"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God." — Gospel of John 1:1-2 (King James Version, marginalia notation: 'but which word? and whose beginning?')
The Bureau's Temporal Cartography Division has logged seventeen distinct moments at which the shard designated The Architecture of Babel may have first achieved material coherence. Seventeen is not, by multiverse standards, an unusual number of contested origin-points. What is unusual is that all seventeen moments are simultaneously verifiable, mutually exclusive, and — in the words of Senior Temporal Analyst Breckenridge-Holst, who resigned shortly after filing this observation — 'somehow equally true, which is not a thing that is supposed to be possible even here.' The shard does not have a history so much as it has a palimpsest: each layer of origin-claim partially obscuring and partially illuminating the ones beneath it, the whole assemblage constituting something that resembles history the way a coral reef resembles the organisms that built it. The dominant Bureau hypothesis, championed by the Historical Materialization Unit's Third Chair and contested by essentially everyone who...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.