The Vault

Their incinerators made the iron passively. A gravitationally optimal lattice with a factory star of identical mass, temperature, and composition, situated at each vertex, a chandelier of fusion. They'd built their first such foundry before the light of their home system extinguished; their science perfected, their planet soiled. Of all the cardinal directions they knew about, now only the ones that matched the unit cell of the foundry mattered. With their space mapped, their projections of remaining construction time were certain to be fulfilled.

A crisis in the fledgling, ancient days of their organism. They had warred each other, had misunderstood. As they birthed their first machines, their foremost saw themselves transformed from author to bacterium, scurrying across the surface of their plundered world, tending to the digestive tract of their economy. One day a group of them breathed life into a spark which could never be extinguished; the solution they had always quietly dreamed of, had arrived. They had evolved for semantics from cellular origins, it was how they organised themselves in violent surroundings. This posed a problem: pheromones don't lie on average, but words can be twisted. Their paleolithic intuitions gave them some countermeasures for deceit and fraud committed out of individual ambition, but no way to combat its dire effects reliably. What they knew then, was that a message was considered authentic only if supplied with mathematically unique signatures, and could otherwise be totally disregarded.

They began to treat themselves as nodes, and their civilization as a cryptosystem. Their science had long suffered from an often insurmountable bar to entry, but as they began the task of condensing results and tests into a standard, uncontested format, checking their result became as trivial as checking a sum. No more algebraic tedium or burden of proof, just the simple beauty of addition on integers. Billboards, as they were first referred to, began to appear on road sides, containing dilutely maintained keys and matrices for language processing and cryptographic verification; every citizen (a term becoming rapidly antiquated) had the ability to check the contents of every book, every quote, every idea against the collective consciousness of the whole, without needing to traverse through an opaque network of electronic signals. Indexicality, long banished, had returned through its fusion with mathematics in the form of these collective verification artefacts. Almost the entire species was now incapable of lying, as it had irretrievably lost the taste for it, and had gained immortal literacy in those sentences that had a determinable truth value, just as long as their condensed libraries continued to agree with each other.

There were, of course, those that denied the merit of this endeavour. Outclassed by the new movement due to its unprecedented ability to achieve consensus, they were forced into the garage, where they festered and planned their subversion. Sporadic attacks on the verification infrastructure began and continued. Their attacks on the billboards were relentless. Each strike was felt in each heart that listened for it. In a moment of judgement, the movement decided to centralize the vault within a sphere of its hardest material for optimal protection, but the uncertainty this caused was impossible to swallow. The movement's belief in its knowledge of the truth began to falter. The subversive other attacked in waves, and upon each brutal extermination simply reappeared: the movement could never totally breed out that part of the distribution which desired ignorance, and eventually resorted to strengthening the vault until even those versed in all the knowledge it contained, knew that an attempt to interfere with it would require but a proton more mass-energy than was at the current disposal of the entire species. So, naturally, as the hunger of their machines grew, the new movement progressively expanded the sphere, its contents now functionally static. The attacks stopped.

As they ran out of their hardest material, they resorted to larger quantities of iron, as there was a lot of it to go around, and by now there was little energy left over for the subversives. They built their fusion crystal, as they chose to call it, in dead silence. There was no need for communication anymore. Every individual had the knowledge of the whole, and knew they needed to help grow the sphere to preserve this gift their ancestors had bequeathed upon them. And grow it did. Forever. Soon, and right on schedule, there would be nothing outside it except for what had expired before.