Recovered from the ruins of a corporate ziggurat: a Convening Chamber, in which we find the most poignant ceremony of the Screen People yet documented.
The Ancients gathered in these rectangular halls in groups of four to six, an auspicious number, and sat in a rough circle around a slab we have named the Altar of Shared Sacrifice. Upon it they placed their glowing tablets face-down, a gesture of ritual humility, though radiocarbon wear on the reverse suggests most secretly turned them over beneath the table to consult more private gods.
Their liturgy was elaborate. One celebrant, the Facilitant, would inscribe words upon a great vertical white plane in colored wax that could be wiped away, proof that no covenant made here was meant to survive the day. The others performed the sacred responses we have partially decoded: "circle back," "take this offline," "align on the deliverable."
We believe "deliverable" was a votive object promised to an absent higher power, since no artifact by that name has ever been recovered. It was, we now understand, never actually made.
The most telling find is the vessel-hoard: dozens of ceremonial cups, all abandoned half-full, and a single flat cake of unknown grain, one slice removed, the rest left to petrify as an offering. Around it, the postures preserved in the ash tell of long suffering nobly borne. One skeleton was found with its hand raised, mid-gesture, waiting.
They came together to accomplish nothing and consecrated hours to it, and we love them for this above all their works. For here was a people who feared the silence of solitude so profoundly that they invented reasons to sit in a room and slowly agree to meet again.