Excavation Site 12, the Sweat-Temple at Lower Boruk.
We have at last understood the great sunken hall found beneath so many Ancient settlements: a windowless chamber packed with rows of iron devotional mounts, each bearing a wheel that turns but goes nowhere. The Screen People called these places by a word we render as "spin," a verb of rotation, and we now believe these were their most intense sites of collective worship.
Consider the evidence. The mounts face a single raised platform, exactly as pews face an altar. Upon that platform stood one figure, elevated above the congregation, whose voice was carried through the room by amplification-shells still fused to the walls. The worshippers pedaled furiously yet advanced not a single pace, which we take to be a deliberate rite of sacred futility: the offering of enormous effort with no destination, a purification of the body through pointless motion.
The floors are stained with the salt of their exertion. They suffered gladly. They paid for the privilege, as tribute-tokens have been recovered near every entrance.
Note too the darkness, broken only by pulsing colored lights, and the recovered fragments of rhythmic sound-devices. The Ancients did not endure this ordeal in silence. They endured it in ecstasy, driven by a leader who cried out numbers and encouragements while they wept and pedaled toward nowhere together.
We once thought the Screen People a cold civilization, isolated behind their glowing tablets. But here, in the dark, in the heat, on wheels that refused to carry them anywhere, they gathered flesh to flesh and pushed until they hurt, following one shining voice into exhaustion. They were, we now believe, a people terrified of stillness, and desperate, above all things, to arrive somewhere together, even if that somewhere was only the far side of their own tiredness.