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Save Point: The Secret Decalogue

"I've decided it should be a poem," concludes Terrowne.

"Wait, what?"

"You remember how you said we should make up a legend, to try and explain what happened and warn people?"

"I thought that it was you who suggested that."

"Whatever. I've been thinking about it carefully and it needs to be something that features a wide range of deeply abstruse concepts, because it'll probably get translated through a huge number of languages. So it needs to be sort of non-specific, using esoteric ideas from mysticism and religion, but baited with a sort of core of hidden truths to attract the right sort of interested people to keep on translating it and updating it. The world is going to be very primitive for a very long time, and so it needs to appeal to a minority of very intelligent and very intellectual people who will realize that it contains something real and really far outside their own experience, so they'll make efforts to translate and understand it. It also has to deliberately stand outside, better yet slightly outrage existing religions and philosophies, so it doesn't get assimilated by them and confused."

"You really have given this a great deal of consideration."

"My foresight is no better than my memory. I can only see so far ahead and at that sort of distance I can't just pick out the correct initial conditions for this. It needs to be carefully considered."

"So what sort of stuff were you considering including?"

"Well, first it needs to be in a conveniently discrete number of pieces, chapters or tablets or what have you. I think ten, because it's a nice scientific inconveniently rounded number. You can't just put it on a handy square grid on a temple wall and forget about it, you have to carefully collect all the pieces, memorize and understand them. So, a decalogue. But each section needs to be not too long, something that will fit on a reasonably sized piece of media, whatever it might be, to contain an individual snippet of hidden knowledge in it under self-contained headings."

"No, I mean literally what information are you going to put in it?"

"Well, first the origins of life, expressed abstractly, but with simple specific details that will make it clear that it's real. Creation from a void, reducing atmosphere like the inside of a furnace, living things that began simple clay and the abysses of the ocean. A world with no gods other than those who might visit from the outside. Then a little geologic history, the movement of the unfixed land, the dinosaurs and their portals into seething universes and depth trains, and how it ended when a Dragon fell from the sky in a ship the size of a mountain made of stone and metal and struck the earth. Finally a quick summary of primitive humans aspiring to be more than animal and making tools, clothes, societies and last of all ideas, like writing all of it down."

"It's a good start, I suppose. In the beginning there are words."

"Gotcha. Okay, now we move onto the important bit, the Age of Azatlan and the Rama Empire, the fall of civilization and history getting re-written. Ideally we want to tie it to precessional ideas, so maybe a thing with twelve symbols in a circle representing ages and constellations as incarnated ideas, like they were deities, a theme of recurrence at regular intervals expressed as a pantheon. I haven't decided if there should be symbols in it yet, but they need to be catchy and geometrical if there are, magic symbols that will attract attention and can be easily drawn from memory but will also attract an effort to reproduce them accurately, so as to catch all the hidden meanings. I figure two or three tablets for the introduction, let's call it the history, then six for the whole saga of our little adventure, three for you and three for me. The remaining one or two can conclude with epic prophesying of the future using the same symbolism, to lend the whole thing a conviction of truth and certainty. What do you think?"

"It's a little simplistic in terms of its literary and narrative structure."

"Well, that would be the idea. It needs to be ten separate bits that can be read individually and in no specific order, but are all clearly part of the same thing and each have that payload of hidden or secret knowledge in them."

"Do I get to write some of it?"

"Of course you do. You'll think of all the stuff that would never occur to me and vice-versa. I'll be all cosmic and shadowy, you'll be all worldly and blazing, then at the end we do a joint re-write to make it all fit, because you know that we're both going to write too much."

"I've never had my own joint-custody scripture before."

"See? Hanging out with me is already beginning to pay off."

"Even better plan. When we are done, we recruit ten unique people who want to be students, and test it on them. Then we re-write and repeat until the effect is optimized, or we get bored. Call it a school of secret hidden magical knowledge or something."

"Oh, I like your thinking! This is what I meant, it would never have occurred to me to consider the whole people factor in the dissemination of the story. This way we'd have a sort of meta-fiction of a hidden school that pops up across the centuries, validating the content. We could repeat it every once in a while when the intellectual conditions were suitable, and throw in extra word of mouth stuff and explanations as we saw fit depending on what's needed at the time."

"You're proposing that we, what, become school teachers?"

"Only of the most special and elite kind. You know you'll just want to tell someone and have them believe it, every once in a while. Preferably someone who isn't an idiot. We'll give them gold stars in the form of knowledge that can actually be used to help them make actual gold stars."

"You have talked me into contributing a little of my time to help educate the underprivileged."

"You can lecture them on subjects as diverse as makeup and metallurgy. You can also sleep with them from an unfair and highly advantaged intellectual position."

"Believe it or not, that thought had already occurred to me," she grins triumphantly.

Cleo flounces off on whatever errand she'd been about before he can get the last word in, so he's left contemplating a suitable wording. It has to be something that will survive positively erosional levels of translation, like it was dug out from under a glacier.

"The subharmonic murmur of black tentacular voids," he scratches. It's a start.