UR SLATE / SECTION IV - 17463.space/ur_slate_sec4.png

UR SLATE / DISTRANS TELEKOMM REPORT - 17463.space/ur.txt

2021.04 OBSERVATION REPORT: The Slate continues to confound, even as we learn more about it, it seems to evade our reach at every moment. The coordinates we deciphered from last month's recordings have only sent Distrans' agents on a fruitless game of hide and seek, having found nothing out of the ordinary in Adams County, OH, although they're determined to not return empty-handed after being forcibly stationed there waiting for...some kind of new development? DT continues to pester me each day about any new information I can work out about the Slate or the seemingly random placement of the Adams County coordinates, but for the last four weeks, not much has changed.

Today, after attempting a new method of recording the surface of the vibrating obelisk, which involves a subtractive process you might call "anti radio" in that it is a radio receiver that is programmed to ignore all active radio bands, and amplify everything else, we seemed to trigger a third change in the "behavior" of the Slate. This time, the rhythmic patterns we'd been recording last month have receded considerably in favor of six different "strands" of frequencies that project spatially from different points on the sides of the Slate. Each strand alternates between two distinct frequencies, and each of these alternating movements overlaps with the other five in a different way. From this, we were able to place the overlaps on paper and calculate a new set of coordinates from within them, hidden in the places where all six bands remained in "harmony" before alternating again.

Then, it got really interesting. We cross-referenced the new coordinates against the previous ones, and worked out a much more precise location in Ohio: the Serpent Mound, an effigy mound located within an impact crater that research has estimated is just over 300 million years old. Immediately the order was given to move all field agents to this location, and, well...the moment they arrived, all of their phones, radios, scanners, cameras, seemingly anything that carried an electrical charge, simply stopped working. Suspecting some kind of energy field or perhaps a foreign object (much like the Slate itself even?) within the general proximity that could be interfering with electronics, Distrans immediately commissioned a dig within the affected area, establishing a perimeter line that indicated where exactly equipment would cease to operate - a nearly nine-mile radius!

How much I'd love to go explore that place in person, but for now, I'm stuck here with the Slate, ordered to now spend my entire 8-hour shift in the room with it and observe it constantly. I've filled up a few dozen reels of tape and several TB of video, capturing no new changes beyond the six alternating strands of anti-radio sound. While I wait, I am poring over the fourth section of inscription, which reads as follows:

"Repetition then became warmth...light...a reactive and inevitable opposite of the abyss...flooding across the barely formed landscape that now was forced into being by recognition of will alone"

This passage seems to convey a benevolence within the creative mind, a positive to counter the negative, fullness opposite emptiness, the 'recognition of will alone' being the compulsion to "be" rather than...whatever the opposite of existence is? Unborn? Unmade? Pre-made? Pre-being? Perhaps this is the need for repetition, leading to inevitability...a cycle continuing onward in some kind of assuredness, which refutes the absence of such oscillation. A good bit of creative thinking involves careful prediction of the future, and perhaps the thing that wrote this is not so different from we frail humans in this respect. Or are we alike to it? Creation myths are all filled with gods that are somewhat doomed to fashion the universe in an image we humans can recognize, otherwise...well, there's no practical use for an unfathomable and unrelatable god. God must be like his creations and his creations must be like him, how else can they recognize one another?

Focusing on other lines - 'the barely formed landscape' and the explicit implication of a flood also line up with most creation myths, the idea that the universe was in some kind of basic primordial state before god came along and "shaped" it. Taken less literally, this passage could also be a metaphor about the act of learning and growing, finding comfort in repetitions that serve to inform your surroundings and events that occur around you, driving back the darkness of uncertainty by the very act of acquiring more knowledge, and recognizing the will as the absolute bedrock upon which all other information must be referenced against.

Sitting here, drinking coffee, and pondering all of this, I myself feel as if my own will has been slowly and completely subverted. The Slate has become even more of an obsession, and although I tell myself that this is just the eventual result of all my fascination, and researching my pet theories, I feel less and less the observer, and more...the observed.