Heuridium

Archivist's Excerpt from: A Tale of Almost Two Cities: Orphan Heights & Related Histories, CVI 42:4

Entry 13: "A Tower, a Dome, a Vision"

Early in Orphan’s history, atmospheric problems in the Expanse multiplied, as did temperature instability (which some called ‘winter’), and as happened whenever anything worth discussion arose, a symposium was called. Propositions from iron-skin houses to fashionable filtration suits were both considered and insulted. One geologist suggested geo-thermal drilling, because of course he did. This angered the Engineers, who reminded the symposium that no such drills existed and they didn’t want to be bothered to invent them. The punching began shortly after. Amid the ruckus, Cornelius Hickter arose, cleared his throat, and proposed the construction of both an iron lattice and glass dome over Orphan Towne (which was rejected), and the Heuridium Tower, (which was loudly ridiculed). The math was beyond anything the whole of the Scholary could conjure; despair ensued. Later, while on his nightly constitutional, Hickter experienced a vision, in which reconciled algebraic formulae appeared atop a mountain, alongside a message: In hoc sine vinces, (“By this sine, conquer”). Hickter attributed the revelation to his own magnificent brain, since no observable cause could otherwise be located at the time. He arrived back at the symposium the following hour and declared not only the mathematical solutions to Orphan’s dome quandary, but also the advent of Hickter’s Law: Nothing Unobservable Exists. The phrase and the mathematics so beguiled the scholars that a spontaneous parade erupted from the assembly, and Hickter was carried on the shoulders of the Scholars across Orphan amid shouts and clamour all the way to Bellamy Park, where a statue was commissioned, though it took fourteen years to complete and resulted in a readdressing of the pigeon breeding ordinances passed ten years prior. Heuridium and dome construction began the following day.

Entry 17: "A Spire into Thunderhead"

Among the landmark work of the mind of Cornelius Hickter, his second-most impacting legacy—behind Hickter's Law—was surely the concept, design, and erection of the great Heuridium Tower. Simultaneously an Atmospheric Lectral Collector (ALC), observatory, museum, laboratory, and research station, the Heuridium represented all that Orphan Heights aspired to be … pun intended. It was the great achievement of Orphan’s first century of life, and that is saying something, the crown jewel of the Grand Academy of Science, overseen by the rumoured Fifth Marquees of Orphan, but nobody knew who that was.

Once the time of Baron Hiram Alberstein Lorecroft came, and Orphan knew lectral lighting for the first time, the Heuridium was posthumously lit as a splendour of The Expanse, a public relations stunt to raise taxes for the Academy, but it worked. The papers made a big thing of it. By the time of the relevant Sub-Variant Shift of 12473, the Heridium was closed to all public access, except for the Museum of Science & Fabrication on the first level. The upper levels were used only for housing prototypes for terraforming machinery for , but this was mostly bunk. Orphan’s laboratories were very much in use, and the new apex of the great spire housed an observatory-like Armillary mechanism, used for mapping astral patterns and generating a Cymatic Induction Wave, apparently for the purpose of shifting Sub-Variants … or Major ones, since why else would one want to generate Cymatic Induction Waves?

Regardless, this is a troubling prospect for any occupant of The Expanse, past or future, or of any other continent, for that matter. Let the reader consider himself warned.

Addendum:

The Heuridium stands (or hangs) in six levels, and of course there are only six levels, and cannot be any more beyond that, of course. The Heuridium Tower has been both the central vision of Orphan and the heart of its Academy of Science since its foundation. Amazingly, the Heuridium managed to survive the events of its own devising: of 1899, and the relocation of Orphan Heights itself, though it now shares the standard five-degree list of the rest of Orphan's broken form.