Chapter Text

• FOR REFERENCE:  Before we begin, Seh Boz/ghelgheli on substack made a good essay on the pale.  It draws upon Sacred and Terrible Air unlike this Atlas, so it has more context, and the writer seems to actually know science instead of being scared by it, which leads to some very interesting discussion about entropy.  Because of its added context from Sacred and Terrible Air, their description of the pale is more concrete in its symbolic and metaphorical purpose, which can be a plus or a minus.  Overall, it's a really good read and worth checking out if you want some more meat to dig into, thanks to delecttric for bringing it up!

OVERVIEW

• The pale is used for the pale in its entirety, pale without the article is used for particulars about pale. I cannot guarantee that I myself will use it properly throughout this.
  • Also pale is never capitalized as like A Thing, it’s always lowercase.
    • This is incredibly annoying. This is seriously one of the most irritating things about Elysium to me.
      • “We’re going to capitalize History because that’s important but this shit nah it’s lowercase” fuck off.
• Pale is the most dominant geological feature in the world, a “separative tissue” between the isolas (Joyce Messier). It takes up 72% of the surface of the world
• Other names and terms for the pale (and when/how they were used for context)
  • The Western Plain—what the pale was called by the Perikarnassians, though it was everywhere, not just to the west
    • The boiadeiro song “On The Western Plain” obviously refers to the pale as the Western Plain. Because the Paledriver relays this, we have no clue when this song was made (or you know. When boiadeiro became relevant) but clearly this term has remained in the modern consciousness.
  • The Great Unrest and The Great Adversary—used by the Paledriver, Joyce, and skills. They seem to be common euphemisms and are sometimes referred to as just “the Adversary”
    • Why do the epithets get capitalization when the actual pale doesn’t? The world will never know.
  • Measurehead calls it the reality rhizome which probably isn’t a standard use but it’s fucking badass.
    • IRL CONTEXT: A rhizome is a network that connects to any other point. Basically look up the dialogue trees for this game and that’s a rhizome.
  • Lomonossov's Land—used by the Paledriver, though it seems to also be a location within the pale superdeep.
    • IRL CONTEXT: “Lomonossov” isn’t a thing, but chop off an ‘s’ and you get “Lomonosov”, like Mikhail Lomonosov, a Russian polymath who did literally everything. He’s the father of modern geology, he influenced the modern Russian literary language, he discovered the law of conservation of mass and Venus’ atmosphere, I don’t know why he’s possibly referenced.
  • Udachnaya Zemlya—Only used by the Paledriver
    • LANGUAGE LINK: Russian for “Lucky Land” (Удачная Земля).
      • I don’t know if Lucky Land is an actual thing that this is a reference to, other than a sketchy casino website and Hirohiko Araki of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s personal manga studio.
        • I’m going to hope it’s a Jojo’s Bizarre adventure reference. Pale is weird enough to be Jojo-ed.
  • le territoire—used by the shelf of paranormal books. It’s the only one without title case, so it’s most inline with how the pale is referred.
    • LANGUAGE LINK: It’s French for “the territory”. Some things are simple.

ENTROPENTICS

• Entroponetics is the study of the pale or at least the present day iteration
• Study of the pale has gone back 6,000 years.
• Joyce believes that their knowledge of pale has not changed since the Perikarnassians, with the only advancement being moving faster through the pale.
• Entropolism: “A faith in and desire to accelerate the spread of pale across the world, until humanity has reached what its adherents call the 'rest state' of humanity, the final reconciliation of past, present, and future in timeless spirit…” (Encyclopedia)
  • Joyce calls this form of thought “the very height of late Modernity”. This was also specifically said in response to an Apocalypse Cop quote, which you know, makes sense because that would be what the apocalypse would be.
  • IRL CONTEXT: “Entropology” comes up first when you google “Entropolism”. It is the study of human actions and how they just utterly fuck shit up. “The tendency of social systems to disintegrate” (Wikitionary).
    • “But Twi, those are two different words, why are you listing it?” Because entro- is not a real prefix. When Claude Lévi-Strauss made up the word entropology, he did it by combining “anthropology” with “entropy”. Isn’t that neat.
• Entroponaut: There’s no concrete definition, but it’s someone who goes into the pale (which we can tell by the etymology, entro for entropy, naut for nautes, meaning sailor or traveler).
  • It seems to be more of a child-like dream (much like “becoming an astronaut”) because it’s only mentioned by Jean, when he’s being a dick, and by Inland Empire in reference to childhood dreams (and the pale book, but that’s not any better).

THE PHYSICAL

• Gurdi’s game had a pale rupture mechanic where the field filled with fog, which illustrates how it’s viewed.
• “On the edges of the map, the colour fades into a blur of dotted lines. Black and white.” (Map Wall)
  • “Disintegrating into mathematics.” (Visual Calculus)
• Pictures of the pale have shown that “There are grey flares and prominences, even arcs above entire isolas” (Joyce Messier).
  • IRL CONTEXT: When you look at pictures of the sun and there’s these little arcs of fire? Those are prominences. And we know flares are from solar flares, so essentially the pale is behaving like a sun behaves, but unlike the sun there’s, you know. Land in there.
• According to the Phasmid, the pale did not exist before humans existed, and this thing born from humans will destroy the world.
  • “Instead of air, you exhale thoughts. There are no trees that eat thoughts.” (Conceptualization)
• On the discovery of Insulinde: “[The eighth expedition into the pale] told the queen and her councillor, Dolores Dei, that the pale had begun to condense, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute. Slowly raining down until it formed a vast ocean.” (Joyce Messier). This phenomenon has never been witnessed again.
  • The mantra “after life -- death; after death -- life again. after the world -- the pale; after the pale -- the world again” refers to this phenomenon.
  • Pale is thought to have formed on the outside of the world. With the discovery of the swallow, this may be an inaccurate understanding of the pale and it may start inside the world and erupts outward. Or something entirely different.
• The deeper into pale you travel, various properties start to separate and suspend from each other, and numbers stop working after a certain point. This “number barrier” has never been passed and may never be passed.
• The Paledriver describes it as something that you can’t see but know is there and is larger than everything
• Sounds like sound detached from its source.
• Entroponetic crosstalk:
  • When a signal is routed through pale, sometimes snippets of past conversations are heard.
    • “Pale is a shroud of memories and it doesn't really distinguish to whom those memories belong to.” (Soona, the Programmer)
  • Frequently heard on long-distance phone calls and on radios, and some radios come with a signal purifier to suppress it.
  • Kim says that it comes up on police radios a lot.
• The one thing that’s measurable for sure is the fact that it’s growing, though the rate itself is unknown. It is known that it will one day cover the world.
  • “Most people -- and indeed most private and government sector organizations; entire civilizations and religions even -- find handy ways to ignore, or downplay that knowledge” (Joyce Messier)

THE IMMATERIAL

• Pale is achromatic, odorless, featureless. It’s the negation of being and the enemy of matter and life. Nothingness, or a transitional state into nothingness
  • To expand on the transitional nature, Harry theorizes that the swallow is what lies beyond the pale and pale itself is a gradient into nothingness or a curdling of reality into nothingness
• A description of going into the pale:
  • Paledriver - "Nothing. Until it starts. When you're deep enough -- then, for me... it's like autumn. Dark grey and orange, the orange of streetlights and the colour of trees in the electric light. It smells like autumn too. It smells terrible."
  • Empathy - Nostalgia. Cooped up in the cabin, shaking... Terrible nostalgia. For yourself. For humans. It's too much to bear. She loves it.
• The pale damages human minds, called over-radiation or overexposure. Because of this, citizens are limited to six days of pale exposure per year.
  • People with the distinguishment of Entroponetic Business Class are trained for and cleared for twenty-two days.
• Symptoms of pale overexposure are time-perception related illnesses, memory malfunctions, thought insertion, and insomnia. It is also said to leave holes in the consciousness, which is the memory malfunctions.
  • Insomnia specifically is called “saudetic syndrome”, which Joyce Messier has; she is only able to sleep for an hour, or a maximum of four hours.
  • Tiago is theorized to suffer from overexposure due to vibing with the swallow, and Inland Empire thinks that this could’ve happened to Harry.
  • It feels terrible.
    • Thanks for that detail, Joyce.
      • Super specific there, Joyce
  • Graad calls people terminally overradiated by pale “protein mass” because they’re catatonic.
    • “An empty vessel the mind has deserted. A husk, No longer inhabited by a consciousness. Biological waste.” (Measurehead)
• It is said that walking through the pale and meditating on the nature of one’s being while naked is essential to opening up a person’s “agiogenous zones”. Agiogenous zones are a series of psychic nodes located throughout the body and, unfortunately, are closed off in modern times.
  • Logic calls entroponetic nudism “beyond dangerous” so like, apparently being naked in pale is worse than being clothed?
  • Harry claims that this is essential for Remote Viewers Division. Medicinal Purposes of the Pale calls bullshit on this.
  • IRL CONTEXT: “Agiogenous” nets me a grand total of four links when googled. It recommends me to search for “angiogenic” which gives me “angiogenesis”, which is the formation of new blood vessels. It is also Greek for “saints” which seems the most plausible?
• Even homeopathic uses of pale do not recommend spending more than an hour in the pale a day, and no more than three hours a week.

Theories on How All This Works

• Some say over-radiation stems from sensory deprivation. They’re boring.
  • Logical positivists are the ones who push this theory
    • IRL CONTEXT: Logical positivism/logical empiricism/neopositivism is a branch of philosophy that thinks that the only knowledge that matters is a knowledge that you can factually prove. This is very simplified.
  • Besides being boring, what’s more important is that from what we can witness in the story, the next theory is more plausible.
• Others say that pale contains past information that is degrading. This is called “the blend-over of the self”
  • The human mind becomes over-radiated by past
  • This belief is held by the dialectical materialists.
    • IRL CONTEXT: Dialectical materialism exists in the real world: it’s the theory behind Marxism. Simply, it’s the idea that everything that exists is material, that this material matter is constantly changing and developing, and that all matter is interconnected.
• Relatedly, infra-materialists think that pale is a “manifestation of nostalgia and historical inertia” (Steban, the Student Communist). Because of this, revolutions would be enough forward momentum to prevent the pale’s expansion.
  • I really want to knock on Steban’s window and ask if, say, royalists successfully get a king back onto the throne via revolution if this is a return to nostalgia or continuing momentum. Hey Steban, hey, what is the weight of History?
• Despite how many people talk about pale containing past information, during the moralist questline, you hear Kim saying a line that is said in the future, in the endgame. If you get to the endgame with Cuno instead of Kim, Inland Empire becomes alarmed because that was not what was supposed to happen.
• In the end though, nobody quite knows what the pale is: “There are so many theories out there, most of them ridiculous. But we'd be here all night if we tried to get into them.” (Steban, the Student Communist)

LOCATIONS

• Porch Collapse—the area where reality and pale meet.
  • Looks like the world evaporating or somehow being drawn into the pale, and the pale itself is a plane of gray mist
  • "Or go and see it for yourself. Watch it rise from the sand and the sky, taking coral reefs in its bosom." (Measurehead)
• Established pale
  • The known pale lit by radio signals.
• Near pale
  • I can’t give you an exact definition for this so I’ll just say it’s mentioned twice: Once in reference to a near pale offshore platform and another is the following: “Hybrid airships, detective. Conventional rotors or jet engines no longer add velocity after the point of reference for motion is suspended -- once you've crossed from near pale to far pale…” (Joyce Messier)
• Far pale
  • This seems to be where the concept of motion is suspended.
  • Recordings of the far pale are apparently common knowledge. This sounds like “sound [...] detached from its source somehow, if not blotted out outright” (Logic)
• Pale superdeep
  • Mentioned in the context of Motorway South, so this is where you can’t return
  • Motorway South
    • A story longhaulsmen tell—called a story specifically by the Paledriver—so it may be more legend than reality
    • Located in the pale superdeep, perhaps specifically off the U41-A. The Paledriver says “where every step you take is one step further from home, no matter the direction,” so unless this is a metaphor, once you enter this, you are officially lost.
      • From how the pale works, it could be said that the superdeep strips away the concept of direction.
    • The mind becomes so irradiated with the past that it erases memory.
    • “to reach the end of the Motorway South is to be *unborn*” (Motorway South)
• What lies beyond the pale is seen in the swallow.
  • “It's *less than less than nothing*. The final rest state for reality.” (Harry Du Bois)

TRAVEL

• The Perikarnassians were able to travel the pale (as well as others judging by the “Seraseolitic” used when talking with the phasmid)
• Traveling through the pale requires technical knowledge and psychological preparation.
• Dimensions can be forced onto the pale in order to travel it.
• In modern times, bouncing radio waves can compress the longitude to shorten the distance between places
• Traveling through it feels like being high
• Pale latitude compressor: A device that sends radio frequencies through the pale. Once a radio signal grid is forced onto the pale, travel is easier. High intensity microwave frequencies are used in navigation.
• Aerostatics: The hybrid airships that are capable of traversing the pale.
  • Conventional rotors or jet engines (they’ve got jet engines???) stop working when the pale strips away the concept of motion, so these…do something instead.
    • “In essence, we throw them in and they come out the other end -- if we throw them precisely” (Joyce Messier) is the closest description we have to what happens. So I guess they’ve got a big catapult.
      • (It’s probably not a big catapult)
  • IRL CONTEXT: Aerostatics is the study of gasses that are not in motion (aerodynamics is when it’s in motion). Aerostats are what we call the actual flying machines (but they aren’t cool, they’re just like. Hot air balloons and blimps)
• The eighth expedition of Irene the Navigator into the pale succeeded with the help of a psychological regime called Volta do Mar.
  • Volta do Mar means “Return from the Sea”
    • IRL CONTEXT: It also means that in Portuguese, though “turn of the sea” is also accurate. It was a navigation technique meant to catch the ocean currents (like, when it was discovered, the dude sailed south and was able to catch the winds and currents to go back up north to Portugal)
  • The Volta do Mar imitates the creation process of poetry. Harry can remember one of the mantras (in actuality a song by Italian-German duo Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld, “What If”)
  • It has continued to be used by travelers (and “other troubled souls” (Joyce Messier)) in the Current Century
• Longhaulsmen, colloquially called paledrivers, travel in the hulls of airships behind steel windows so you cannot look into the pale.
  • The lorries they drive are the same ones that go into the hull and have special wheels that attach to the floor
  • Joyce describes it as a horrific job and says automation will soon abolish it.
    • If it’s anything like IRL truck driving, they’ve been saying that for years.

Routes

• There are two “Magistrals” mentioned ingame: The Graad-Katla Magistral and the Trans-Katla Magistral.
  • IRL CONTEXT: This is a reference to the “Baikalo-Amurskaya magistral” or Baikal–Amur Mainline, a train line built by the Soviet Union. It crosses from Eastern Siberia to the Russian Far East (4,324 kilometers or 2,687 miles) which like, is most of Russia. It’s built onto permafrost, and if that were to melt, the railway line would sink into the peat bog underneath.
    • If you’re not biting the walls right now I need you to read the above bit again because I refuse to be the only person in the world whose mind is broken by this knowledge
      • PEAT BOGS ARE WHERE BOG BODIES COME FROM CAN YOU IMAGINE—
  • I’m unsure how the Trans-Katla Magistral works. Because it’s mentioned by the Paledriver, it has to be pale-adjacent, but it’s Trans-Katla…so does that mean that there’s pockets of pale in Katla? Inquiring minds want to know.
• U41-A
  • It’s mentioned a couple of times by the Paledriver, but outside of “being said”, there’s not a lot of knowledge about it. My guess is just “a highway, pale style”, but who can say for sure.
  • IRL CONTEXT: I didn’t think I’d get anything from googling this and somehow I got disambiguation link on wikipedia, so if this is indeed a reference, it could be to:
    • A ditrigonal dodecadodecahedron, which is a shape that makes me cry almost as much as the name does.
    • U-41 was the designation of a bunch of WWI German submarines (and one Austro-Hungarian sub)
• As Estradas do Mirador
  • LANGUAGE LINK: “As Estradas do Mirador” is Portuguese for “The Roads of the Mirador”. And if you don’t know what at Mirador is, it’s a tower with a panoramic view (which I think would be most towers)
  • Paledriver mentions it alongside the above routes while in a trance-like state. We get more information from knowing that it’s Portuguese.

THE SWALLOW

• The name Soona Luukanen-Kilde gave the two millimeter hole in the world. The origin of the pale or a “baby pale”.
• Because this is a recently discovered concept, everything that is discussed is only theoretical so like knock yourself out if you want to change things
• It was found in a church, specifically built around it as a pinewood sarcophagus. Whether this is an instinctual reaction to bad vibes or part of a religious practice is unknown.
• The swallow in the Church in Martinaise has begun to swallow and absorb sound and information.
  • It’s also theorized that it could’ve swallowed “events” or “outcomes”, causing failures in the doomed commercial district and even the failure of communism and the revolution.
• Many descriptions Harry has of aspects of the pale have swallowing metaphors
  • “Like a cavity, a pit opening up in your stomach. A throat into which the world will vanish. The streets, the grass, the stars -- all will be *rolled back*.” (Cop of the Apocalypse)
  • “A blank space with no point of reference, where only one type of motion is possible. The motion of a human throat, swallowing.” (Motorway South)

MATH-LIKE TERMS

A lot of descriptions of/related to the pale seem to be connected to math stuff, or terms that when I google them show me a graph that makes my head hurt so I consider that math, so I’m just collecting them and putting them here.

• On a porch collapse: “Imagine a grey coronal mist, cold vapour, marked by spores of an opportunistic microorganism” (Joyce Messier)
  • Coronal—an anatomical plane. Wikipedia’s definition makes my head hurt, but if you were to divide a human on a coronal plane, it’d be vertical, across the shoulders.
• “The ocean breaks apart into a tangle of cosines and azimuths, all pointing into pale nothingness” and “At the edge of the map the landmass begins to disintegrate – into pure trigonometry. The ocean melts, becoming a tangle of sines and cosines, the mountain range turns into a sharp-angled azimuth.”
  • Trigonometry—It’s concerned with the relationship between triangles’ lengths and angles. Somehow this is super relevant for so many things such as music theory and this whole list that I’m going to copy and paste from wikipedia: “acoustics, architecture, astronomy, cartography, civil engineering, geophysics, crystallography, electrical engineering, electronics, land surveying and geodesy, many physical sciences, mechanical engineering, machining, medical imaging, number theory, oceanography, optics, pharmacology, probability theory, seismology, statistics, and visual perception”. Trigonometry is concerned with three main terms: sine, cosine, and tangent, or SOH-CAH-TOA, all used to figure out the angles of a right triangle
    • Sine—God math is complicated. Okay, the law of sines is used for triangulation, like when you try to triangulate a position.
    • Cosine—A cosine is the ratio of the adjacent and hypotenuse sides of a triangle.
      • Both sine and cosine are used to measure things that form “waves” like sound and light. It’s also used to calculate sunlight intensity and day length. With this in mind, it kinda makes sense why things are disintegrating into trigonometry, with how much it’s used for things like distance and sound and shit do not tell me if any math term fits this better I don’t want to learn more about math.
  • Azimuth has two relevant definitions
    • For magnetic tape drives, azimuth refers to the angle between the tape head(s) and tape.
    • Azimuth is an angular measurement used in navigation, astronomy, engineering, mapping, mining, and ballistics. When used with stars or other celestial objects, the azimuth is the horizontal angle between the star and north (altitude would be the vertical angle, for visualization purposes).
      • It’s used on a sphere-coordinate system, so I don’t know how it works when Elysium is not a sphere.
      • The map wall goes on to say that x directional azimuth contains y isola, implying that azimuth is used for that, I guess.
• On the pale latitude compressor: “This is an industrial-strength paraboloid. It's meant for forcing dimensions on something that doesn't *have* them.” (Ruby)
  • “In geometry, a paraboloid is a quadric surface that has exactly one axis of symmetry and no center of symmetry. The term "paraboloid" is derived from parabola, which refers to a conic section that has a similar property of symmetry” (Wikipedia)
    • Reading this definition made me feel like i was in a pale latitude compressor, I legitimately almost cried, I do not understand it, we are not getting colloquialisms this time.
• “At the upper limit is the large prime number generator station. It's used specifically for pale latitude compression. That's why you may be hearing some numbers.” (Ruby)
  • Prime numbers are numbers that can’t be divided into a smaller number other than itself and one. So 2, 5, 7, 11, etc. This can go on for a spectacularly long time as my new favorite website bigprimes.org demonstrates. It gives you a random prime number with 30 digits right when you go to the website, isn’t that sweet!
    • Can understand why the pale freaks out and applies dimensions to itself as a defense mechanism after that.
• "A pale latitude compressor is used to sort of... make the pale more manageable. With a lot of these, you can force a radio signal grid on the pale -- literally crunch the distance across it." (Ruby)
  • “Literally crunch” is a hell of a word choice, which begs the question: what the hell is crunching distance? Unless “crunching distance” is a reference to Australian alt rock band The Refo:mation’s only album “Pharmakoi/Distance-Crunching Honchos with Echo Units”, it’s probably something else.
    • There’s no concrete definition for where the idiom “crunching numbers” came from, what was doing the crunching and why it was crunching, so we can’t look at that origin, so we have to take the idiom at face value: To compile, calculate, and/or analyze a large amount of numerical data.
      • Since the number barrier has never been passed and the prime number generator is used, my personal theory is that the radio waves apply Math, the Math is forced to be calculated and numbers generated, and pale somehow shrinks? Basically, it’s bitcoin.
• On Motorway South: “A single vector shoots out, like a rocket. It's the Motorway South, splintering off from the known pale! *To where*? Where does it go?”
  • A vector in mathematics is something that has magnitude and distance, often used to determine positions of things in space
• “Thought insertion? *Dithering*? The Graad-Katla Magistral? [...] It's more than dangerous -- it's *sad*.”
  • I am stretching “math” to the absolute limits to talk about “dithering”. Now, there’s normal definitions of dithering, to tremble, shake, or shiver, to be uncertain about a decision, to do something nervously…and then there’s these two, which are fascinating (from wikidictionary):
    • “To render an approximation of (an image or graphic) by using dot patterns to simulate the appearance of colors or shades not in the system palette.”
    • “To intentionally add noise to a signal to randomize errors.”