Percy:  Exactly. And those dots represent the components of the state's Dome of Domestication.

Red:  Oh yeah.  Governing Interface, Superstructure and Trade Lane Interface.  What do they serve?

Percy:  They signal what component a propaganda campaign is attempting to change: the government, a law, or control of a trade node.  Or all three at once.  Those dots are central to constructing a Tessera for mapping inside a Dome.  But for perimeter mapping we are only interested if an entire Dome changed.

Red:  What do you mean by entire?

Percy:  From the concept itself -- meaning the name -- down through the government and laws linked to how the state creates wealth from the trade lanes.  In other words, how it relates externally to the rest of the Domes in its sector of the Resource Exploitation Machine.  If the entire Quadrant lights up,  it should indicate a structural adjustment in the power grid of Abstract Space.  That is, a major energy event.  We take our first relative measurements from these points of change. 

Red:  Relative?

Percy:  We don't have an absolute measurement tool -- like a math formula -- but we can try to gauge the relative power of events across space and time.  Particularly time.  And the Quadrant, helps us add the depth of time to the flat Screen.  Look at this graphic up on the Big Screen.

Red:  Oh my Percy.  Mighty big cone you got there...

Percy:  We are doing a rather big picture.  Lots going on here.  First, note we are looking at the side of the Screen, which appears as a line, with the Quadrant in vertical alignment.  The upper horizontal line is the propaganda concept -- in this case the Bible -- over time.  The bottom line marks events in its paired Object, the Jezreel Valley.  See Sidebar:  The Quadrant's Dots

Red:  What are the dates?

Percy:  The points when the Jezreel Valley changed Empires.  These are objective, and fairly easy to determine via Wikipedia. 

Red:   Really? Objective?
Percy:  Yeah.  You will see.  Some people may quibble.  But again, this just lays down markers that should indicate a surge of abstract energy.  Overall these dates, I believe, will help us measure the long-frequency waves of imperial entropy.  That is the wave-length from creation to destruction of an imperial system created by writing.  And each one has a Screen.   We will bounce through them.  Drop a Quadrant and initiate our mapping of Abstract Space.  We return later and zoom in on the feedback loops spinning off them with the Tessera.  But here's the linear wrinkle...we can't keep this straight timeline in our heads.  We must convert it into a circuit.  This graphic might help...

Red:  This should be interesting...

Percy:   ...up on the Big Screen. 

Red:  Look's a little like the Propaganda Portal, but with the green dot turned into a circuit...

Percy:  Yep.  I've extracted the timelines from the Event Cone and turned them into a kind of portal.  Think of this as an overhead view of the Ur-Dome.  Meaning Abstract Space.  The blue base contains what writing -- at least the oldest "book" still active on the Screen today -- says is the system's full cycle from creation to destruction.  And the green circuit is the set of objective events we've extracted via the GT Engine to penetrate this illusion, which we will now map with the Perception Perimeter tools introduced in this Torus. 

Red:  I still don't see how something as simple as before and after can disrupt your cyclical thinking...

Percy:  You may be able to get around linear time in the mapping of historical events.  But the whole idea of this experiment is to unlock the linear cages on the HyperScreen of the Present -- meaning live, in "real time."  Which is not linear.  In information warfare operations, when my HyperFlow triggered, linear time dissolved -- enabling me to see the entire 4D map of abstract energy, and jump onto future Screens.   We will have time to discuss time during the mapping...ready to get going?  

Red:  Why not?  I'll surf that wave out of Armageddon.  On that timeline -- er, circuit -- I recognized 1918 as the end of World War I...paddling out from a familiar beach at least.  

Percy:  Sorry.  We need to jump back as far as possible and rotate through the Screens to the present, plotting coordinates on past event cones along the way. 

Red:  I was afraid you'd say that.  But I don't get why only past cones...

Percy:  We are creating a formula from the past to predict the future in our present.  Today we know about past events but can only guess what comes next.  So we must measure historical energy from the perspective of humans living in their present.  They didn't know future outcomes of current events.  Nor should we. 

Red:  But what if I already know about these past events when we jump back and pretend to be in the present?

Percy:  Know what exactly?  Are you a big reader of any historical period?  

Red:  Well, I've read a fair amount.  Ahhh.  Who am I kidding.  I pick up the occasional popular history book recommended by the Times Book Review...bluff my way through dinner party banter.  Usual shit...

Percy:   Good.  The less you think you know, the better.  One simple suggestion: drop causality from the events you've read about.  Just note they occurred.  Now let's consider Screen B, the Jezreel Valley in 539 BC.  I've put the Quadrant on the Big Screen, with the imperial changes.

Red:  Why Screen B?  Your timeline starts at Screen A, in 609 BC...

Percy:  Screen A gives us a baseline.  Otherwise we'd be starting from a constant in Screen B, not a change.   In 539 BC we can see a change in the concept's light blue dot -- the name of the imperial province containing the Jezreel Valley.  Therefore we assume everything else on the Quadrant changed as well:  the dark blue dot of the government, the orange of the laws and the green of the infrastructure node.  I want to stress that we are only looking at the outward-facing laws: those that govern the province's relationship to the Empire and its trade lanes.  We are not peering inside the Dome.  Again, that requires a Tessera.

Red:  Yeah.  O.K.  I suppose those changes are self-evident at this 30,000 foot level.  But what if you find one of them didn't change?

Percy:  That would be very interesting -- an inconsistency worth exploring if and when we stumble across one...next, we establish Screen B's M3 Power Supply.  One warning.  Movement, money and messages within the trade lanes don't change overnight.  We just need to determine what was flowing through those high-voltage cables once the Empire had consolidated its trading system.  Which is very easy with Wikipedia. 

Red:  Um...isn't sequencing important?

Percy:   Yes.  But establishing broad patterns through a dialectical engine means zooming in and out, across space and time.  Placing down markers.  Comparing and contrasting.  Filling in the gaps...until you can think in four dimensional networks, well, this may be hard.  Never mind that the alphabet never makes it easy.  I always get tripped up if I spend too much time inside writing.  And you, Red, see the world through it. 

Red:  Sorry for laughing...I gotta laugh.  Because I simply don't know how to respond to that.

Percy:  Then don't...let's begin with what we can find about the Screen's M3 Power Supply on the pages of Wikipedia.

Red:  You like Wikipedia, don't you?

Percy:  Love it.  That crowd-sourced beauty holds the conventional wisdom of literacy in one predictable and easy to navigate space -- complete with hyperlinks and references.  The living front page of the Illusion stretching across space and time.  And without the distortion of advertising.  I donate to it; so should you. 

Red:  So you aren't a Luddite...

Percy:   Always use the tools.  Never let them use you...now look up on the Big Screen.  This is the Persian Empire's M3 Power Supply.  Let's start with the medium of the money: the coins from the Sardis mint and mines.  Historians, by the way, consider Sardis the birthplace of coinage. 

Red:  Wait.  How do you determine its source of money without grammar?

Percy:  Find the name of the Empire's currency, where it's minted and the primary silver and/or gold mine.  Wikipedia says the coinage of the Persian Empire is the gold daric and silver siglos minted from Sardis in western Anatolia, which also contains the mines.  Again.  We can always adjust.  Just setting down markers...

Red:  Fair enough.

Percy:  The medium of the movement is the Royal Roads, protected by the Persian cavalry.  Historians consider this the first master plan transportation network, with rest stops -- caravanserie -- for merchants bringing Asian goods west and European metals east.

Red:  I guess I see that.  Which leaves the medium of the message.  Odd, medium of the message, that sounds familiar... See Sidebar: The Medium of the Message

Percy:  The Persian changes to this medium are both subtle and powerful.  By adopting papyrus and the Aramaic alphabet, the Empire has boosted the volume, velocity and distribution of abstract energy.  Bear in mind that papyrus is fragile, so we can assume most of the writing from that period just faded away...

Red:  Oh.  Wait.  Now I get why we landed at Screen B.  We've arrived at the beginning of the alphabet.

Percy:  That was around five hundred years earlier.  

Red:  What's this thing about 500 years?  Are you making things up to find patterns?

Percy:   Just reading the written record.  Apparently the alphabet was invented around 1000 BC by Phoenicians in modern day Lebanon.  It took that long to become a tool of imperial control. 

Red:  Things can get adopted slowly I guess.

Percy:   I don't know.  Perhaps at the time it was smart to have symbols that are difficult to master and compose -- and different than the spoken language.  Pretty strong secret code for controlling the masses.  Doesn't appear to have traveled well, though.  Smart maneuver warfare operators -- say semi-nomadic traders from the area around the Susa crossroads on the Eurasian trade lane -- can run circles around a slow-moving cuneiform empire.

Red:  Huh.  I see what you mean by things flipping and inverting when we peer through the Screen. 

Percy:  I know, and we still haven't left its surface.  So...the alphabet's adoption marks the beginning of contemporaneous recording of events.  The consensus is that the oldest of these chronicles was created by Babylon's Jewish community around the time of the Persian conquest.  They codified their faith into laws wrapped in parables and prophecies, which preserved -- across space and time -- the identity of a tribe at the fault line of the first Western Empires.  Do you think the tribe of Judah would have disappeared -- like all other tribes -- under the waves of empires if it hadn't been the first to freeze its symbols, laws and history with alphabetic text?

Red:  Oh.  Right.  That's your whole deal.  We haven't landed at the beginning of the alphabet.  We've arrived at the birth of the Bible!

Percy:   Our Propaganda Concept, and the portal through the Illusion.

Red:  So now is it finally time to go through the Looking Glass?!?

Percy:   Not yet.  One more room to go. 

​