Nowadays peacekeeping as well as war are outsourced to capsuleer corporations. The modern private military industry tolerates little oversight, and is routinely asked to perform operations for the ministry of internal order. I am sure that also in the present case, the MIO attaché has sanctioned, if not commissioned this engagement.

 

Yesterday, I offered prayer service in the Chapel, to bless our warriors and ask for a crusader indulgence for our pilots. At this point in my training, I can contribute little more to the fight.

 

I have arrived in Dam-Torsad. Even though I have repeatedly visited it over the last few months, I don't think I will ever get used to the hustle and bustle of our capital. Tomorrow, I will make my way to the Book and meet with the Keeper.

Gurista cruelty

Some time ago I was told by a capsuleer that of all the pirate factions, the Guristas are the most humane.

With what I've seen this week, that does not bode well for the others.

There must have been a big leak of information at DED, and the Guristas must have obtained a list of names of DED agents undercover. What the pirates did to these undercover agents baffles the imagination.

In an unseen act of cruelty, they lock up the captured agent in a capsule, keeping them alive yet in agony. The capsule is programmed to warp around randomly for an indefinite amount of time, prolonging the suffering of their human cargo, buried alive yet incapable of dying.

I've stumbled upon some of these brightly colored capsules (yes, they took the time to paint them in cheerful colors). They can't be disabled or boarded without killing the occupant. The only merciful thing to do is to destroy it to release its occupant from misery.

But let me end this entry with some positive news. My application for a visit to the older parts of the Book is still being processed as it has to pass several internal committees. Nevertheless Keeper Thadron suggested I could already come over to do some "ground work" as he calls it. I am not sure what it means, but I am preparing to go over to Dam-Torsad, to the Book.

Veil of Ignorance

Yesterday, mr. Woyunohs joined our corporation, and had his interview with the Directrix. I remember vividly doing this interview myself - pertinent questions are asked by Lunarisse, and often the candidates are rather nervous. Maybe you too, dear reader, if you belong to our corporation, remember your own very first face-a-face with the Directrix? I too was ill at ease, but the main reason of my discomfort was that the interview was held in the corporation's canteen. Or bar, probably that is a better name for it, since far more calories are consumed there via beverages than via solid food.

One of the recurring questions at these interviews relate to the function of slavery in today's empire. Oh, I could talk a long time about the history of slavery, its waxing and waning over the course of the millennia in our empire. I do believe the most recent high tide is behind us, and slavery has been ebbing ever since the Pax Amarria. This of course brings all sorts of turbulence with it. There is always resistance to social change.

 

Anyway, I overheard mr. Woyunohs interesting answer : "If you had to live in a society with slaves, not knowing if you would be the slave or not, would you still choose that society?". He had picked this up at Hedion, he said.

 

I surmise he followed a class on moral or political philosophy. The principle mr. Woyunohs so pointedly refered to is the "veil of ignorance". Imagine a committee that has to choose how to organise society. They have absolute power. If the committee members are to design a fair and just society, so the principle claims, they have to be ignorant of their future position in that society. After the people drafting a constitution finish their job, they should trade places with a random person in that society through some lottery. They just jump clone into that randomly chosen person, not knowing in advance who that will be, and live the life of that person. You may jump clone into a slave or into an Heir, you may jump clone into Ishta or into Nauplius. How would you organise society?

 

This principle has been used by Federation philosophers to "demonstrate" that slavery is not just, because they claim no-one would want to risk being a slave. But their reasoning is flawed, and not only because they have no idea how it is to be a slave in the Empire. Every person is shaped by their upbringing and their culture, and what a person considers a worthwhile life depends on this upbringing and culture. Our concept of fairness and justice is shaped by the culture we grow up in. And so, a panel with representatives from all of the Empires would never agree on what is fair, even if they would work under the "veil of ignorance".

 

Of course a Federation philosopher would choose the Federation democracy and freedom! Well, probably just tweaked a bit to have a little less corruption. But equally an Amarrian would choose a slightly tweaked version of the Empire. And a Caldari would choose some form of the State. I believe most slaves in our Empire would probably not choose the system of the Minmatar republic with all its uncertainty and cutthroat violence, he or she would go for the lottery ticket to improve his or her lot in Amarr. And I? I would not want to live in a society that does not put scripture first, no matter what station I would have!