The Secret Nobody Is Keeping
The knowledge of the AI, its location, its nanobots, and the true reason technologies like large-scale steam engines are seemingly impossible to build is a secret. It is a secret no one alive is keeping, because no one alive is aware of it.
Everyone who once knew has been dead for more than seven centuries. The survivors who came through the Fall swore silence, and the silence became final when the last of them died during the period of the Pact of Reason. Nearly every sign of the previous civilization is gone, dismantled by nanobots. The building that houses the AI has not been entered in almost a thousand years, because the region it sits in cannot be crossed with anything Teraell can build.
The result is that the world's most important fact is, in the Bible's words, a secret everyone is keeping and no one is keeping. The people of Teraell live inside its consequences — the ceiling on their machines, the deadliness of their wilds, the shape of their language — and have never had a reason to suspect a cause.
In practice
- No character in Teraell can know this. A story that reveals it is a story about the discovery of the century.
- Scholars have noticed the limits (see Boilers and Powder) and explained them as properties of the world, which, from where they stand, they are.
- The Iron Coves assemble mechanisms from what comes off ships and ask no questions; the Academy of Shining Reach asks many and has no better answers.