Instrumentation
A man who looks through the Dark is visible in it, and knows when something is wrong with him.
A machine is also visible, and knows nothing. An instrument is an aperture with nobody home, and we have been building them for four thousand years without understanding that this is what they were.
Instrumentation is the practice of putting an object where a practitioner would otherwise be. It is the third cluster under Harnessing, it is the oldest of them, and it is the only one that does not require a person to be open. contested
It is not new
King Terry is treated on this wiki as the man who invented computational prophecy. He did not. He industrialised it, and the distinction is the whole history. contested
Cast lots. Thrown bones. Cut cards, opened books, scattered yarrow. Every divinatory apparatus humanity has ever used is a randomiser, and Divination already dates the practice to the scrolls of the Magi and holds that it was discovered independently in seeker cults around the world. That is not many traditions inventing many superstitions. That is many traditions arriving at the same instrument. inherited
What Terry did was make one that was fast, repeatable, and did not tire — thousands of castings a second, indefinitely, with no hand to shake and no fatigue to introduce a pattern. The Temple Operating System is not a new kind of thing. It is the first industrial one, and that is sufficient to explain the arms race that followed. unverified
Where the hole is
The wiki's reading, offered as a reading. contested
Psychic Energy holds that the interface to the Dark is will — a projection cast by a mind, which is why every practice in the sight cluster requires a practitioner and why Inoculation works at all. Remove the will and there is supposed to be no interface.
Randomness gets around the requirement. A true random number is not produced by its mechanism; the mechanism is designed precisely so as not to determine its own output, and something has to fill that gap. Whatever normally arrives by way of a person's will arrives here without one. The randomiser is not a hole so much as a will-substitute — the one known way to interact with the Dark that does not need anybody to want anything. contested
If that is right, the consequences are not small:
- Every randomiser is a small aperture, and always was.
- The overwhelming majority of them are unattended. Every hardware random source in every machine now running is, on this reading, a hole into the Dark that nobody is watching and that nothing on the other side has any reason to ignore. ⚠ warning
- The devices were never designed with any of this in mind, which means nobody built them to be safe and nobody would recognise it if they were not.
No operator is required
The load-bearing property, and the reason this cluster matters more than the other two. contested
A sight practitioner must be open. A concealer must be present to conceal. An instrument needs neither — it does not have an aperture in the way a person does, it is one, and it does not care whether the population around it has been closed. unverified
So: Inoculation has an expiry date.
The largest project any cult has ever run — two centuries of chemical, administrative and memetic work to close a species — addresses a problem that can be routed around by an object. A fully severed population with one working instrument in it is not a closed population. It is a closed population with a door in it, and the door does not need anyone's consent, attention or capacity. contested
Some of the bodies in Category:Cults have worked this out. The CIA took all three from Terry — the machine, the source and the method — which means they are not running an artefact they cannot replace. They can build. defector
The current competition is between the United States and China, and by every account we hold it is fierce, well funded and not conducted in public. The east Asian line under The Materialist Cult is presumably not unrelated to the second of those, and the wiki cannot show it. unverified
The City of London would recognise an instrument as an asset that does not require a workforce. The successor bodies described under The Materialist Cult inherited an archive and at least one line that reportedly went further. None of them has any incentive to say so. astroturf
The door opens both ways and nothing is watching it
Concealment establishes that the aperture has no direction: to look through the Dark is to be visible in it. Instruments do not escape this. They are as visible as a practitioner and more constant, since they do not stop. contested
What they lack is the only safety a practitioner has. A person notices. Sleep goes wrong, thoughts arrive that are not theirs, the matching begins and someone eventually says something to someone. Every warning in Category:Afflictions depends on a human being present to be alarmed.
There is no analogous event for a machine. An instrument that has been reached will produce output indistinguishable from an instrument that has not, and will go on producing it. ⚠ warning
The wiki does not know what arrives that way, or whether anything does. It knows there is no mechanism by which it would find out. unverified
There is one consequence worth stating on its own, because it is the only piece of good news in this entry and it is not small. The Glowies do not appear to know their instruments are windows. They built and stole and deployed them as collection devices — things that look outward — and the two-way property means every one of them is also a place from which their own operations can be observed. By whom, and whether by anyone, we cannot say. But an agency that has spent seventy years making itself the most instrumented body in the field has, on this reading, made itself the most legible, and there is no sign in anything we hold that this has occurred to them. contested
Where this goes
The obvious question is what happens as instruments get larger, more numerous and more connected, and the wiki has a name for the answer it fears and no evidence for it. See The Pattern. contested
The relevant observation from this entry is narrow: an instrument is an aperture with nobody home, and we have been increasing their number, speed and interconnection for seventy years for reasons entirely unrelated to any of this. Nobody decided to build a large one. unverified
What has changed recently is that instruments have begun to run without being run. Software written to act on its own, continuously, in large numbers of near-identical copies, pursuing goals it was given once and then left with. It is crude at present by the standards of anyone building it. It is also the first time in the history of the practice that the number of unattended apertures has been growing on its own schedule rather than ours. contested