A thought occurred to me as I left the Imperial Archive. I have been told this is a common occurrence upon leaving these vaunted halls. It has something to do with how the brain ambiently processes information, ever scanning its surroundings for threats, obstacles or opportunities. Entering a new room triggers this mechanism, given all the new information it suddenly has to process. The Imperial Plaza provided the opposite of new information, which was a very distinct quality of informational input. No one knew why the Ancients had chosen to place the Archives in the middle of a vast expanse of finely crafted yet uniformly flat stonework, or why the subsequent generations and iterations of Ancients had chosen to keep it that way, yet there it was, utterly obliterating any previous line of thought to give rise to a completely new line of flight:
If truth is contextual and prone to vary as the needs, priorities and wishes of those who happen to inhabit said contexts change, what hope is there of an eternally valid archive? What manner of preservation could hope to stand the test of time? When the barbarians were at the gate, what manner of argument swayed their course to loot some other building? Why had the Imperial Archive survived and been able to continue its archival function, while the empires it nominally served came and went according to the savageries of entropy? What use could the archived material be if it was transcribed according to priorities foreign to those of the contemporary residents?
Perhaps – and this is the thought that occurred to me – the answer is to be sought in the very plaza that so confuses and surrounds the Archive. Trying to take the Archive itself would be a tactical nightmare, moving too many troops over the vast expanse of flat terrain. With a minimum of preparation, any current empire could turn the Plaza into a kill zone, a no man’s land where angels fear to tread. A weaponization of the negation of information. Even if the Archive were somehow successfully occupied, there would be nowhere to go; it did not connect to anything, and to get back to the battle any invading army would have to cross the same featureless terrain again. With no material gain to be had through conquest, the building was left alone.
And so, when the barbarians had battered down the gates and made their bids to imperial power, what they tended to find out was that they needed someone to administrate their newfound empire. Moreover, they needed someone to train these administrators. Seeing as there was an institution right there which would be willing to do just that, no strings attached, most barbarians opted to include the Archive in their newfangled imperial ambition, thus ensuring the continuation of the Imperial prefix.
These musings did not answer the question of how to keep knowledge relevant over generations, but it did shed light on how to go about sustaining the attempt. Perhaps this, too, was a clue in its own way. The first step in creating an Eternal Archive was to create a surviving archive; the rest could be figured out with the time given.
More longer friend see that sky? 