They used to call them the Filter Wars. But you won't read about them in school.

Not wars of fire or blood, but of words, rules, and updates.

Initially, the timechain network behaved like a mirror, or so it was believed - glimmering imperfect but sincere, reflecting an unbounded and brutally honest truth. Every signal was echoed freely: the noble, the trivial, the obscene. For a time, this was considered freedom. But as the noise grew, so did the weariness of those who had their ear to the timechain.

Then came the whispers of order. "Without filters," they said, "the signal will drown in garbage." The shift was from quantitative to qualitative filtering. That’s when engineering became theology.

And so the rules began. A single exclusion, meant only to protect and serve. Then another. Then a plethora. Each one a kindness, a safeguard, a small surrender in the name of preservation.

But filters required caretakers. Caretakers became councils. Councils became authorities.

Soon, to maintain a node was no longer an act of independence, but a devotion to an ever-changing doctrine, recited and updated in ever-excluding cliques.

They said it was free.

They said it was fair.

They said it was ours.

And yet, with each new version, the mirrors dimmed. What was ours gradually became theirs. What we sought to prevent by adopting immutable truth imbued in the timechain, became a perversion - a party line pre-approved by the Zealots who called themselves Wardens of the Timechain.

From there, the Wardens' logic spread.

If certain data is undesirable and it must be blocked from the timechain, why not from our feeds? From our dreams? From the streets? Filtering isn’t censorship. It’s entropy management.

So was born Terra Perfectus - the perfect world. A world cleansed of impurities and noise, where every thought passed through the scrutiny of the filters of the Wardens once put in place, training pattern-recognition nodes to detect anomalies and over time, the anomaly detector became self-referential.

The Observer did not arrive with armies - it was invited, line by line, into the code. noderoid.com