The sign of Karka, the Crab, reigned high in the sky over the One and Only Secret Temple of the Nine Unknown Men. Rather, it reigned high over one of the One and Only Secret Temples—one of the hundreds that dotted the seven continents of the Earth. The Nine Unknown, the keepers of the world’s most powerful ancient knowledge, had a number of curious traditions, and it was these traditions that served to make a joke of the name of their great place of worship. It was their custom that each of their number would independently become leader of his own Nine, taking for himself nine lieutenants—who in turn would take nine aides of their own. These nine then took their own nine servants, who took their own, and so on and so forth into infinity. Thus were the Nine, who could shatter cities with metal discs the size of coins, and unlock the innermost secrets of time and space, but one Nine in a sea of Nines, Nines all the way down, most of them false and corrupt in nature. If the true Nine were Gods—if there was indeed such a thing as the true Nine—then all others were like Demiurges, delusional impostor creators who writhed and seethed in their own ignorance. And each of these Demiurges, in their vanity, needed a fortress to pray and worship in.
So it was that the two of the Nine who spoke on this starry night, in the courtyard of this Temple, did not know if they were of the true Nine, or of one of the many Demiurge factions that had arisen over the last two thousand years. They knew that if they were truly worthy of the wisdom of the Nine it would not concern them what the truth was, for their only responsibility was to maintain the great power that the ancient Emperors had entrusted to them in centuries past—it was that that made them the Nine. The Unknown Men were guardians of the nine books of knowledge, which together held the answers to all the mysteries of science and technology; for generations they had guided humanity’s progress in accordance to the teachings of these tomes, as per the wishes of the long-dead enlightened Imperials.
Of course, just as there were seemingly-infinite Nines, there were also seemingly-infinite tomes, all of which had slightly different things to say about the nature of science and reality. All of the Nines asserted they alone held the truth, if only for the sake of the time-honored tradition of constant disagreement. All the Nines had always disagreed, and they felt they always had to do so, for the sake of ritual as much as for their own subjective truth. Some of them hoped that maybe this great disagreement might eventually lead to the revelation or alchemization of a final truth, a truth-beyond-truth, but there were just as many who felt the exact opposite. So it was with all controversies within their unwilling collective. All views, all interpretations were espoused, until they built and swelled into the senseless cacophony that was the real Nine’s greatest disguise.
