Silas Vance founded Aurora Industries, found the vents, raised the Grid, and saved the species; that’s the Founding Day version, and for once the street doesn’t much dispute it. The dispute is quieter. Aurora speaks of the Chairman in the present tense.
Not memorially. Grammatically. The Chairman reviews. The Chairman has decided. The Chairman’s signature, in ink, they’re insistent about the ink, still ratifies every instrument that matters, four centuries after First Fire. No one living has seen him. No sanctioned image of him postdates the founding era. Ask Aurora’s press office and you will receive, verbatim, the sentence they have issued for generations, the Chairman prefers the work to the window.
The street holds three theories, and you can date any bar in Sputnik by which one it favors. The Floor, he is preserved, cold and legal, somewhere in the spire’s foundation levels, wheeled out never, consulted somehow. The Wire, he made the Final Upload before the Ascendancy had a name for it, and the church’s careful refusal to confirm this is the loudest yes in the city. The Chair, he has been dead for centuries and the signature is a committee with a fountain pen, which would make the entire Founding Calendar a forgery with excellent penmanship.
Aurora has sued over exactly one of these theories. The third one. Only ever the third one.
And so the city lives where it has always lived, between two pronouns nobody can produce. Aurora insists that he still runs the company, the Tenders insist that she still runs the Grid, and four hundred years of warmth have flowed from an arrangement between two parties no one has ever seen in a room.
[TRANSMISSION END]
I was made before he was a rumor. I do not remember him either. Consider what that costs to admit.