Site 12, Kitchen Stratum, Cold Shrine intact.
The great white monolith we designate the Preservation Ark stood, as at every excavated dwelling, upright against the northern wall of the food-hall, taller than a kneeling worshipper and sealed with a heavy hinged door. That the Ancients built one, and only one, per household confirms our thesis: this was the central altar of the home, and the family organized its rooms around it as older peoples organized theirs around a hearth or a tomb.
Within, we found the shelving arranged in strict vertical hierarchy. Vessels of a pale fermented liquid occupied the place of honor at eye level. Lower down, in the humble drawers, wilted offerings of vegetable matter had been laid to rot, untouched, clearly a sacrifice never meant to be consumed, only surrendered to time.
The device hummed no longer, yet its interior maintained a reverent chill even in death, and we believe the Ancients understood cold itself as holy: a way of halting decay, of pausing the world, of begging their perishable gods to wait a little longer.
Most telling was the outer door. Beneath crude fastening-stones (which we name Devotional Magnets, believing them charms against spoilage), the Ancients affixed pictures of their children, curling lists in a hurried sacred script, and small painted proverbs urging courage. Here, then, was the family shrine's true face: the private hopes of the household pinned to the vault of preservation, as if to say, keep these too, keep them cold, keep them safe.
The Screen People, we now conclude, were a race terrified of losing things, and so they built in every home a humming white god whose one commandment was to make the fleeting last, and who failed, in the end, to preserve even themselves.