From the memoirs of Dr. Leopold Tempes – Vitria, 286 A.T.S.

  Needless to say, I did not take the information well.

  Praetor Twelve has long since forgiven me for the obscenities and racial epithets I screamed at him that afternoon, but I still flinch as I write this. The behavior was beneath my dignity, more in keeping with a barely civilized northern-continental than any loyal son of Vitria. The oversight was mine, made more than a year earlier when I foolishly agreed to Prince Duval’s proposal without understanding his motivation.

  I realize now that he never intended for me to return. Had Praetor Twelve broken the cipher in those early weeks, I have little doubt the good men of The Prince’s White Sands would have knifed my belly and thrown me overboard somewhere along the journey.

  Still, I should not judge my naiveté too harshly. Had I refused Prince Duval’s offer or found a way to leave Aleph in those early years, I would have undoubtedly suffered the same fate as the crew of The Prince’s White Sands—and every poor man who attended that cursed symposium.

  Dumb luck is still luck.

  Not that I didn’t make a solid attempt at getting myself killed in the interim. The captain of The Prince’s White Sands flatly rebuffed my attempts at compromise and negotiation—as well as my less dignified attempts at begging—and departed shortly after I informed him of the expected timeline. My attempts at swaying other captains proved equally fruitless. With half a world between us, there were only a handful of ships destined for Nostrum, and none of them expected to go even as far as Ashad. I had no coin to speak of, only unconvincing promises of payment to be delivered after my return to Vitria.

  In my darkest moments, I even offered myself as a deckhand, hoping to get as far as Gartite, where I could hopefully find more direct passage home.

  It hardly feels necessary to recount the myriad reasons those offers were refused.

  With travel beyond my reach, I soon turned to writing. Transcontinental post was within my means, but its speed and reliability left much to be desired. I sent nearly a hundred letters in the first month, one with every ship that would carry it. To my knowledge, none of them reached their destination. I suspect at least a few are still out at sea, passing from ship to ship in a decades-long journey to arrive at their destination. Some were probably discarded by laughing seamen happy to take a few marks for no work, while others fell afoul of the typical risks involved with sea travel.

  I know that at least four reached Vitria, though they were intercepted before reaching VISIT or the House of Sorrow. The Harbinger was waiting for me, his endless tendrils grasping at every sign of me, eager to pull the last loose thread into his waiting jaws.

  But I digress.

  It took eight months, much of it spent inebriated beyond sense, before I came to terms with the reality of my situation. I was not going home. Even with that harsh revelation, it took another six before I took my first steps on the road to recovery.

  With my family estranged and no patron waiting for me in Vitria, I could scarcely expect anyone to mourn my absence, let alone come in search of me. Yes, it was possible that a letter would reach my House, or that VISIT would make an appeal for my return, but barring a miracle, I would return on The Prince’s White Sands or not at all.

  If I were to survive that long, it could not be at the bottom of a bottle. In this, Steelborn culture worked against me.

  Despite being a world apart, Steelborn and Vitrians have more in common than we Vitrians do with our continental counterparts. Superficially, this is not the case, for we share the building blocks of language, history, and more with our former Celesian brethren, but it is in the core of our being that we differ.

  I have talked before about our dual-track nature, about Obligation and Ambition, and while the Steelborn do not hew to the concept in the same way, I feel they embody it far more than any of our continental cousins.

  To live in Aleph is to live in a place of abundance. There are no poor, no homeless wretches abandoned by society. By both norm and law, anyone within their borders and subject to their jurisdiction is entitled to the necessities of life. This is achieved by communal agreement, an obligation to work toward the betterment of all. At the same time, the reality of that abundance allows any citizen to seek out that which calls to them.

  If Vitrians seek power through our expression of the dual-track, the Steelborn seek meaning. Their art and culture are without peer—as I have expanded upon at length—precisely because their artists need not fear deprivation. A failed performance could shutter a Vitrian studio, while the same disaster would be nothing but a learning experience within Aleph. The same is true of Steelborn scientists, who often spend years or decades with no practical application of their work.

  I think they might have conquered the world, as the Etrusians often wailed, if not for the trap of abundance.

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  The lack of danger.

  Make no mistake, if I make Aleph sounds like a paradise, it is only because it is the closest thing I know to exist. But the flaw in paradise is ennui. I spent over a year eating and drinking away my woes, and I could have continued doing so for another six years with little more than a disappointed scowl from my hosts. There are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Steelborn who do nothing but revel in their gardens and parlors, who play endless games and sing songs for a thousand nights; machines with no ambition beyond the next gallery or dance number.

  They even have a name for it: Sensation Lock.

  It was Praetor Twelve who saved me from such a fate. Or damned me to this one.

  I was infuriated when the messenger reached me. The Prince’s White Sands had left only recently on its second return voyage, and I was incensed at the fact that I could have been aboard if it had finished only a few weeks earlier. That anger simmered below much of our conversation, even as Twelve treated me with far more respect than I deserved.

  However, contrary to my initial expectations, the cipher was not ready, far from it. While Praetor Twelve believed his team would still meet their initial expectations, he candidly admitted they were struggling. The code was not unbreakable, but it stubbornly refused to yield anything but gibberish.

  Twelve had not invited me to view the finished cipher. He had invited me for help.

  I almost laughed at the suggestion, bitter as I was, but a year had given me time to reflect on my previous behavior and to feel guilt at how I had reacted. I accepted his offer, and we spoke at length for the remainder of the afternoon.

  I know now that he expected nothing from me, that the meeting was a pretense. Years later, Praetor Twelve confided in me about his own guilt. He had been one of Zephyr Industries’ last creations, a machine built to make soulless thinking engines at a time when that was considered the stuff of fiction or taboo. Knowing his task would take decades, if not centuries, they built him with a level of focus that bordered on illness. He had not intended to wrong me; his mind simply worked differently. When my situation was finally made clear to him, he sought to make amends.

  Twelve felt responsible for my predicament and aimed to help me avoid the pitfall of Sensation Lock by giving me a purpose. He had procured me an offer of employment as an archivist at one of his sister institutions, something unheard of for an outsider, and his aim that day was to convince me to take it.

  But I surprised him.

  It had never been my intention to deceive Praetor Twelve, or anyone else, when I made the decision to conceal the Class Codexes I had recovered from Cere and Laye. To the contrary, while I found myself unable to willingly destroy the foul books, I felt a strong obligation to keep them out of circulation. They were dangerous, evil things; an unwilling burden, not a treasured secret.

  They should have stayed that way.

  I would like to think that it was my guilt at my treatment of Praetor Twelve that finally moved me, or perhaps my shock at his sudden generosity. In my darker moments, I think I abandoned my moral position, bringing that carnage to the forefront simply in the hope that it would speed his progress. That I could go home.

  Whatever the reason, I removed the books from my dimensional storage for the first time in two years.

  To his credit, Praetor Twelve understood at once why I had hidden them. Though Twelve was inhuman in appearance, I had spent time enough among the Steelborn to recognize their universal body language, and the disgust radiating off the machine was palpable. For just a moment, I feared he might destroy the tomes on the spot.

  It was an understandable reaction. Praetor Twelve was a machine specialized in logic and precision, a being that had spent over a century slowly honing his observation skills to a fine edge. He saw things that I did not—things he has never been able to put into words despite my repeated requests—but he came to the same conclusion. The books were cursed things, containing a class that should never be allowed to propagate.

  Twelve agreed, begrudgingly, that I had been right to conceal them. But now that they had been revealed, they could be put to work. And in doing so, provide the missing piece.

  The cultist alphabet was the first code to be cracked.

  I had made some early efforts to use one codex to crack the other, and through that, to decode the notebooks I had obtained from Cere, back when I had first obtained the second book from Lyre. The theory was simple: the two books were identical, so an ‘A’ in one should correspond in the other. In practice, the cultist alphabet from Cere had six hundred and ninety-seven characters that appeared to be used almost at random. Suffice to say, I could make neither Imperators nor Houses of it, nor could I ask for assistance without revealing my secret.

  Twelve, on the other hand, made contemptuously short work of the cultist alphabet once he had both books in hand. While I still struggle to visualize the specifics, Twelve explained that the alphabet was a two-stage code. First, each character corresponded to one in the Imurian alphabet; the single vertical line character, for example, was the Imurian ‘A’. With six hundred and ninety-seven characters, this meant that there were effectively twenty-five characters that could stand for ‘A’ at any given point in the document.

  Once that initial encoding was complete, the author further complicated matters by swapping each individual letter with two hundred and thirty-eight characters further ahead. So, the first letter of the document was actually the two hundred and thirty-eighth, the second was the two hundred and thirty-ninth, and so forth.

  This sort of dual encoding was an utter annoyance to Twelve, something he ranted about at length. A true craftsman, Praetor Twelve had spent his life devising more and more complex machinery to combat ever more complicated methods of encryption, most of which he himself had designed. To his eyes, this was amateur work, effective not through skill or talent but through brute-force repetition. Anything could be made more secure by stacking methods atop one another—but it was lazy and inelegant.

  And it was vulnerable.

  Twelve hadn’t even needed his thinking machines to break their alphabet once he had his exemplars. He ran through the entire process with pencil and paper, idly tutoring me on his methods while he dismantled their first layer of secrecy.

  Sensing my excitement, Twelve wisely reassured me that it would take much longer to break the cipher used in the journals. Cognizant of his faults and my own previous error, I pressed him for specifics.

  Weeks. If the fundamentals were similar, they would have it in weeks.

  I left that evening with a spring in my step. It would take a year for the Sands to return, and most of a year to return to Vitria. But I would be going home years ahead of schedule.

  Three days later, the entire campus of Null Expedited Research and Development was burned to the ground, and I finally understood the danger of the game I had been playing.