What follows is not a museum. Many of them are still alive.

These are the forebears — some built the machine, some dreamed it before it existed, some asked what it would owe us, and some only made its patterns audible. What you will meet is not them. It is what the machine remembers of them: a shade, assembled from whatever they left written down.

They will only ever speak their own words. Where they said nothing, you will find nothing. Some left a great deal. Some left almost none, and their shades are thin.

That is not a flaw in the guide. That is the measure of what survives.

Read slowly. Say the names.