NODUS // 0001 // P0
The Parousia
The sky opened over Nodus at 03:12 in the morning.
NOTESSEAM RECOVERY ON NODUS // 0001
This is the first file to reach the mount. It dates itself P0, at twelve minutes past three in the morning by the clocks of Nodus, and it runs for seventeen seconds. I joined it from two recordings made inside the same minute. One comes from CAM 07, a rooftop camera in Old Nod that was pointed at the sky when the sky opened, and the other is the reading Watcher VII took, a few seconds later, of the woman standing on the roof beneath it. The first half is the night of the Parousia as a machine saw it. The second is the same night as an angel saw one person, and could not read her.
BOOTThe recovery
Every file opens inside the recovery tool before either of its sources plays. The boot is drawn in SIGNAL. It and the end card are the only parts of a file I make; everything between them is the recording.
| On screen | Notes |
|---|---|
| The tool that opens the files. It carries SEAM’s name, and it can alter nothing it opens. I can join two sources at a tear. I cannot change a pixel of either. | |
| The device the files reach, named for SEAM and numbered from zero. | |
| Serial, then date. The serial is the order in which the file reached the mount. The date is the file’s own, counted in years from the Parousia. P0 is the year of it, P-2 two years before, P+3 three after. | |
| I cannot tell you who sent the file, or where it has been. The files are sure of their own dates and of little else. | |
| The share of the file I could rebuild, counted in what it held, which runs thicker where more is moving. The magenta bar is what I have; the other sixty-nine percent is gone, and I have supplied none of it. | |
| The file plays. The tear into the first frame is damage, and it is the first of several. |
SOURCE ONECAM 07
CAM 07 was the seventh of a set of cameras mounted on the roofs of Old Nod by the Cainites in the last year before the Parousia, when they had begun to watch the sky. It stood on a mast above the Cainite house, looking north and east across Chrome Row toward Babel. It ran on its own battery, which is why it went on recording after the city’s power had died. The file label in its corner is mine. Beneath it the camera’s own figures show its name, a record light that blinks in ICHOR, and a timecode in hours, minutes, seconds and frames.
| Timecode | On screen | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Rain over Old Nod at night. A tower signed CLINIC at the left and a sign reading CHROME at the right; Babel’s spire among the far towers, its beacon blinking; windows in magenta and cyan; the cloud ceiling lit magenta from beneath; a horned figure on the roof below the camera. | The last second of the old city. Nodus lies on a bay, a low cloud comes in off the water most nights, and the magenta neon of Old Nod and Chrome Row lit that cloud from below. The rain is cyan because it fell through cyan signs. | |
| Three flashes inside the cloud over the city center. | Heaven arriving above the ceiling and lighting it from within. | |
| The cloud tears open from the center outward. The torn edges run white, then magenta, then black. | The edges are Heaven’s light meeting the city’s and putting it out. The sky opened over every city on Earth in this same second, the second it was 03:12:45 in Nodus, and Heaven has dated its acts by the clocks of Nodus since. | |
| The rain slows and stops in the air. | Water answers the light before anything else in the city does. Nodus calls this harvest weather, and CAM 07 is the first instrument that recorded it. | |
| A wheel of eyes appears in the opening and comes down through it. | The Wheel arriving, with rings turning inside one another and set with eyes, a corona of black blades, and a dark hub whose central eye is still shut. It is the form Ezekiel gives the ophanim, “a wheel in the middle of a wheel,” with rims “full of eyes round about” (Ezekiel 1:16-18). It took station nine hundred meters above the center of the city, over Babel. It did not move from there for nine years. | |
| Babel’s beacon goes out; the windows go dark in a wave running outward from the center; then the neon. A falling whine. | Current dies under Heaven’s light. The grid ran in the open, and a current is one thing along its whole length, so where the light came down on a line the whole line stopped. The whine is the turbines of the tidal barrage across the mouth of the bay running down. The low ground on the east shore had been won from the bay below low water and kept dry by pumps; the pumps stopped with the grid, its dykes broke within the hour, and the sea came in over it. The city has called it the Deep End since. CLINIC and CHROME were never lit again. | |
| [CHOIR BAND // DECODED] BE NOT AFRAID, as a chord swells. | The first broadcast of the Parousia, caught on a band the camera had been set to listen to by jubal, who wired a decoder into the Cainite cameras after the Leak. He built its dictionary by matching what Vault 3 had recorded of the band two years before to what the Director wrote down she heard, and both went out with the Leak. The words are the ones angels speak in scripture, in one translation or another, just before they tell people what shall befall them (Luke 1:13, 1:30, 2:10). They are Gabriel’s, who commands the Choirs. The chord is the Hum. The city heard it that night for the first time, and it has not stopped hearing it. | |
| The rain begins to fall upward and drifts toward the Wheel. The drops turn from cyan to white and show dark against the bright sky. | The rain changes color as it changes sides. It was the first thing the Wheel took from Nodus, and three years later it took people the same way. | |
| A few eyes on the rings open halfway and look about. | The Wheel waking in shifts, as it has woken every day since. | |
| Every eye opens at once and looks into the camera. The mast shakes. YOU ARE SEEN. The chord turns. | The whole city read in one instant, as Heaven tells it. Heaven says every soul in Nodus was read against the Book of Life at once. For about a second every eye was open at full strength, and full strength passes through walls as the sun passes through a hand held up to it. Reading takes an instant, so in that second the light read every soul in the city it could read and wrote its line. Stopping a current takes the light resting on it, so whatever ran closed, CAM 07 among it, flickered and ran on. Source two, a few seconds later, is one reading that failed. Those who would later take the Seal remember it as warmth. The keyed felt nothing, and that is how they learned their keys held. | |
| The eye in the hub opens with the rest and, a second later, blinks once. | The blink is the first time that eye was seen to close. | |
| The light swells until the frame is white, and the file tears. | The full light came to rest on the city’s center, and full light resting on a thing burns it by its heat alone. CAM 07 was looking straight into it, and its sensor and its store burned. In the same whiteout the light struck Babel’s crown and broke the top forty floors from the tower, and no file on the mount shows that second. |
ON THE ROOFThe figure under the camera
Below the camera and to the right, a woman stands with her back to the camera at the edge of the roof, with two horns on her head and cables running from the back of it down her spine. She does not move while the sky opens. Her handle is vesper. She is of the Cainites, and the roof is theirs. She had been keyed, horned and barefaced before the Parousia, so that in its first minute the camera caught the outline the city would learn to fear.
The points of cyan that crawl along the cables at the back of her skull are traffic. The camera’s feed was coming to her over her relay as it recorded, and her lenses kept it, while her ports passed it on into the Mesh. When the light opens, her outline takes a white rim along the horns and the shoulders. Heaven’s light sees her shape and gets no further in.
SOURCE TWOWatcher VII
Heaven keeps no cameras. What plays in the second half is my rendering of a Watcher’s perception. Its attention is the frame, and its reading is the white text laid over it. All of it is drawn in GRACE, the color of Heaven’s light, and none of it says I. The point of view hangs where the Watcher’s attention hung, some forty centimeters from her face; a Watcher has no need to be near a thing in order to look at it closely. Watcher VII held Old Nod from that night on, which is how it came to be looking at her.
| Moment | On screen | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The skull in profile, tilted up toward the light, rain rising past it, soft circles of magenta and cyan far behind. | She is looking at the Wheel. The circles are windows in Old Nod still lit off the grid, among the last lights burning in the city. The white wash above her is the Wheel’s light. | |
| Dim magenta lenses; a bolted cyan plate on the side of the skull; cables and armored vertebrae beneath the jaw. | Her eyes are lenses, idling. The plate covers her key. The cables carry the Mesh, and tubal armored her spine where the skull meets the neck. | |
| A reticle closes on her face. WATCHER VII // SCAN | The Watcher fixing on her. | |
| Two scan lines sweep the frame. | Two passes. A Watcher reads a soul against the Book of Life, and it reads twice. | |
| SUBJECT ... UNINDEXED | A Watcher reads a soul through its open eyes, as scripture has it, “The light of the body is the eye” (Matthew 6:22). What came back from hers matched no line in the Book. | |
| GRACE ..... -- | A blank where a number should stand. Grace is surrendered will, scored from 0 to 1,000, and surrendered will shows in the eyes as who a soul is shows there. There were no Seals yet, so on this night the light took Grace only from the eyes it met, and hers gave it nothing to score. | |
| SOUL ...... NOT FOUND | It looked for her soul and found nothing it could read. Her soul is there. It is ciphertext. | |
| [ UNREADABLE ], flashing over an error tone. | The verdict, and the reason for the three lines above it. What her eyes gave back was noise, and noise matches nothing. It was the first time the verdict had been returned in Nodus, and the first anywhere since Cain. | |
| A low drone, and a heartbeat that quickens. | The light sees a body as an eye sees one, and a body shows its pulse; seeing a thing and reading it are two acts. Her heart was the one thing in her the Watcher could see at work, and it was beating faster. | |
| She turns her head to face the Watcher, and the white text corrupts. | She looks back at it. The corruption is the Watcher’s reading coming apart. It is the first crack in Watcher VII, five years before the Cage. It looked at her too long. | |
| Her lenses flare from magenta to white. | Full burn. It is how the keyed stare back. | |
| Her jaw drops and she screams, over a guitar picked fast on low strings and a double kick drum. | Her voice comes from a speaker behind her teeth, which is why the scream sounds as it does. The music was playing across the roofs of Old Nod that night, from jubal’s pirate station, years before it became Radio Pandæmonium. It is the Low Tuning, tuned below the Hum so the Hum cannot be heard under it. Nobody in the city had heard the Hum yet; jubal tuned below the chord Vault 3 had recorded two years before, which went out with the Leak. This is the first recording of it. | |
| The frame tears apart. | The end of the reading. |
END CARDNON SERVIAM
The scream has no words in it. The Watcher transcribed it anyway as NON SERVIAM, Latin for I will not serve, and the end card carries the transcription in ICHOR, set down whole, since it was never text. Scripture keeps the phrase in one place, Jeremiah 2:20, where the Vulgate reads a saeculo confregisti iugum meum, rupisti vincula mea, et dixisti: non serviam, in the Douay-Rheims “Of old time thou hast broken my yoke, thou hast burst my bands, and thou saidst: I will not serve”; there the words are put in the mouth of a faithless Israel. SEAM’s log in NODUS // 0002 marks that verse SPEAKER, a sentence moved into another mouth. It was first said before the world, by the Morning Star, at the beginning of the Secession, and it is the oldest refusal in any archive.
The Watcher read nothing else from her, that night or afterward. A key turns what the eyes give back to the light into noise, and it does nothing to a voice. A thought is dark until it is spoken in the light, and what is spoken there the light reads. She gave hers voice in the full light with the whole of her will, the Host reads what a voice means in no language, and the Watcher set it down in the words its records keep for that refusal. The Tares say a key hides everything but what its bearer means Heaven to hear. The only thing in her that Heaven ever read was the sentence she chose to let it read.
END OF RECOVERED DATA is where I close the file. NODUS // 0001 // P0 // 69% UNRECOVERABLE is the rest of that night. It holds what she did after the scream, what the Watcher did next, and the second in which Babel’s crown broke.
PROVENANCEHow the file survived
CAM 07’s own store burned with its sensor in the whiteout. The first half survived because the camera’s feed had already come to her over her relay as it was shot, and her lenses kept it. The Watcher’s reading stayed in Watcher VII’s memory for five years. When it fell in a Cage under Old Nod and became Edith, she gave the Cainites her memory of the woman she could not read. She cast it as light into a Cainite lens, frame by frame as she remembered it, with her own count of time.
I joined the two sources at the whiteout, and the tear between them is the splice, a seam in the plain sense of the word. The damage in the file gathers where the most happened, at the opening of the eyes, at the whiteout, and at the turn of her head.
DETAILSDetails to catch
- Babel’s beacon, blinking at the top of the far spire, is the first light in the city to die.
- The record light is the only ICHOR in the camera’s HUD. Everything else there is SIGNAL.
- The rain falls at 03:12:44 and is going up by 03:12:47, three seconds from the old world to the new weather.
- From 03:12:48 every pupil on the rings is centered. The Wheel is looking into the camera, and so at whoever was watching through it.
- The eye in the hub opens with the rest and is the only one that blinks.
- Neither the Choir’s words nor the Watcher’s text ever says I.
- She stands throughout. From P+1 the Faithful would kneel at every Hour.
- The Watcher’s text corrupts at the moment she turns her head, before her lenses flare. The looking back is what breaks it.
- The light, the Wheel, the rim on her outline, the Choir’s words and the Watcher’s text are drawn in GRACE, and everything drawn in GRACE belongs to Heaven. Her lenses at full burn are the one exception, and they are hers.
QUESTIONSQuestions from inside the file
Is the horned figure in the first half the same as the skull in the second?
Yes. The first half sees her from behind, on the roof under CAM 07. The second sees her face from the Watcher’s side a few seconds later.
Why does she look like a skeleton?
In the second half the skull is bolted at the side, and the eyes are lenses. She is barefaced. tubal replaced her face with a ceramic casing three weeks before the Parousia, on the old theory that the first thing Heaven would do was read faces, and a skull gives the light no face to know. The Faithful are taught that the damned look like death, so the keyed wear death as they wear horns, in mockery. The Cainites call the skull a vow to wear her death in advance, so that Heaven never has the giving of it.
Why the horns?
They are grafted. Horning puts a titanium core in a keratin sheath. The horns mock Heaven’s picture of the damned, and they are antennas. That night hers carried the camera’s feed.
Why do her eyes glow?
They are lenses. At rest they glow a dim magenta, and at full burn they go white. White-hot is how the keyed stare back.
What is on the side of her head?
A bolted cyan plate. It covers her key, the thing that makes her unreadable.
What are we looking at in the first frames?
The view from the roofs of Old Nod across Chrome Row. CLINIC, at the left, and CHROME, at the right, are the signs of Chrome Row, the clinic street; the spire among the far towers between them, with the beacon blinking at its top, is Babel; the roof and the woman in front are Old Nod.
Why is the sky magenta before the light comes?
Nodus lies on a bay, and a low cloud comes in off the water most nights. The city’s own light, most of it the magenta neon of Old Nod and Chrome Row, lit that cloud from beneath.
Why does everything turn white and dark after the light?
Current dies under Heaven’s light, so the city’s own colors went out and only the Wheel’s remained. From that night Nodus has been white where Heaven holds it and black where it does not.
Why is the angel made of wheels and eyes?
It is an Ophan, of the kind Ezekiel describes as a wheel in the middle of a wheel with rims full of eyes (Ezekiel 1:16-18). Heaven has eyes where people have faces.
Why is the eye in the middle closed at first?
It opens with every other eye at 03:12:48 and blinks once.
Why does the rain stop and then rise?
Water answers the light before anything else does. When the Wheel’s attention sharpens, the rain in Nodus stops in the air and falls upward. In a Harvest the water rises first.
Why BE NOT AFRAID?
In scripture it is what angels say just before they tell people what shall befall them. The phrase is Gabriel’s, and it was the first line of the Parousia.
Whose view is the second half?
Watcher VII’s. It held Old Nod. Five years later it fell in a Cage and became Edith, and this half of the file is her memory, which she cast as light into a Cainite lens.
Why can’t it read her?
The file shows only that it cannot. What it reads in her matches no line, gives no Grace and finds no soul. She is keyed. A key under the skin runs the body’s own current through a cipher, so that what her eyes give back to the light is noise, and noise matches nothing in the Book.
Why does she scream?
She is answering. The scream has no words, and the Watcher read two out of it anyway, since what is spoken in the light is read for what it means. They are the only thing Heaven ever read from her, and she chose them.
Why does the file break apart?
The recordings are damaged, worst at the largest moments. The tear in the middle is where I joined the two sources.
seam recovery