Recovery Site D-9, "The Congregation Floor." Excavation revealed forty-three adult Ancients arranged in a single chamber, all standing upright, all facing subtly different directions, each fitted with a cranial device we have designated a ear-crown. Preservation was exceptional; the postures were captured mid-gesture, arms raised, hips angled, one figure caught in a permanent half-turn away from the others.
The scene defied every prior model of Screen Age assembly. In all known gathering-halls, the Ancients faced a common altar. Here, there was none. Each worshipper attended to a private revelation transmitted directly into the skull, and no two revelations agreed. My colleague Vessin insists this proves the Late Screen People had, at last, abandoned the tyranny of the shared signal and achieved a civilization of perfect solitude, each citizen a sealed and sovereign world.
I find this reading cold, and the artifacts refute it. Wear patterns on the ear-crowns show they were passed hand to hand, warm from the previous head. The floor itself was polished to a mirror by the friction of many feet that moved, and moved together, in the loose rhythmic swaying our texts associate with joy.
And near the doorway we recovered the master transmitter: a single source, beaming three separate hymns at once, so that any two Ancients standing side by side might be moved by entirely different music and never know it.
So I picture them now: a people who could no longer agree on a single song, and who solved this not by parting ways but by dancing anyway, shoulder to shoulder, each alone inside a private heaven, all of them silent, all of them certain the person beside them heard the very same thing. They were wrong. They were together.
I no longer believe those two facts contradict.