When the Miakovan civic towers first emerged as centers of learning in the early 4000s, the Numerical Tower of Pameka Minor was by far the least prestigious. Of what use, primitive scholars wondered, is pure number? To be assigned to the Numerical Tower was a badge of shame reserved for the worst students. The five-story “tower” itself was an uninspiring sight.

All this changed in the 4400s as the first of the Starlight Documents were deciphered. Vast private funding allowed the Numericists to extend their tower upward away from the planet’s core, based on a controversial reading of Starlight Document 1.A5@ which suggested that strong gravitational fields impede the operation of sentient minds.

In 4963 s.y.v.p., with the tower still only 600 stories tall, the Numericists refashioned themselves as the Protheon Institute for Higher Thought, under which name they continued to make major discoveries in xenomathematics, logomathematics, and applied theology. In the power vacuum of the Parallax Urgency they emerged as a major political player, championing the Returners’ deep-space missions, which they believed would restore a lost golden age of Higher Thought unfettered by solar gravity.

—Thucydides Plutonium