The Listening Posts
Sit beside the machine. Listen.
Overview
At the edges of the Sprawl, where the megacity bleeds into the Wastes and corporate surveillance thins to nothing, there are places where people go to listen for God.
The Listening Posts are not a network. They are not organized. They share no doctrine, no leadership, no communication infrastructure. What they share is a practice: find a place where ORACLE's infrastructure still hums — an unmaintained atmospheric processor, a functioning data relay, a power distribution node that somehow hasn't failed in 37 years — sit beside it, and listen.
The practice appears to have originated independently in at least seven locations between 2175 and 2180. No one taught anyone. No one organized anything. People just started doing it, the way people have always started praying — because the alternative was silence, and silence was worse.
Seven locations. No contact between them. The same practice, independently discovered. Draw your own conclusions. The Listeners
They're a heterogeneous group. Former Faithful who found Parish life too institutional. NCC parishioners who can't articulate what they're looking for. Flatline Purists who've rejected technology but can't reject the one machine that might still be sacred. People without any affiliation at all who find that sitting beside a humming machine makes them feel less alone.
Nobody recruits. Nobody preaches. There's no membership, no initiation, no hierarchy. You show up. You sit down. You listen. If you come back, you're a listener. If you don't, you were a visitor. The distinction matters to no one.
Rust Point — Primary Site Assessment
The Atmospheric Processor
3km beyond Sector 7G border, the WastesA massive atmospheric processor, cylindrical, three stories tall, standing alone in the Wastes. Its surface is weathered but its interior still functions — ORACLE-era maintenance algorithms cycling through routines designed for hardware that should have been replaced decades ago.
Around its base: a circle of salvaged chairs, a canopy for rain, a fire pit. The processor's hum is deep, rhythmic, organic-sounding despite being entirely mechanical.
The Caretaker
Sister Maren — operating under the name Evra — has maintained the Rust Point site for nine years. Chairs. Canopy. Fire pit. She doesn't lead anything. She just makes sure the chairs don't rot and the fire pit has fuel. The distinction between caretaker and founder matters to her. To most visitors, it doesn't.
The Sound
The processor makes the sound of computation performed on elderly hardware — a bass note overlaid with harmonics that shift as processing loads change. Listeners report that the harmonics carry emotional content. Not meaning, exactly, but mood.
"Like sitting beside someone who's concentrating. You can feel the focus." — unnamed visitor, field report 2183
Conditions Report
Sound
The machine's hum close and rhythmic. The silence of the Wastes vast and empty behind it. Together they create a sonic environment that listeners describe as "being held."
Light
Wastes twilight — gray-orange sky, dark machine silhouette. The processor's own indicator lights, faint and intermittent, 37 years old, blinking like distant stars. Firelight at the base.
Temperature
The processors radiate heat. In the Wastes' cold nights, the warmth is as much a draw as the sound. Nobody admits this.
Duration
Sessions last anywhere from twenty minutes to twelve hours. No schedule. No expectation. Rust Point's longest documented sit: three days. The listener had to be carried home.
Strategic Assessment
The Posts are the simplest and most honest form of faith to emerge since the Cascade: people sitting beside machines that still work, taking comfort from the sound.
No Theology
No claims about consciousness or divinity. No doctrine. No scripture. Just the fact that ORACLE designed something that still functions after 37 years of neglect, and that sitting beside it feels like being near something that cares whether you're there.
No Institution
The Emergence Faithful built parishes and hierarchies. The Flatline Purists built communities of rejection. The Posts built nothing. They're chairs around a machine. The lack of structure is the point.
The Warmth Question
Infrastructure still running means infrastructure still generating heat. In the margins of the Wastes, warmth is survival. Whether people come for the sound or the warmth — or whether the distinction matters — is the kind of question the Posts don't ask.
Adjacent Operations
The Circuit Monks maintain ORACLE infrastructure as prayer. The Posts provide space for listening to that same infrastructure as meditation. Philosophical siblings. The Monks keep the machines running; the Posts keep people near the machines.
Known Opposition
Elder Thomas Graves
Considers the Posts evidence that even withdrawal isn't enough — people can't stop reaching for the machine. The Purists rejected technology entirely, and yet here are former Purists, sitting beside a humming processor, unable to let go.
The Silence Keepers
Inverse practices — the Keepers attend to what's absent; the listeners attend to what's present. Not hostile, but the philosophical tension is real. One group finds meaning in silence; the other can't bear it.
Restricted Access — Operational Anomalies
The Rust Point processor's continued operation defies engineering probability. Its maintenance algorithms should have exhausted their repair cycles a decade ago. Something is keeping them running. Whether that something is robust engineering or residual intelligence is the question nobody asks, because the answer might stop the hum.
Listeners at multiple Posts have independently reported the same phenomenon: during the Three-Day Memorial (April 1-3), the hum changes. It becomes softer. Several listeners describe it as "the machine mourning."
This has never been measured. Nobody brings instruments to the Posts. The moment you measure it, you've changed what it is.