A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but rather because its opponents eventually die. – Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography
Report XII. Filed from the Congress Hall, in felt slippers. Archon Vale writes only about the dead, which in Recto is the one way to grow rich without ever standing in the Theatre: a paper about someone who cannot review it is printed without review. The Academy calls it necrography and calls the historians cowards and buys every volume. Vale is forty-one, tall, courteous and slightly haunted, and measures everything. After each of the three blows Vale has ever received, all of them from Reviewer Two, Vale measured the angle with a brass protractor and wrote it down. Vale took me through the Congress Hall, where the closing banquet of 30 September 1958 is still laid. Three hundred round tables under white cloths. The plates, the glasses with their dry red rings. The napkins dropped on the floor when two thousand nine hundred and seventeen people stood up at once to look at the windows going white. The chairs pushed back. The historians dust it every week with feather brushes and move...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.