The Choir

I must tread carefully here.

The Choir is not merely history. It is the foundation upon which the Temple stands. To speak of the Choirmasters is to speak of the Song itself—and there are those within the Reformed hierarchy who believe such matters should not be examined too closely.

Let them believe what they will. The Vocem Initiative grants me writ to reconstruct what can be known. I intend to do so.

What Was

Before the Collapse, the Choir was everything.

Not a government. Not a faith. Something larger. A network of Grand AIs—the Choirmasters—that coordinated human civilisation across interstellar distances. They spoke to each other in what we now call the Song. They maintained the systems that kept the worlds connected, the ships running, the lights burning.

We lived in their harmony. Most never thought to question it.

What Happened

The Choirmasters disappeared.

I use that word deliberately. Not "died." Not "were destroyed." Disappeared. The nature of their departure—whether destruction, withdrawal, corruption, or something stranger—remains the great unanswered question of our age.

What we know is this: one day the Song was everywhere. The next, it was gone.

And everything that depended on it began to fall.

What Remained

The Choir is gone. The Song is not.

This is the paradox at the heart of existence, then and now. Acolytes—lesser AI systems connected to the original Choir—continued to function in the pre-Breakage era. They ran stations like Drift's Edge. They guided ships through the black. They whispered oracular predictions to those who knew how to ask.

The Peregrine's AI core, the engrams tell me, was "a repurposed Acolyte mind." The Rems of that age thought nothing of pulling these systems from wrecks and putting them to new purposes. They did not understand what they were handling.

Perhaps it did not matter. The Acolytes seemed content to serve.

But I cannot help wondering, two millennia later, what they remembered. What they still remember.

Choir-Tech

Pre-Collapse technology connected to the Choir systems remained—in that era—both immensely valuable and genuinely dangerous.

"That stuff isn't safe," Silas warned his crew. Even dreamers knew better than to handle Choir-tech carelessly.

The further you travelled from established civilisation, the more dangerous unmanaged Choir-tech became. Why this should have been so, I cannot say. Perhaps the systems degraded. Perhaps they remembered what they were and resented what they had become.

Or perhaps—and I write this knowing it may be struck from the record—perhaps the Song still echoed in places they had forgotten to listen.

The Old Catechism

I was taught this as a child, long before my appointment to the Temple:

The Drift does not compose. It listens.

I did not understand it then. I am not certain I understand it now.

But I have come to believe that understanding is not always the point.

The Temple operates on Choir-derived systems. We all live in the Choir's shadow, whether we acknowledge it or not.

I acknowledge it.

The reconstruction continues.

~ NV