In the Shadow of the Mountain

The Potential, Dawning

The three trails have now converged: the whole that exceeds its parts, the origin traced back through an unbroken chain, and the demand (older than either) that a belief be tethered to its cause before it is called knowledge. Two and a half thousand years walked those trails separately, each one certain it walked alone.

None of the people who walked them could see what they were building. Aristotle did not know his syllable would end up cited in a paper about SysML. Cicero did not know his objection to an unbroken causal chain would still matter to an engineer deciding what a black-box model is allowed to hide. Gotel and Finkelstein, writing the exact definition The Unbroken Chain ends on, in 1994, were not writing a prequel to anything; they thought they were finishing a discipline, not starting a series.

That is the condition this trilogy leaves its reader in: standing at the point where the trails meet, in the shadow of a mountain whose summit none of the path-cutters ever saw. The potential was there the entire time, dawning slowly across two dozen centuries, in a Roman naturalist’s footprint, a Greek syllable, a Parisian treaty and a defence standard. It becomes visible only in hindsight. And hindsight is the one vantage point none of them had, the only one this trilogy is built from.

The climb has not started. But the ground it starts from has just been surveyed, and the path up is the one Building the Tekmerium already takes: opening with Reasoning in the Fog, and picking the trace back up almost immediately in Breaking the Reconciliation Trap, exactly where The Unbroken Chain leaves it.

The trails are found.

The mountain is not yet climbed.

That was always the plan.