Site Report, Sector 7-Delta: recovery of a "Broadcast Rite" chamber.
The Ancients possessed a small handheld altar, roughly the size of the palm, which they called the Glow-Slab, and from a certain era onward they used it to perform a devotion we have named the Vigil of the Unseen Multitude. The rite unfolded thus: a single supplicant, alone in a modest dwelling, held the slab aloft and spoke, danced, or simply gazed into it for hours, addressing companions who were not present in the room and, so far as our excavations can determine, may never have existed at all.
We know this because the chambers where the rite was performed contain no seating for guests, no vessels for shared food, only a single ring-shaped lamp, always positioned to illuminate the supplicant's face from the front. This lamp, the Halo-Frame, confirms the sacred nature of the act: the Ancients lit only their gods and their dead in such a manner, and here they turned the honor upon themselves.
Most poignant are the recovered inscriptions, tiny votive offerings that ascended the slab during the rite, brief and repetitive: gift of a small heart, gift of a small crown, gift of a rose that was not a rose. These were the currency of blessing, given by the invisible congregation to reward the supplicant's endurance.
The longer one held the vigil, the more hearts one gathered. Rank, therefore, was measured not in grain or gold but in the sheer volume of attention one could summon from the dark.
Let the record show what these fragments compel us to conclude. The Screen People were a civilization that had solved loneliness by making a ceremony of it, that lit their own faces because no one else remained to do so, and that measured a life not by who sat beside them but by how many strangers, briefly, agreed to watch.