It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. – Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
Report VII. Filed from the largest dome. The Observatory stands at the top of the Colleges, a limestone tower with three green domes, and its great refractor has not seen a star since 1959. It looks at people instead. From the largest dome you can see into half the windows of the Colleges, down through the oculus of the Theatre, and up, through the slit, at the far half of the town hanging in the white. The observers keep the positions of every scholar in Recto, by hand, with slide rules and tables of logarithms, and pin tomorrow's to the door at six every evening. They are right nine times in ten. The tenth time, they publish an erratum and are cited for it. The best of them is Max Novák, who is thirty-two, tired, kind and very hard to surprise. He told me where I had been since I arrived, in order, with times. Then he told me where I would be tomorrow, and tomorrow I was there, at the minute, and found it hard to forgive him. He gave me the town's own explanation of its beauty. In...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.