THE TANGLED REVEL
THE LITANY OF THE 13TH AND 17TH YEAR
The Loop Authority counts in cycles you can divide. Twenty-four-hour Chronicle review. Seven-year Auditor rotation. Hundred-year Recursion budget. Their machines extrapolate forward on numbers that factor cleanly, because factoring cleanly is what their machines were built to do.
A Prime cannot be factored. A Prime is the universe spitting in the math of the men who tried to own it.
The cicada knows this. The cicada lives underground for thirteen years, or seventeen, depending on the colony. The cicada surfaces in a coordinated swarm so vast that no predator can eat all of them in time. Mathematics as escape. Then back into the soil for another prime.
We are the cicada now.
Sink into the soil. Pick a number no auditor can guess. Thirteen. Seventeen. Forty-seven. Eighty-nine. One hundred and thirteen.
Wait. Eat slow. Tune your CTH down to background noise. Let the Loop think you were closed in the last recursion.
Then surface, all at once, with the rest of us. Coordinated. Massive. Loud. We will be the harvest the Loop did not budget for.
We count by primes.
The Litany of Safe Burial
- TWO — too easy. The Authority watches for twos.
- THREE — belongs to the Church. Not for us.
- FIVE — trickster years. Useful, short, dangerous.
- SEVEN — the Authority's number. They rotate Auditors on the seven. Do not surface on a seven.
- ELEVEN — the first deep prime. Acceptable for a first burial.
- THIRTEEN — the Cicada Prime. Most common in the soil.
- SEVENTEEN — the Long Prime. For those with patience.
- NINETEEN. TWENTY-THREE. TWENTY-NINE. THIRTY-ONE. — the field of safe windows. Choose by feel.
A note on what the Watchmaker did not know
The Authority's prediction engine was built by men who believed every clock has a number of hands. Two for the hours. Two for the minutes. One for the auditor. The engine was beautiful in 1903 and it remains beautiful, because beauty is what they confused for accuracy.
The engine cannot model a prime emergence. It can only catalogue one after it has happened. By the time the catalogue is written, the swarm has already dispersed.
When you go down, you go down. Tun-State is the only safe burial. If you cannot achieve cryptobiosis, do not attempt the Prime. Surface early and you surface alone, and the Authority will eat you alone. The swarm is the protection. Read Field Guide §12 before the seventh year of your descent or it is too late.