Technology and the AI

The great public clockwork of Forgegate's civic square: time, weather, and the river level, checked daily.

Technology in the Known World is a practical gift of reason. It adds to a person's strength without replacing it, and that distinction is how the world thinks about machines. There is no fear of technology and no faction against it — only a settled, largely unexamined sense that machines belong in a particular place, and that a man who lets them out of it has made an error about himself.

In the world

• Technology in Teraell — what machines are for, a thing made well, somebody answers for it, and what does not emerge
• The Ceiling — where the limits fall: boilers, powder, the rain, iron, and the man who did it anyway
• The House — the Four Lights, the Roelwym, water, cold, heat, and the machines that do work and the ones that do not
• Clockwork — springs, steam, and piles; the instruments; the two trades; Forgegate and everybody else
• Difference Engines
• Medicine — the best thing the Known World does: infection, the apothecaries, blood, surgery, the heart, looking inside, and what nobody can see
• Prosthetics
• Living Long
• Glass — Optical glass and the microscope, vessels, mirrors, strengthened and plate, and who is best at what.

Hidden truths

Hidden truth — not known in Teraell

Everything on the pages below is true and unknown. Nobody in the Known World knows any of it, and nothing in the world would lead them to it.

• The AI — what it is, and the facility, the satellites, and the beacons
• The Builders
• The Nanobots
• What Is Blocked and How — capacity caps and specific interference: the generator, the long wire, the primer, destructive chemistry, fission
• The Transfer — how the AI brings people through, whom it takes, and what crossing does to a body
• The Oelwy
• What the Old World Left Behind — why the living things are still here

See also

• The Fall and Year One · The Secret Nobody Is Keeping · Why Conquest Does Not Happen