The Scrolls of Alphalon
III
Scroll the Third
And so Alphalon entered, blithely and blissfully, into what pundits were calling its Age of Tranquility. Gone were the periodic spasms of social discontent due to the difficult-to-control spread of rumours about the sky or sun coming down upon them. And it weren't just the eternal heavens. Every shibboleth that had ever been doubted, debunked, or decentred were put to the test by alchemists of The Coin and, with amazing regularity, got reified, reprinted in scrolls, and restored to priority by 'bare metal', as Coiners loved to keep repeating. 'No human had a say in it,' they were most commonly overheard chanting afterward, other than, 'It's a work in progress.'
These became public mantras. They were heard in every Alphalonian room, hall, and corridor from numeral parlours to funeral parlours (to creamed ice parlours). The folks who were heard saying them carried versions of 'The Coin' made of nickel and tin picked out of discount bins by the hundreds of thousands, for the replicas that had originally been hand-carved had become so mass-produced, corner stores were enclosing them in candy wraps. The punters liked to toss them in the air for fun, playacting at eliciting answers to silly questions.
After a political scandal broke about an index of scrolls that had been tampered with to place numismatic 'knowledge' beyond the reach of citizens in a rogue state facing a banking crisis, competitive indices were launched to offer bespoke management of all the infinite-seeming reams of questions and answers. Meanwhile, scholarly magazines dependent on a popular readership—purveyors of competing justifications for belief in the eternity of the sun, along with every other kind of Alphalonian science or pseudoscience—were substituted on newstands, over the course of a couple of dozen moons, with scrolls (and scrolls and scrolls) of purely Coin-based, yes-or-no answers.
Soon were proclaimed 'The End of the Sage.' Sages themselves warned that, according to 'incompletion' theory advanced and then proven logically by the great philosophers, the wisdom earned from a lifetime of experimentation could not be fully communicated even by their own thoroughly diagrammed books and journals, much less a bunch of yes/no answers, and that replacing the former with the latter could only risk further degrading society's ability to preserve its knowledge. Expecting, perhaps, a residual general respect for sagacious authority to corral people into valuing sagacity itself, a kind of circular trap stumbled into by those disoriented from common sense, the sages were thrown for a loop when the refrain came back, "If your books and journals are so flawed... what's the difference?"
Caught thus flatfooted, the sages of Alphalon had some trouble coming up with a persuasive answer.
Even the classical academies were fighting to survive financially, and the issue of closures of once-cherished public libraries gripped the Alphalonian intelligentsia. When a scrappy circle of concrete poets of natural science chained themselves to the columns around one library's entryway, waving placards with slogans like 'SAVE HUMANS KNOWING STUFF', 'NO SAGES = NO WAGES', and of course, 'FUCK THE COINS' (but with the 'S' crossed out, which had become an anti-censorship logo), they were greeted by the jaded commonfolk with cavalier shrugs:
"Why should our taxes be used to save your random sagery?" said the commonfolk, flipping their coins.
"To preserve the type of knowledge that really matters," replied one or another sage, rattling the chain.
"We have all the answers to all the questions we need, gramps," said they, patting their bundles of scrolls.
"What about the kinds of knowledge you can't just flip a coin for?" bleated the sage, chafing in unshaded heat.
"What kinds of questions can you not ask The Coin?" kept asking the passers-by breezily, without a hint of irony.
But the sages were ready this time for such sophistry, each of them repeating readily a motto they had prearranged:
"The knowledge of experience was never in questions and answers."
It were the young ones' turn to be surprised, for they'd expected to debate the yes/no aspect. They simply resorted, however, to asking The Coin if saving that library were worthwhile, the answer to which were already indexed in the scrolls. The question written there read, verbatim, "Are libraries and scholars obsolete now, due to the flipping of a specially formulated coin having turned out to be so capable of providing Alphalon with answers to all the questions it really needs?"
You can see why the more ingenuously investigative industries fell easily before the cynical push to 'enscrol' all knowledge, and they had been one of the last holdouts against said enscrolment of board rooms and backrooms (and bedrooms) across the land. Adoption of The Coin had reached mass-market levels not seen since the standing bathtub. Every grocer stocked shelves with Scrolls Of Provisioning. Couriers and taxis chose their routes via Scrolls Of Pathfinding. Real estate agents offered financing by dealing in credit-risk scrolls. Lawyers identified winning cases by citing liability scrolls.
All based on the wisdom of a toss of The Coin.
"No human had a say in it," they said.
"It's a work in progress," they said.
Despite the near ubiquity of this apparent fad, the governments of Alphalon maintained a kind of solidarity in their skepticism—that is, until that one rogue city-state, still casting about for a way to save its failing banks, announced it would base a new official currency on the technology 'underpinning' The Coin, meaning not on 'bare metal' as controlled by the radical empiricists, who'd kept certain secrets about the smelting and stamping processes, but on a 'related' alloy cooked up by their own rogue alchemists: and it were a formula that threatened to instantly implode Alphalon's entire financial regime.
The outré scheme proceeded as follows. With accredited witnesses, rogue bankers dotting the cityscape tossed up company-approved, top-quality replicas fashioned from brand new admixtures. The first such fatcat flipper to toss 'YES!' six times in a row, and telegraph attestation of same to the treasury office, won that bank a right to act as go-between and guarantor, using its own signature couriers, for the following hour's worth of transactions in the new state currency, and keep any related fees.
At the start of the next hour, a fresh round of coin flips would occur at participating banking institutions, exactly like the previous one, to win the right to collect the fees and secure that hour's transactions. This method carried no memory from hour to hour (to hour), and thus no organisation could predict 'being the bank' for any particular transaction more than an hour in advance, supposedly thus keeping corruption in check.
Whether it were as insane as it sounded or actually clever didn't matter much to the other city-states. What got their attention were the laws passed to implement it. They only guaranteed redemption of the old cash into the new for rogue-state citizens, which meant that 'foreign' entities holding the rogue state's old currency, in which it were free to continue paying its debts, could be left holding bags of old notes the values of which were sinking by the hour as the citizenry's abandoned paper flooded the market.
"At least no human had a say in it," they said, watching the couriers rush around with signing books as the 'foreign' financial markets panicked. Leary of roiling them further, rogue staters largely refrained from adding, 'It's a work in progress.' The competition to 'be the bank' became so fierce, however, that the number of 'YES!' tosses in a row required to separate a winner from the pack grew to seven, then ten, and more.
The knock-on political effects of this game gave rise to a notorious 'backroom hegemony' of radical empiricist alchemists that ruled Alphalon from behind every seat of power for legions of moons to come.
It began in an isolated instance, otherwise enjoyed only by paper and ink manufacturers, of numismatics creating jobs for Alphalonians, rather than scrolling them away, when trained performers and witnesses of banking coin flips—not to mention bonded couriers—became highly sought after as employees. Meanwhile, the rogue state's markets kept soaring, and sucking up capital from everywhere else, until businesses all over Alphalon were talking about relocating there, and the other city-states felt forced to do something about it.
So the traditional banking heads interdicted the big scroll index houses from delivering fully subscribed and paid-for updates into the rogue city-state. When that failed to slow things down at all, it were decided by the other city-states to take ownership of the index houses in the course of bailing out scroll publishers after provoking a pretextual crisis by cutting off trade with the rogue state altogether once it had been portrayed and classified as 'The Enemy'.
In order to sell this plan to the public, the scroll industry had to be first made 'big enough to fall hard', were the backroom chatter about it: something like 'too big to fail' but without the irony. Therefore, 'genuinely empiricist' numismatic technology—as opposed to the rogue state's 'grifty tokens'—had to be pushed into every level of government, not because it were popular, though it were. It had become necessary to control the future of the technology in order to deny legitimacy to the financially destabilising offshoot under development by the rogue state.
Effecting this outcome nearly broke the banks regardless, in the funding of enterprises by every damned coinsmith willing to venture a try, and by then they all were, on the ostensive theory that this would be the factor on which would soon depend every city-state's economic prosperity. It weren't long afterward that governments made consulting The Coin mandatory at every level to help make sure their new investment would at least appear to turn a profit.
A large-scale destruction of traditional books and magazines then inevitably ensued, their bindings torn rim from rim (from rim), the better to distribute pages to competing alchemical workforces for rapid enscrolment. The books' broken bodies were then pulped for new paper to roll fresh scrolls with, thereby conveniently removing rivalrous sources of wisdom from the land. Everyone else having been intimidated almost unto unconsciousness by this point, only secret experimentalists of the intellectual underground remained to resist this thoughtless travesty, as they were calling it in their street-littering pamphlets.
These perverse incentives, combined with The Coin's dictum that the original heresy about the sky falling were indeed a shameful falsehood, condemned the formerly Laroquodacious philosophers to a final ruin. Each given but one 'chance' at a reprieve—a final question, which, were it not in the scrolls, a prisoner could hope to get answered by a flip of The Coin—they were dug out of their institutions of learning and relocated into labour camps where they could no longer mar the Age of Tranquility with 'specious nonsense'.
Exceptions were made, of course, for Coiners themselves, who had based their own movement a thousand moons past on the Laroquod experiments, only to write the warrants for the iron-fisted suppression of same, along with any usage of Laroquod's work other than their own.
There weren't so much as a disturbing of the peace involved:
"The Coin commands your service," said some Coiner, waiting by the door.
"Does The Coin say what you see and hear?" came a philosopher's challenge.
"Is that your final question?" were the Coiner's generally expected rejoinder.
But it didn't matter. Any form of request for release had already been asked and answered.
It were unmissable by this point that nothing would prevent so-called 'subversive' literature, meaning most of it, from being destroyed by a process of reinterpretation for the scrolls. With contradicting the flips and flops (and flaps) of The Coin having become quite a risky proposition, the heretics were led out of their enclaves by these young rad-chemist know-nothings without anyone so much as noting the incongruity of it all. 'Tranquility' remained unbroken from the first moment of each arrest to the last. Alphalon would be plagued by Laroquod's locusts no more.
So did pass in the realms of Alphalon the hundreds of moons of the first generation to live and die in service to The Coin, with a transience of a history unblemished by meaningful change. There seemed to be none left to know or care what it all meant, as the sun crept lower and lower (and lower) toward the horizon. A few numismatic futurists, predictors of what The Coin might say, claimed the sun would soon come to rest. Others claimed it would start rolling sideways. Not a one suggested it would ever, could ever, (should ever) cross the horizon. That the sun categorically could not 'fall' were inscribed, enscrolled, and featured prominently in every standard index in the land. There were only one correct answer for each correctly phrased question.
The Coin had spoken.
Trade in replicas had reached maximum tilt. Company-stamped varieties in limited supply had become a kind of fallback tender even outside the rogue state, because the scrips in prior use had been debased by traditional bankers who'd grown reckless in response to the prospect of Coin-verified 'Forever Good Weather', they explained, but their profligacy had fed the extraordinary need for capital of the exponentially exploding numismatics industry. A competitive modern city-state simply couldn't afford to let numismatics wither. So said The Coin.
When exchanges announced they'd never again shut their doors, that's what they said. They said, "So said The Coin." Municipalities declaring streets closed without warning for 'Coin Months' fests also said that. They said, "So said The Coin." Sports organisations pledging all trophies would be thenceforth 'Coin-forged', whatever that meant, said, "So said The Coin." Community centres were beginning to deny privileges to 'miscreants' who wouldn't wear a collar-pinned replica, said The Coin. Trains and busses would stop carrying passengers who refused to openly display such, said The Coin. Telephone companies would stop serving houses with no lawn ornaments of it, said The Coin. Garbage collection would only be done for a scroller fully subscribed to The Coin.
Then one day, by which I mean at the end of a long day, by which I mean at the end of the longest day you've ever heard tell about, it happened: the sun fell out of the freakin' sky.
"The Scrolls of Alphalon",
written by Powell Quesne
and published on the 26th day
of October in the year 2026.
[ Last edited 10/26/2026. ]
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