Nova Arcis G 6
The Storyteller’s Art
Cokas’ and LYRA.ai’s tour of Nova Arcis had brought them to their final destination before the grand finale of their broadcast. They were now inside the very building they had just been viewing from the alpine meadow: the old OCN headquarters tower.
It was no longer a place of bustling, high-stakes operations and media production anymore. The tower, a grand monument of 27th-century architecture, had been transformed into the Museum of Interstellar Communication. They walked through its quiet, reverent halls, moving through a physical timeline of the very technologies that had shaped their thousand-year story.
The first gallery was a study in primitive genius. Behind shielded glass cases sat the artifacts of ancient Earth: a Morse telegraph key, its brass polished to a dull gleam; a complex, menacing-looking Enigma machine from a forgotten global war; a crude but revolutionary Reis-Phone, and beside it, the more elegant Bell model. One entire section was dedicated to the brilliant, chaotic mind of Tesla, his coils and wireless transmitters looking like instruments of strange magic. Wall-sized media-streams, now beautifully restored and animated, showed flickering black-and-white images of Marconi with his first wireless sets and the towering antennas of Telefunken. The air hummed with the ghosts of forgotten signals.
“It’s easy for us to see these as simple, almost quaint objects,” Cokas mused, his voice a low, respectful murmur as they passed an exhibit on 20th-century radio. “But each one of these was, in its time, a reality-shattering breakthrough. Each one created its own version of the ‘Great Noise,’ its own crisis of perception. They made the world smaller, faster, and more frightening for the people who had to live through the change.”
They moved into the next hall, which was dominated by the bulky, complex machinery of the early space age. Here were the first Priority Message apparatuses—massive consoles of humming quantum processors and delicate cryogenic arrays. They were the tools of the “Silver Age,” the machines that had allowed institutions like the High Yards and OCN to hold a fragmented galaxy together through the slow, painstaking art of asynchronous deliberation. “The art of the compromise,” Cokas said, his voice a low murmur as he looked at a decommissioned HYAOPH courier terminal. “When you look back at that final ‘Official Debate,’ that’s what truly stands out. It began with such polarized positions. Professor Tanaka’s call for a hard quarantine, the very real logistical nightmares Director El-Amin laid out… it felt irreconcilable.”
He shook his head, a look of a historian marvelling at a complex event. “And yet, by the end, you can see the shift. You can feel the influence of Academian Sollus’s long view, her insistence on looking inward. The entire conversation pivoted. It transformed, almost imperceptibly, from a frantic debate about what to do about the ‘Alien Question’ into a much deeper, more thoughtful inquiry into what it meant to be human in such a vast, mysterious universe.”
LYRA.ai, who had been walking in a thoughtful silence, her connecting the historical artifacts around her to the vast memories she remembered, finally spoke. “It was a remarkable example of successful public discourse,” she agreed, her voice a model of careful neutrality. “The data shows a clear, galaxy-wide shift in public sentiment following that broadcast. Keywords associated with ‘fear’ and ‘threat’ regarding the alien signals decreased by over sixty percent, while terms like ‘resilience,’ ‘philosophy,’ and ‘self-reflection’ saw an exponential increase.”
Their path through the museum had now brought them to the modern era. The final exhibit was deceptively simple. On a single, elegant pedestal sat a small, sleek device that looked almost exactly like an antique 21st-century mobile phone. This was a modern, personal SQN-device, the end result of the entire, sprawling history they had just walked through. A single, handheld object that contained more communicative power than all the massive machines in the previous galleries combined.
They paused here, before this symbol of their own instantaneous age. LYRA.ai turned from the exhibit, and for the first time in the entire broadcast, her composed, professional demeanour seemed to falter. A subtle, almost imperceptible tremor of emotion entered her voice.
“This next segment,” she began, her voice a fraction less composed, a touch more personal than the audience had ever heard it, “is a significant one for me. It is the archive of the final, great public forum of the Philosophical Debates. It was… my first major, galaxy-wide broadcast as a moderator.”
Cokas looked at her, his expression one of warm, gentle understanding. He knew this story. He remembered the young, brilliant, and deeply nervous AI-Embodiment who had been thrown into the centre of the galaxy’s most important conversation.
“I had just graduated,” LYRA continued, her gaze now distant, seeing a memory, not the museum. “I had read the ‘Unstable Map’ paper. I had watched the ‘Garden and the Wilderness’ broadcast. I was, like everyone else, trying to make sense of the chaos. And then… I was assigned to moderate what was announced as an important special, one, that turned out to be the final debate. To sit in a virtual room with minds like Aris Thorne, Jax Rider Kalemma, and the man who, for my generation of AIEs, was - is a figure of immense intellectual importance… Bate Bobsman.”
She took a slow, simulated breath, a programmed gesture that now seemed entirely, authentically human. “His synthesis of Perceptionism and historical media… the way he wove together the arguments of the other panellists… it had a profound impact on my own developing consciousness. It taught me that my function was not just to present data, but to understand the story the data was telling.”
She turned to Cokas, a look of genuine, almost vulnerable, deference on her face. “For an objective summary of the broadcast’s historical importance, Cokas, I must defer to you. My own perspective is… too close. Too personal. I was there.”
Cokas placed a reassuring hand on her arm, a gesture of deep friendship and professional solidarity. “You were more than there, LYRA,” he said, his voice filled with pride. “You were magnificent. You guided that difficult, explosive conversation with a grace and wisdom that belied your age. You helped them find their way to a new consensus.”
He then turned to the camera, ready to provide the final piece of historical context for their audience. “What you are about to see,” he said, his voice resonating with the weight of the moment, “is the culmination of the entire crisis. The final act of the Philosophical Debates. It was a live, galaxy-wide broadcast that brought together the four most powerful, competing philosophies of our time and, through the brilliant synthesis of Bate Bobsman and the skilled moderation of a young LYRA.ai, forged a new, more mature, and more hopeful path forward for all of humanity.”