Field Journal, Excavation of a Late Screen Age Labor-Temple.
We have long known that the Ancients gathered daily in vast partitioned halls (the "cubicle-shrines") to perform coordinated devotions before their glowing tablets. What we did not understand, until the discovery of the Threshold Deposit in the eastern wing, was how they marked the end of a devotee's service.
The deposit is unmistakable: a flat baked confection bearing carbon-scored sugar-glyphs, a cluster of ceremonial signature-cloths (small, square, ink-stained, passed hand to hand and marked by dozens), and a single cardboard reliquary containing personal totems, a framed image of kin, a chipped drinking vessel, a small figure of no ecclesiastical rank. These were not discarded. They were gathered with immense care, as one gathers the belongings of the honored dead.
We infer a rite of departure. The devotee moved once more through the halls, and at each shrine the others rose from their labors, clasped the departing one's hands, and spoke the ritual formula, of which only fragments survive: "keep in touch." The confection was consumed communally. The cloths were inscribed.
And then, in the great ceremony we call the Last Locking, the devotee surrendered the sacred rectangular access-token that had granted entry to the temple, and passed for the final time through the glass doors.
That the artifacts show heavy wear and no damage tells us these people did not leave in anger or defeat. They lingered. They circled the halls slowly. They photographed the emptied cubicle-shrine, as if to prove to some later self that the sacred place had once held them.
I have come to believe the Screen People did not worship gods at all.
They worshipped belonging, and they knew, with a grief we can only excavate, that every belonging was a thing they were only borrowing.