If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. – Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 1675
Report V. Filed from the Index Hall. The Index is the Congress building of 1958, a long limestone hall with a skylight of white glass, and in it stand forty punched-card sorters and tabulators, the machines that were shipped in to count the votes and the coffee of the Congress, and have counted everything since. Every citation made in Recto is a card. The cards run through the sorters day and night with a dry, continuous rattle like rain on a tin roof, and fill oak drawers that cover the walls to the ceiling. The Registrar says she can hear a ring in the sound: when a group of scholars cite each other in a circle, the same cards come round, and the machine slows by a fraction. A ring, in Recto, is both the place where you fight and the thing you are prosecuted for. On the first of every month the balances are read aloud in the hall in alphabetical order, and the hall is full. People stand with their hands in their pockets and listen for their names. Whoever is not called is uncited. ...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.