Catalogue Entry: The Compliance Bell, recovered in near-perfect condition from a bedside stratum.
Every dwelling of the Screen People yielded at least one, positioned within an arm's reach of the sleeping platform, and we now believe no member of the society was permitted to sleep without one standing guard. The device emitted a sound at a preordained hour, a sound the Ancients did not choose to hear and could not refuse.
This is the crucial detail. They set the hour themselves, the evening before, in an act of extraordinary self-abnegation: each citizen, nightly, sentenced their future self to wake in darkness, and then obeyed the sentence without appeal.
We name it the Compliance Bell, for it enforced a covenant between a person and the person they would become. The wear patterns on its upper surface, a single worn depression, tell us the waking act was violent and repetitive. They struck it. Every morning, the first gesture of the day was to silence the thing they themselves had commanded to speak.
Some units permitted a brief reprieve, a second summons minutes later, which suggests a merciful clergy allowed the faithful to negotiate, once, with the hour of their own choosing.
The elder scholar Venn maintains these were instruments of a sun-cult, tools to greet the dawn. I reject this. The Ancients timed the bell to sound before the sun, in defiance of it. They did not wake to meet the light. They woke to arrive somewhere, and the light was incidental.
They were a people who did not trust themselves to rise, and so built a small loyal tyrant to do the trusting for them: a civilization that could split the atom and chart the stars, yet could not, unaided, be relied upon to open its own eyes.