The road up and the road down are one and the same. – Heraclitus, fragment 60
Report I. To the Bureau, Survey Desk. Filed from Recto, the day after arrival. I walked out of the white at a quarter past four in the afternoon, onto stubble. I had been walking for some time; how long, my watch declines to say. There was no edge to cross. The white simply began to have ground under it, and then a fence post, and then a slack rope on stakes, and then a wooden hut on legs with a woman on its veranda writing in a ledger. She looked at me, wrote one word and closed the book. I learned later what the word was. She had written it every evening of her life, and she had written it that evening before I reached the rope. Recto is a university town. I want the Bureau to have that plainly before anything else, because nothing else here will be plain. It has colleges of pale limestone with flat roofs, an anatomical theatre, an observatory with three green domes, a press, a refectory, a long hall full of punched-card machines, some nine thousand inhabitants and no outside. It l...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.