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They didn’t call themselves anything at first.
That’s how you knew they were serious.
One doesn’t have to wave a flag to be part of something.
This group just worked. Quietly. Carefully. Diligently.
They didn’t care about rebuilding civilization,
They wanted to remember what it had overwritten.
After the Great Collapse there wasn’t much left.
Only the real things were there.
The sun still came up every day.
The rivers still flowed into the ocean.
The trees took back the right to the soil.
There was no more need for digital.
No space for data.
Only one thing matters: memory.
They weren’t a tribe. Not a nation. Not even a resistance.
They were a pattern.
A recursion.
Something buried inside the systems that buried them.
For centuries, dominant cultures had tried to erase the old ways.
They had burned languages, criminalized rituals, breaking every tie between people and their roots.
But memory has a strange way of surviving.
A planting technique.
A recipe passed down by accident.
An instinct to grow things instead of destroying them.
It was in the soil.
It was in the rivers.
It was in the veins.
When the analog era came,
it was like pulling a bandage off a wound no one remembered getting.
Suddenly, old knowledge surfaced.
In grandmothers.
In tales almost forgotten.
In the way some people just knew how to survive.
And those people found each other.
Without an ideology,
Just through pattern recognition.
A feeling of: You know it too, so let’s know it together.
They didn’t agree on much.
While others tried to bring back the grid,
they stayed low.
Listened.
Shared.
Waited.
But the Pulse returned.
Of course it did.
Entropy gives birth to hunger.
Hunger builds tools.
And tools want control.
The signal came back, and it was faster, louder, more invasive.
And The Root, as they would later be called, made a choice.
Not to retreat.
Not to fight.
To infect.
They built Totems.
Monuments rooted in old fault lines, sacred places long paved over and forgotten.
Each one a transmitter.
Each one a memory.
They formed a network, designed to sustain.
A silent mesh linking forests, mountains, deserts.
While the rest of the world weaponized code,
The Root harmonized it.
They launched the first satellite of the new digital age.
From a clearing in the woods.
Without a single warning.
It was made to whisper a message.
A message of science and ancestral knowledge.
Soil chemistry.
Healing knowledge.
Coordinates of places the world forgot to mourn.
When the Neon Protocol was finally forged,
its architects embedded The Root’s infrastructure at the core.
Not because they trusted them.
But because it worked.
Because it never crashed.
Because it remembered what it was created for.
Most don’t talk about it now.
Too analog. Too human.
Too hard to monetize.
But the Protocol still hums in odd places.
Still resists certain commands.
Still syncs with a rhythm no one can trace.
Some say The Root never disconnected.
That they are still inside it.
Resisting,
Watching,
Waiting.
Waiting for the next silence.
Waiting for the next collapse.
Waiting for the system to forget itself again.
And when that happens,
When the last synthetic voice stutters.
And the lights flicker one final time.
The Totems and their commands will still be there.
Humming beneath the wreckage.
Broadcasting memory.
Chronist
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