The Citadel, Great Midwestern Lost Zone - September 2095
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Edith
Asaph would make quick work of this, no doubt, Edith Gorman caught herself thinking not for the first time since embarking on this endeavor.
The task at hand was discerning the origin location of a thought transfer received by one of the Hierophants late yesterday evening. The Cult was apparently trying to determine whether a tip they received about some ANET project was coming from the same informant who had given them bad information about some higher stakes operation a few months back. The task had fallen to Edith through what sounded like a vaudevillian series of events which had left her, an anthropologist with a cover story of being a very lightly trained basic electrical systems technician, as the one best suited to figure the math on this node science problem. This despite the fact that nearly everyone in the chain of command between her and the Hierophant had some amount of background in node science.
That was no coincidence, the prevalence of node science folks in the upper ranks of the Cult of Ramiel. The Cult was practically as old as Nodes themselves, having formed first as an online community of people who believed in the prophetic foretellings of the so-called “Ramiel Journal” leaked in the early days of the Node age. A lot of those early forum members took up node tinkering, trying to experience visions of their own, as the Author had, and when the forums became physical communities and eventually a bona fide cult, it was they who made up the leadership. Before Coronation, before the Static and the Node Crisis, the Hierophants had supposedly received genuine visions like the Author had, through home-brewed Node transfer and Brain-Computer Interfacing technology.
And yet here was Edith Gorman, plugging numbers into formulas she was pulling straight from her thought-transferred queries to the Universal Search Engine, thinking about her best friend who she hadn’t so much as shared a thought with in more than three years. She consoled herself for at least the thousandth time that her bigger work here —not what she was doing in the Cult as Saturnia Gault, Level 1 Electrical Technician/general lackey, but what she was doing for University as Edith Gorman, Modern Anthropology research fellow— was all worth it. When she was finally at the heart of it all, and saw enough of the picture, what the big plan was for all of them, she would quietly make her way back to the edges of the Cult before disappearing altogether and returning to University to present the findings of her anthropological survey.
“Ah got it now I think,” she said aloud, bringing back from some great distance the focus of the Hierophant’s aide who was sitting across from her.
“Oh, good,” he said, righting his posture from the slouching, wide position he had slowly slipped into over the last half hour or so while Edith had worked at her math in relative silence.
“Yeah,” said Edith, pausing as she carried her last zeroes and double-checked her significant figures. “These should be the approximate coordinates of your informant, with a resolution of ten miles.”
Edith slid her page of chicken-scratch mathematics across the table after circling the coordinates several times.
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“Ten miles?” the aide sounded incredulous.
“Yeah. Give me ten times as long to work the numbers and I might be able to get you down to a mile, but aren’t we just trying to confirm this isn’t our bad informant from before? What are the chances we have two informants in the same town?”
“Tch. That’s not really your concern. The matter’s urgent so I’ll bring this to the Hierophant at once, but if he wants better accuracy, you’d better be prepared to deliver it,” the aide said as he stood, taking Edith’s sheet in hand.
“If you say so, Boss,” she said, and saluted him as he made for the door of the small office.
“Don’t do that. And don’t call me that either,” said the aide, and left.
“If you say so, Boss,” Edith said to no one.
God, how badly she wanted to have a thought chat with Asaph, just complaining about her day and the Cult like it was some everyday workplace drama. They’d laugh at her little joke to herself and then tell her about their day at the CORC R&D facility. She assumed they were still working there, after having finished their initial internship. She hadn’t dared to thought transfer with anyone from her old life since getting to the edges of the inner circle and moving into the Cult’s main compound in the Midwestern Dead Zone. She felt certain the Cult had ways of surveilling thought transfers, and she couldn’t risk blowing her cover. She had to remain in a mindset that she was not Edith Gorman, she was Saturnia Gault at all times in order to prevent anyone from inadvertently blowing her cover by trying to check up on her with a transfer.
At least that goal of hers felt like it was getting closer by the day. Even though it had been an almost comical chain of sicknesses and schedule confusions and the like that had left it to her, the task she had just finished was part of an important operation, so it meant something that she had been trusted with it. And the operation itself might prove enlightening toward her goal of figuring out what the big picture was for the Cult.
On that note, Edith shook herself from her thoughts and left the office. No point waiting here, the aide would surely contact her mind directly if her work proved unsatisfactory to his Hierophant master. She headed through a corridor and down an elevator and made her way out onto a raised promenade, taking a long, refreshing breath of the cool evening air. It was really quite a nice evening, and she had nowhere in particular to be, so Edith decided to sit on a bench and enjoy the air and the view from outside the tower that housed Central Sanctuary.
From her perch on the promenade twenty feet above the street level, right beside the grand building that capped the Citadel’s longest and widest boulevard, the view was extraordinary. You could see every one of the structures raised by the EOKAJ from here, with their flawless, translucent white stone edifices in the unique, almost alien architecture that had elements of gothic and art deco styles, but with a geometric repetition that felt somehow “of the Nodes.” There were gardens of plants that the EOKAJ created, found nowhere else on Earth, adding a splash of pastel color throughout the white cityscape and the surrounding desert of white quartzite sand.
Living here, among the skeletons of the automata inhabitants who stopped moving when the EOKAJ died, Edith had developed a deep appreciation for the mind of the EOKAJ— the way the duality of their existence showed itself in their creations. She had also developed a deep-seated fear of the sheer power of the Nodes, often wondering whether the Cult and the Journal would really be right and the Nodes would destroy the entire world in the end.
[https://marts.notion.site/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2F919de00e-8904-4080-8243-79047ec36570%2FEdith_illo_finished.jpg?table=block&id=309b8fbf-7456-4b85-9c33-9098b181cd60&spaceId=f55aaa38-563a-4fb9-b6f7-a8add6e64006&width=2000&userId=&cache=v2]