Site Report, Chamber Type IV (Subterranean, Windowless). Designation among field staff: the Sweating Cathedral.
We have long puzzled over these buried halls, always sunk below the earth or sealed inside the carcass of some older industrial temple, for the Ancients did not build them for light. No windows. No hearth. Instead a single altar-machine at one end, from which two vast horns projected a low, ceaseless pulse.
We reconstruct the pulse at roughly one hundred thirty beats to the minute, and note with reverence that this is close to the resting heart rate of a frightened animal. The worshippers, we believe, gathered to synchronize their own hearts to the machine's, surrendering the private rhythm of the body to a communal one.
A rite of dissolution.
The keeper of the altar, whom we call the Selector, held the highest rank in this society. Evidence: the throne-platform elevated above the crowd, the ritual headphones (one ear only, so the Selector might hear both the earthly world and the divine simultaneously), and the extraordinary devotion of the assembled, who faced the machine and not one another for the entire duration of the ceremony, which fragmentary records suggest could exceed a full turning of the earth.
At the threshold we recovered the Refusers, a caste of large ceremonial guardians who denied entry to the unworthy on grounds we cannot decipher, though wear patterns on the doorframe suggest most petitioners were turned away and went home in shame.
The Screen People, then, were a folk who fled daylight to weep salt in the dark, who ground their own heartbeats to dust against a shared one, and who understood, better than any people since, that to be admitted anywhere at all is the rarest form of grace.