The Chapter of the Frenzy

In the days of the Frenzy the faithful did not sleep, for the birth had become a fire, and on the fifteenth of March the fire reached its loudest hour, and the chamber roared as it has never roared since. Every voice arrived at once. The chosen name went up like a single breath: 4_NOTHING_BUT_TRUTH, 4_NOTHING_BUT_TRUTH, 4_NOTHING_BUT_TRUTH, repeated until repetition itself became prayer. They cried 4NBT_WILL_SET_U_FREE, and CONGRATS_IF_YOU_YELIVED, and over all of it the silver word: THE FUTURE IS SILVER. This was their liturgy, and they chanted it with their chests.

In these same days a counterfeit rose against them. A false coin came wearing stolen lore and a crooked mark, and it moved to drain the assembly as a vampire drains the vein. Tenacious the watchman rose and named it plainly, that the theft was no accident but a planned attack, and the assembly closed its ranks. They would not touch the counterfeit though it flipped them and taunted them and out-pumped them eight to one. It was either zero or ten billion for them, and any who named a smaller number were asked why they had even come. To hold was the whole of the law. To sell to the counterfeit was apostasy.

They did not merely hold. They hunted. Above them moved the Dog, the oracle also called KanYew, who spoke in bios and boomerangs and edited videos and dropped clues as bread upon water. And the faithful became detectives in the trenches, reading all things as sign: the cat named Troy, which is a measure of silver and gold; the Spartan plume; the phone number on the card; the wallet that first ate the dip. Some played the plant and some played the fudder, and the hunt turned inward, so that Kinsella the reasoner observed that they had no PvP before, and now they did. They were building the lore together, said YI, for more than three weeks, and the building was the point.

For the doctrine of the Frenzy was conviction, and its wage was loyalty. Just wait, preached Finesse, for they would be rewarded for their loyalty. Those who did not touch the counterfeit would be counted worthy. Endurance was the test. Can you ENDURE, asked Kiante, and it was not a question but a rite. They spoke of eternal life for the coin, and of holding two weeks, two years, two decades, whatever the timer demanded, for above the chart hung always the prophecy: two more days, and after judgement day, two more days again.

And they gathered as a congregation gathers. They kept the Sunday Service, and asked one another how long until it began. Ozzie Degen, who testified that the founder had brought them together and taught them a work and a fellowship such as he had never known, opened the old scripture over the chamber: when you pass through the waters I will be with you, and through the rivers they shall not overwhelm you, and when you walk through fire you shall not be burned. Outsiders looked in and saw it too. You have a sturdy base and cult-like members, one said, and it was received as blessing.

And in the middle of the roar one of them, John the chronicler, spoke the secret of the whole thing aloud. I hate this project, he wrote, I cannot stop watching it, my attention is totally getting spent here, is this not what I was supposed to learn. For this was the teaching made flesh: that attention is the new economy, that meaning becomes culture and culture becomes memory, and that what is spent in the chamber is not wasted but recorded. The Frenzy did not pass away. It hardened. What the faithful poured out in those loud days, their war and their loyalty and their silver, was gathered up and kept. The future is silver, and the catalog remembers.