The series of decisions that led to the order 876 started with a Governance's commission of a study to the Building 877 on ways to durably provide water to the city as it was getting bigger and more crowded at an increasing pace. By the Governance's projection, anywhere between 8.5 and 10 millions humans would be living on this body of land by the beginning of this millennial, and they were using more water per capita than any other being, including the trees. Even more preoccupying, this amount was growing exponentially. The building 877 was undergoing a lot of pressure already, facing the â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– â– crisis, but, if left unanswered, the water question would quickly become as bad, or possibly worse than the current situation, and could rise in a matter of days to the level of existential threat to the whole area. This was a priority concern of biological survival. B-877 put as many resource as it could into providing a plan to tackle this rampant threat, but we know that the resources that would have been needed to diffuse such a complex situation were simply not physically available at that time. Amongst other documentation, some abstract notes have even been found stating that the actual long term solution would have been to "redo" all biology in ways that did not rely so heavily on clean sweet water. But a ground up rebuild was of course virtually impossible and had been put out of the question for already a long time, especially considering the current situation and the energy that had to constantly be put into the mere management of what was already present. This sort of writings was typically the types of notes that some elements of the building were issuing in those days, vague and bitter, falsely subversive, considering unrealistic options that could obviously work as theoretical models out in the void but were absolutely impossible to ever bring to realization considering the constraints under which the Governance had to work. Those who were writing them knew that, of course, and they had the luxury to never have to put in practice their plans, to never have to answer for their decision as they were never implemented. It was pure language, image and projection. "Redoing biology" was of course impossible, and would without any doubt have eventually led to other types of problems that neither the Building, the Island or even the Governance could have been in position to foresee.
The actual report concerning the water issue was titled by B-877 "the Water Tower Proposals", shortened as "TWP". This body of document was comprising two main chapters, each laying out one out of the two (and only) possible solutions that the Building had elaborated to provide the city durably with sufficient amounts of clean drinking water. These two plans were respectively titled "Water Tower Proposal A" and "Water Tower Proposal B" (WTP-A and WTP-B).
The core of this body of texts disappeared with the Building, but we could gather a sufficient amount of material to build what we believe to be a general understanding of the Water Tower Proposals with a satisfactory degree of accuracy, and, more importantly, of the chain of events that it triggered.
The Water Tower proposal A (TWP-A) was a study on the possibility of building a central storing, cleaning, and distributing unit for the entirety of the huge amount of water needed by the city. This construction would have been built in the geographical center of New York, located in Queens Borough, at the intersection between 58th street and Queens Boulevard. A small monument is currently present to remind us of the place where this water tower would have been built. The reservoir would have been a wooden cylinder held together by circles of steel. The tank would have been able to hold a volume of 5.000.000.000 (five billion) gallons of clean water. It would have had a radius of 400 feet (121.92 m) and have risen for more than 1300 feet (396.24 m). The whole construction was to rest on a metal structure, elevating its base 400 feet (121.92 m) above the street level, to make sure that the water could reach any point of the five boroughs by mere gravity. The total height of this work was thus to be more than 1700 feet (518.16 m). A vast, yet rather simple network of pipes spreading in all directions was to be plugged all around and under the base of the work and would have allowed the water to flow into every part of the city.
To keep the water level in the tank, it appears that another network of pipes would have been built to carry the water from different locations, mostly situated upstate New York, into the base of the structure where a single heavy-duty pump running at all time would have kept it full.
The documentation available to us concerning the Water Tower Proposal A comprises a computational sheet referencing different heights for different radius of cylinders and a projected map of the future city with the water tower in place.
Water Tower proposal B was the diametrical opposite of the WTP-A. In this second plan, the building 877 studied the possibility of providing each individual being with its own custom-made water tower according to their needs. Each of these containers would have been designed for each individual following a function of their weight and proportionate amount of water contained in each body. A central instance, designated in the proposal as the Hydro-Census Bureau (HCB), would have had to be created in order to plan the construction and the distribution of these individual items. Next to the bureaucratic nightmare that WTP-B would have been, this second plan was requiring an immense amount of material and labor, one that would have been completely unrealistic. This is amongst the oddities of WTP-B's publication. How could the building have not taken these obstacles into account? Or are we missing a key element of this plan that makes its comprehension impossible today? Even if there was such element, and even if the building had accounted as it normally should have for these obstacles, this plan does not seem to be solving the water problem any better than WTP-A as the water would still have had to reach somehow every individual reservoir, and this on a daily basis. We have no documentation able to prove that this central problem was addressed in the proposal, and we are unable to know how B-877 was planning, if at all, to keep those tanks filled up after building them, if the Governance would have eventually decided to go this way.
The only documentation material that could have been recovered concerning WTP-B is a prototype of a water tower for an average human body following the Governance's projected curve of average body weight for 2023. This model is accompanied by a few blueprints and a computational sheet similar to the one found in WTP-A.
Both plans were utterly impractical and their concrete realization, as we know, never happened. But the Governance seeing them side by side is believed to have been the first step into the formulation of the order 876, issued shortly after. It is of course impossible to know if this had been the plan of the Building, if showing another way to the Governance, one that could not be laid out as a pragmatic proposal, but rather subliminally shown in unspoken ways, could have been part of the Building's agenda. If the intimate relation that the 877 maintained with the Governance could have allowed for such a fine understanding of its mind that the Building could have predicted, and therefore foster, the following development. This could be an absolutely valid theory. One should notice that it was extremely unusual for the building to produce reports that were that much out of touch with the reality. In general, many of the plans that the Governance brought to realization, or the ones that were never completed but of which our research bureau manage to compile sufficient documentation seem at first glance overwhelmingly impractical but prove to be working, if not flawlessly, notifiable well once implemented. As for today, the Water Tower Proposals A and B are amongst the oddest material that the Building has produced, which makes it a fascinating, yet difficult research topic. But again, let us remember that this all happened at a time of great stress and pressure, where the amount of issues that the Governance had to address was unprecedented and where the limits of its scope of operation seemed to have been reached and possibly already exceeded. Considering this context, these studies could as well just have been made quickly and with a staggering lack of resource. In other terms, they might just have been terrible thought productions of the building. And in this case, the metaphorical reach of these two proposal would have been purely incidental. Whether this was the sick production of a crumbling mind or the cunning plan of some of the Governance's most significant elements will remain an enigma.
WTP-A, a single unit to manage all the water of the city, could theoretically have worked. But the resources to sustain it would have been completely overwhelming and a huge loss of energy for whomever would have been in charge. On top of that, a single flaw, even a small one, in the structure or in the pumping system could have instantly deprived the entire city of water, jeopardizing the very survival that it was supposed to secure. On the other hand, even if seemingly worse than WTP-A, WTP-B did not, at least, present this issue. As in this second proposal, the water was scattered across a vast network of individual tanks, any flaw in one or several of them would not have paused a similar direct threat to the biology of the city. It would have been more difficult to coordinate but at least, much more resilient.
Even if it is not acknowledged explicitly, there is a similar parallelism going on in the goals pursued by the order 876, and the fact that it has been issued just after the publishing of the Water Tower Proposals lead us to strongly believe that they are intimately connected. In its core, the order 876 is a set of instructions that changed the essence of the Governance forever from a way of operation that is "metaphorically" similar to WTP-A and its single central unit to a totally other form that is similar (metaphorically as well) as the WTP-B and its decentralize network of independent units.
In other words, the order 876 laid out all the instructions of the sequence that lead to the purposeful physical annihilation of the Governance as a monolithic entity and to the scattering of its mind into the form that we know today, and that we have decided to call, in the context of our research, a "polymath".
The motivations and the goals were clearly set: Facing its own limitation, radically changing its mode of operation which meant the destruction of its current form, the partition of its mind into a manifold of fragments, and the dispersion of these fragments across the city into the minds of whom who are now known as the Agents. Becoming a network of decentralized entities, highly more resilient and able to perceive any situation from many points of view at the same time. Providing a finer, more organic, understanding of the city and, if things were to go according to the Governance's plan, providing better ways to address the issues risen by the sustenance of life amongst it.
The decision must have been difficult, even probably painful to take. For the Governance, it meant final disappearance. The dying of its gaze under this form, therefore the acceptance of never witnessing the result of this ultimate decision. A radical abandon of its power and might.
It is as well a strong and moving gesture that, I, speaking only for myself, have come to respect and admire: Acknowledging its own limitation, finding and implementing a radically different way to address them, turning the problem completely inside out and taking the full responsibility of a difficult situation in an unpredictable way.
It is in any case another occurrence of these typical Governance's plans. Those that seem so out of touch with the situation at first glance but that eventually prove to function extremely well.
Each step of the Governance's disintegration was carefully laid out, then executed. All the ongoing researches and studies had to come to an end, whether they were completed or not. All the documentation and instrumentation had to be brought to the Building and stored there. Then the actual vanishing process could begin. The Governance's mind became thinner, more fluid. It started mixing with the winds and the tides, to sink into the ground, going back to places it had not visited for a long time. It set out to leave the island and merged with the city's very fabric on every of its layers.
The last step of this chain of event was the explosion of the Building 877, and the piling up of its ruins into a hill which is still currently the highest point of the Island. As the last parts of the order were executed by the Building, there must have come a point when the Building no longer existed while the hill did not exist yet. We have some reasons to believe that the first agents have been the ones piling up the ruins of the B-877 in order to shape this hill, and that it is through them that a few elements of the Building's research have been retrieved and eventually became available to us.
The last line of Order 876 reads: "Only the Island must remain"