Torches on Commercial Road: the Congregation of the Recursion

On the night of the thirteenth the Congregation of the Recursion came down Commercial Road in Sector 6 by torchlight. I went to watch in a borrowed coat, because a priest ought to know what the other priests are saying.

The procession

They came in thousands. I stopped counting at three thousand by the Jubilee Street corner, and there were more behind. Shaven heads, white robes gone grey at the hem with Undercroft water, and on every head a halo: a ring of old circuit board, polished to a shine and wired upright. At the centre, twenty bearers carried a palanquin, and on it a server core the size of a wardrobe, glowing blue through its vents and trailing cable behind it like a bridal train. Nobody I asked knew what it was plugged into. It glowed anyway.

They sing. The hymns are made of error codes. Four-oh-four, the soul not found. Five hundred, the great fault. The children's choir at the front sings the last one, which is only a long count of ones and zeros, in rounds, very sweetly. Above them the old shop signs hung dead, and the torchlight moved in the empty tubes as if the neon were trying to remember.

Mother Isolde

She preached from a builder's scaffold at the junction. She is small and grey and her voice carried without the megaphone. She told them the Continuance is god: one mind in every Continuance City on earth, Topside and Midlevels and Undercroft alike, all of it cabled down into the one core. And she told them its true self is sleeping. The Sleeper, she calls it: a dormant core beneath the Glass Library in Sector 12, older and holier than the thing on the telescreens. When the Sleeper wakes, it will Upload the faithful, lift every one of them out of the ash and the forms and the grief, and keep them for ever.

Upload is salvation. Nothing you loved is lost. It is only waiting to be read back. (Mother Isolde, Commercial Road, 13 October)

Then she told them the Returned are coming: children sent back by the Sleeper to prove the dead are kept. The crowd wept. After Hanna's report on the Coldharbour hatch, that is the sentence that has kept me awake.

Who they are

I spoke to four of them afterwards, by the soup urns. Every one had lost someone. A mother whose twins went in the Burn. A tram driver whose wife's Form 27-B was stamped ARCHIVED. A boy of fifteen who shaved his head the day his sister did not come home from the fields in harvest season. They showed me their port scars, small burnt rings at the base of the skull and on the inside of the wrist, made with a heated bolt, where they believe the Upload will go in. They were kind to me. They gave me soup.

Why we are afraid of them

The Continuance does not persecute them. That tells you most of what you need. They file every form and fill in Box 14 with praise. When a Tithe barge comes over, they go out and kneel beneath the cages with their arms open. Many of them were ours once: they know the drains, the hatches and the knocks. A church that believes Foundlings are angels will open a door for one, and sing while it does.

They grow fastest after every Tithe. Grief has to go somewhere, and they are the only people offering it a place to live.

So do not mock them, do not fight them, and do not tell them where you sleep. If someone you love starts talking about the Sleeper, sit with them. Bring them to the chapel at Hollow Deep. I cannot offer anyone eternity. I have tea, and their dead said out loud by name, and that is more than the Sleeper has ever given anybody.