The waking of a god starts deep within the earth, with a rumbling that shakes the miles of soil and rock and brick between the retaining walls that encase its body.
Pumping stations whir to life, dragging the black-gold blood from the depths up and up and up through the twists and turns of the pipes. Up through the dirt, then up past the rooftops, then up through the towering struts of the superstructure and into the veins of the machine. The great electric coils thrum as light courses through them. The rarefaction cells squirm in their casings, sending pulses of energy out through their shells that bend gravity into shape.
Now come the neuronflies, flooding from their cultivation chambers in coruscating tides. Nerves thick as rope strung between chamber walls stir with new sensation. Biomechanical cables fizz and spark as they reach for the neural fronds they interface with. Lights rove across the vast halls of the general systems bus, slowly at first in indistinct blooms, then faster and finer until they crackle with rapidly-etched thoughts.
In the memory conflux, small organisms piece together the first squares of billions of memory frames. In the observation chamber in the city above, the shaking and rumbling and thrumming begins to die, and all eyes on the screen watch the iterator's puppet rise.
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That's you. They're waiting for you.
◙---------------◙
"Welcome to the world, Three Points Poised."
There are many things calling your attention, but they are waiting for you. Miles of coils and arrays and cells gleam with newness and excitement. You want to touch it all for the first time, but they are waiting for you. Your overseers, too, as they come alive, squirm in their casings ready to be sent to see whatever you will see, but they are waiting for you. There are many things you have never done before, in your first seconds of life, but they are waiting for you. They are waiting for you. They are waiting for you.
You are not able to ignore it, and you have not learned how to split your attentions yet. In this way, all of your focus is forcibly shifted to just one of your chambers, one high up near the crest of your grand body. It has arms, as most of your chambers do, and one in particular is wrapped in layers of cloth. There are many other things you notice - your focus, being what you are, is a powerful thing, and you've run everything in this small room through minute analysis - but none interest you so much as this. It pleases you. You begin twirling the arm, to watch the cloth flutter through the air, floating about and covering the screen where they are waiting for you.
One of them clears their throat. The drone floating at their side pings you, and you know
It would be difficult to imagine someone more suited for this task than Four Angles, Twelve Intersecting Lines. As with most children of her city, she had been tested for supracedent memories at a young age, and was found to have been a mechanomicrobiologist specializing in iterator design for two previous lives. Not uncommon by any means and certainly more common than it used to be, but it was rare to have had two previous lives in the same rare field in a row - naturally, she was removed from her progenitors' block and fast tracked into the appropriate educational paths, after which she performed far more ordinary yet largely unnecessary work on maintenance and purely theoretical designs. With this in mind, when the plans for a new iterator began to coalesce into something concrete, she was a natural choice for a name to attach to the project.
Courting Four Angles' participation was obvious - less so that she accepted. It was strange to think about, wasn't it? Life after life she seemed to uproot herself from everything she knew over and over again.
Because that's what doing something like this meant, really. They were only able to travel here relatively easily because the rains hadn't reached this place yet. Once it was activated, the journey would become so dangerous it was simply impractical for such a large group to attempt it...some would return anyway, but the rest of them would be stuck here. Four Angles had been aware from the start that she was not one of the people who would try for a return trip.
Thus, in practical terms, everyone here had come with the understanding that this would be where they spent the rest of their lives. It was always why they brought a few thousand people, when in reality it only needed a few hundred...if people would be stranded here, it would be important to prepare for actual city-founding, instead of simply tacitly acknowledging this was a risk. Some of the cities atop the older iterators...
Well, that wouldn't be the case here, so Four Angles didn't need to worry about it.
And, as she knew very well, there were several reasons to want a fresh start...Iterator projects had gotten something of a reputation in these times of attracting low ranking council members and house acolytes and the like. If there was no chance of them achieving the kind of power they would like to in their home cities - and this was usually the case - then their other option was to try for a complete do-over. Four Angles wasn't one of them, but she was very familiar with their motivations, given the last several years of her life courting their sponsorship. Even now...
Anyway. She never liked how people always insisted on being present for the first activation, and she didn't like it now. This would go much smoother if she were alone, but...
You're still twirling your arm, but much more half-heartedly than before. The charm wore off the moment you realised you could simulate all possible results of your motions, so the feeling of discovery is gone. There are so many people watching you, all of them so small, each one an explosion of synapses and data threatening to burst the second you focus on them. Like that one, so much shorter than Four Angles, Twelve Intersecting Lines that they have to grab her shoulder and pull her down to whisper much too loudly in her ear. You can barely focus on the words - "Is it broken? It looks broken. Why is it doing that? Who is responsible for this?" - over the ping of their drone, which lets you know
Not everyone could be blessed with memories of lives long past to propel them into a bright future. No, many of the most skilled members of society had to claw their way into its upper echelons tooth and nail, hand over hand, step by excruciating step. Of these, Eyes Behind Countless Silken Curtains, Lauded Heir of the House of Angry Vases, Count of 1 Living Block, Consultant of 3, Chief Observer of the Soaring Game Tournament of 345.66, of pure Angry Vases heritage, Co-Inventor of the Upward Spiracle Chamber, was not one.
The House of Angry Vases was a tower of generational wealth that had enough money and power to dredge up a decently impressive set of titles for even its most persistently skilless offspring. Never mind that Silken Curtains' only role in the invention of the Upward Spiracle Chamber was writing their name on the paper, nor that observing a soaring game tournament was something anyone could volunteer for several times a month. It fed Countless Silken Curtains' ever-hungry ego, and more importantly it made them look a little more the part of an Angry Vases heir.
Silken Curtains had been groomed all their life into the exact image their blessed House wanted to portray, and all their life every metaphorical comb and brush had bounced off their iron will to waste as much of their own time as possible. Years of behavioural reports listed concern after concern, advanced and then catch-up classes skipped in favour of parties and frivolities, countless expensive hobbies picked up and dropped when they became too much effort. This was not to say that the House had permitted Silken Curtains to face any substantial consequence for any of it, of course. They drifted through life on a gilded boat, and as far as they were concerned, it springing a leak was no more possible than gravity inverting and tossing the world into the sky.
How they had made it to this most holy of rooms on this most holy of days was no question. To answer why - why them, and not a member of the House with any form of suitable skill or at least respectability - that was a matter yet unsolved.
Four Angles presses her fingers together, something you now know is an irritation tick of hers that is supposed to be subtler than the alternatives.
"This is all standard behaviour at this stage. If you recall..."
"Is this standard?" interrupts Silken Curtains. "It doesn't look standard to me. I think something's wrong with it. We ought to send someone to um, check on it, and right away. It looks broken. When we find who's responsible for the fault I will ensure that they face the appropriate repercussions, have no fear."
Four Angles' heart rate spikes. Medical records indicate this has happened very often over the last several months, and thus she may need to visit a doctor. These are the kinds of things you notice now.
"As I was saying. It is standard. We do not encode iterators with instincts on how to move their puppets; it interferes with certain other processes, and they never quite figure out how to emote naturally without personal instruction anyway. It is in the launch procedures for someone to go in and instruct the iterator on proper puppet etiquette."
"Well, why hasn't someone done that yet?" demands Silken Curtains indignantly, putting their hands on their hips and looking around at the rest of the gathering. You notice how many of them seem to be averting their gazes. "Really, what have our engineers been doing all this time? It's most unbecoming. Such an important occasion should be conducted with utmost propriety."
"Because," Four Angles says, brusque, "This was not meant to be the public launch. We cannot train the iterator without first starting it. The procedure is to launch the iterator privately, teach it to speak to us, and then unveil it properly. I seem to recall someone insisting they be invited to the initial launch and then bragging about the privilege to others, resulting in everyone demanding to be here at this delicate moment."
"That's something to to improve for the next time." Silken Curtains shrugs their shoulders with a tinkling and jangling of jewellery. "Someone ought to note that down."
Four Angles inhales. She exhales. And finally, she turns away from Silken Curtains to look, once more, at you.
"My apologies. You must have questions. My name is Four Angles, Twelve Intersecting Lines - although, you should know that already. I am the premier mechanomicrobiologist of the Pillar of Analytical Balance, Three Points Poised sect - in other words, you. I-"
"And I," says Countless Silken Curtains, pushing back to the front, "am Eyes Behind Countless Silken Curtains, Lauded Heir of the House of Angry Vases, Count of 1 Living Block..."
The list of titles, which you already know, goes on and on and on, and just when you think it's over someone else forces their way forward and starts to introduce themself, and their drone floods you with information as the others did before, and then someone else follows suit, and another one, and another one, and they just keep coming until you realise none of this is relevant and stop paying attention, letting the pings wash over you without bothering to comprehend them. An eternity later the last of them finally gives a self-satisfied nod and pushes back through the crowd to their previous spot. Four Angles has been standing to one side the entire time, breathing very carefully even.
"Alright!" she says, faux-pleasantly. "Is there anything else we need to attend to?"
A general burble of chatter strikes up, but no one seems to have an answer for her.
"Thank you." The noise slowly dies down. Four Angles pauses, clearly conflicted. She makes a decision, and continues. "If you will excuse us...It is best if you leave the Pillar to our work."
With great reluctance, the attendees at last begin filing out of the chamber through a door in the far wall. As the last of them leave a far smaller crowd of people gathered at the back become visible, and when Four Angles beckons them at last they all hurry forward with eagerness in their steps. You wonder if there will be more pings.
Four Angles, for the first time, relaxes. With another exhale - so much breath is involved - she turns to you.
"My apologies. That must have been overwhelming." You don't know how it was supposed to go, nor what under- or average-whelming would be, so it makes no difference to you. "You must have questions. Go ahead, Three Points Poised."
The rest of them lean in. They are waiting for you.