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Well of Memories (OR: Rammis Field) When the pioneers of the 33rd Lands first came in contact with the natives of the Earthen Spine, both parties were surprised at each other’s existence. Upon learning the local language -- a process which took all of two days -- the pioneers immediately began cultural exchange. The natives, while clearly human in their ingenuity, literacy and advanced tool use, seemed nearly a different species. They still grew hair and bore what they called “wisdom teeth”, intrusive extra rear molars. Their single-color skins still deteriorated with age and the community “elders” were no more than seventy solar-years old. Strangest of all, they asked the pioneers what “nation” they were from and what had become of a land called “Tar-Tekka.” The pioneers were confused. Context only heightened their confusion. The natives explained that they were descendents of a seafaring people from Tar-Tekka, a continent far across the ocean. In time immemorial they had arrived there, fleeing a great cataclysm they concisely called “The End.” From The End came The Beginning, an age of peace and balanced prosperity. The Middle began when Tar-Tekka somehow became inhospitable, causing the people to scatter across the waves. One group of refugees happened to settle in the Earthen Spine and became the natives who told the story. The pioneers realized what a great anthropological treasure they had found. Here was a society forgotten by time who knew secrets long forgotten by the rest of humanity. If the pioneers could decipher these secrets, they could know the true history of how people lived long ago. Nothing could be more important for they valued education and knowledge above all else. Eagerly the pioneers learned all they could of local culture at a rate which astonished the natives. The natives were apparently so primitive that the peak of their natural educational absorption ability occurred in childhood and dropped off rapidly thereafter. Furthermore, the total amount of information the natives knew was very low indeed. They knew nothing of gravitons or chakras or even tectonics. They couldn’t even draw a tesseract! It was a wonder that the natives sustained any culture at all. One day the pioneers learned how they did it. It seemed that the natives, cut off from the rest of humanity, relied on each other for information. The elders held all knowledge of the past and kept it in their personal memory to tell others. Even middle-aged people had personal memories full of useful facts and morals that they taught to their children and to anyone who liked to listen. The pioneers thought this was strange because they themselves had little personal memory. Whenever one of them learned something, they mentally uploaded it into the Universal Gravi-Quantum Computer -- a data-storage device with the nickname “The Well of Memories” -- instead of keeping it to themselves. That way humanity had a warehouse of tremendous informational volume that would last forever, eternally safe from the forgetfulness of old age and the ravages of perspective. Furthermore, anyone could access any amount of it at any time from anywhere at no cost. One no longer had to go through life relying only on what one personally learned and experienced. All information that was known was shared. It made life very easy. So it was natural that one of the pioneers eventually asked a native elder, “How can you possibly live in a society where nobody knows everything?” The elder replied, “We live very well not knowing everything.” The pioneer pushed, “Yes, but how? How do you bear it? Where I come from, everyone knows everything, so there is no uncertainty. Nobody is afraid of the unknown because we already know it.” “Then why were you surprised to see that my people and I live outside of your society?” “That’s just the point! My fellow pioneers and I were surprised, but the world was not. When we return home with tales of you and your people, there will be no great shock because we will have already carried the knowledge of you to the Well of Memories. Our people will be temporarily shocked, but when they see the knowledge already in the Well, they will smile and know that all is still known. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for you to go through your whole life without that certainty.” The native elder smiled and said, “But I am already certain of where we came from. Are you?” The pioneer also smiled. “No, I am not. We have come here on a quest for knowledge. Anything you can tell us about the past, anything at all, will be of more value than you could know.” And so the elder told an important story. The elder promised that it was a history which all the elders agreed dated back over ten thousand solar-years. The pioneers listened. --- Long ago, the world was nothing but a ball of ice with misery in every life that lived. And then one day humans harnessed fire to melt away the ice, which formed the great oceans and seas and rivers. Humans went on to harness the earth the ice had revealed, the waters that flowed around the earth and the winds that blew over the waters. Humans thus controlled the Four Elements and some of them exercised such control that they grew powerful, more powerful than any ordinary human. They called themselves the Elemental Controllers until one day they congealed into a single entity, the first of the Four Gods. That entity was the great god Yuropus the Builder. Yuropus was the first being who took raw materials from the ground and shaped them into all manner of tools, from intricate measuring instruments to self-propelled ships made of steel. Eventually, however, Yuropus grew bored and built tools without purpose, tools for its own amusement: searing airless clouds and swift iron rain. On a terrible day, Yuropus fell victim to its own creations. From the rotting corpse of Yuropus sprung Globalus the Coverer. Hard and singular Globalus was immune to what intelligent and multi-faceted Yuropus made, and in fact used those same deadly tools in its quest to unify the world in singular darkness. Its appetite for knowledge was insatiable -- not to learn for learning’s sake but to learn, for its own advantage, how to keep others from learning. Its deeply flawed logic led it to create even more terrible devices than Yuropus had built. The threat which Globalus posed to the world was such that the planet itself was moved to act. On a fateful day the sunlight from the East burst forth with the brightness of one hundred thousand stars, boiling the sky and shattering Globalus into innumerable shards which stuck fast in the earth and sea. One of the shards landed upon a white hill in the wide green grass of Rammis Field. Deep within each shard laid a wisp of black Globalus turned gray by the white light of the sun. The uncountable millions of shards across the planet made up the collective body of Politus the Organizer; the invisible connections between them, its mind. Politus conspired to unify the world in gray, for gray, it thought, would be immune to the powerful assault of the light. The shard of Politus in Rammis Field was particularly potent and particularly clever. It spawned chains to connect to the other shards so that Politus could more easily unify and gather strength to engray the planet. As the chains grew, Poltius lost its multiple-shard identity and became a great web of steel and pure connectivity: the final god, Petrolus the Gatherer. The chains spreading from Rammis Field were surpassingly useful. They not only facilitated the Great Graying but also carried information and resources from distant places directly to the hub of Petrolus on the white hill. Puppets made of grass performed meticulous maintenance on the chains, anchoring them to everything from people’s hearts to the Four Elements. The Graying thickened outwards from every chain like wax on a candle. It seemed that nothing could stop it, that nothing could break the chains that promised to choke the world. And then Petrolus the Gatherer became aware. Somewhere deep in its collective mind it remembered the day when it had been the singular Globalus the Coverer, the multi-faceted Yuropus the Builder before that, the Elemental Controllers before that and mere humans before that. Upon recalling the days when the planet was nothing but a ball of ice, Petrolus took one long look at itself and realized the horrible truth: the gray unity it craved was no different from the ice! It was then that The End occurred. Petrolus the Gatherer set itself ablaze in a desperate suicide to save the planet, but its chains had penetrated so deeply that terrible destruction still befell the planet. Cataclysm compounded cataclysm and shockwaves from Rammis Field spun the world into ruin, taking with it everything and everyone that descended from the Four Gods. . . Leaving only a small number of people to stagger their way to Tar-Tekka and start their lives over again. --- The pioneers fell into awed silence. Could that incredible story really be their long-lost heritage? “No,” one of them finally decided. “Their story is just a perspective. We cannot rely on it alone.” As well they couldn’t. Every scrap of non-mathematical knowledge in the Well of Memories was shaped and reshaped by every perspective and context added to it. Someone somewhere could find or conceive of a perspective or context to counter every fact and re-counter every counter in the Well, so all additions were equally valid because they were equally wrong in some way. The Well treated them as equally true falsehoods due to its sturdy and/or ethereal Gravi-Quantum construction. The story told by the natives threatened to harm the society of the pioneers if not the Well itself. This is why: history resembled arithmetic. Just as 2 + 2 = 4, something either happened in history or it didn’t. The natives, being isolated for so long, logically had a better grasp of history than the pioneers who knew nothing that happened before the creation of the Well of Memories. And yet the story was nothing more than a local perspective! If the pioneers dared to mentally upload a perspective into the history-keeping sub-sector of the Well, it would be like uploading 2 + 2 = 5. The whole system would need to be reconstructed to compensate for such a fundamental change in the most basic of statements. “What are we to do?” The pioneers lamented. “This is new information on history so we must upload it, yet it’s merely a perspective so we can’t!” And then a pioneer had a stroke of genius. It did not come from the Well but rather from a little corner of her shrunken pioneer intuition center, a corner of her brain where the invisible pathway to the Well did not reach. “Why must we upload it into the history sub-sector?” “What do you mean?” The others asked. “It’s history!” “What is history but ‘what came before?’” She asked. “Is history not simply a perspective based on one’s culture?” The other pioneers fell into awed silence. “I think I understand,” another said. “Our perspective is that history is not known before the time of the Well of Memories. Therefore, our ‘history-in-perspective’ is that which has occurred since the construction of the Well.” “Precisely!” The first pioneer said. “So if we create another sub-sector in the Well for ‘history-in-perspective’ and upload what we have learned here into it, we will maintain the integrity of both the Well and ourselves!” Relief swept over the pioneers. “I’ll get to work on that right now,” one said, “but what will we call this ‘history-in-perspective?’” The pioneers thought long and hard before asking the natives what they called their creation story, intending to steal the name. “We call it ‘The Beginning of The Beginning,’” the native elder said. “No, no, not the title,” a pioneer fretted, “I mean what do you call your story? What is its noun?” “It is our true history.” The pioneer sighed. “Very well. . .let’s say that I had a story just like it. What would you call that?” The elder spoke three whole words, the last of which the pioneers stole: “Merely your religion.” |