The Rewritten Guide

The LED exhibition guide lightbox above the exhibit carried the title of the special exhibition: "The Other Face of Tutankhamun: The 'Hidden Name' Rite in Nineteenth-Dynasty Liturgical Texts."

The typeface on this lightbox is locked. Changing the content means working through the back end during the day, authorized by two permissions at once; once it is changed, the Print Shop has to swap the wall label to match, mount the new label, align it, retain the old one. The last time a label was changed over a single typo, the whole procedure took 8 days to run.

21:47. It flickered once, then began rewriting itself from the first character on.

The first character to change became a hieroglyphic sign for "gate," rotated 30 degrees. The next became "beyond." The characters after that went over one after another, and inside a minute the whole title had become a line of Ancient Egyptian that could almost be read aloud.

The rewriting skipped no character and went back to correct no position. It pushed from the first character on the left to the last, straight through, without one flicker, without one redraw. An LED changing content goes dark for half a second; this time it stayed lit the whole way.

Halfway along, a character was set into the sentence. That character was not hieroglyphic, not hieratic, not demotic. It was like a circle, its line broken between the third point and the fourth.

The components used in the rewriting were unremarkable in themselves, every one of them matching something on the plates. The trouble was in how they were put together—an arrangement like that is in no known version of the liturgical texts, and in no Hellenistic recension either.

A guide lightbox does not write Ancient Egyptian on its own. What made it write that way was the exhibit it was "introducing." Text being rewritten is often the first signal to leak out when something deeper is waking up.

22:04. The lightbox snapped back to the Chinese title. The back end was pulled the next day: not one authorization operation in that window, the login record blank. The adhesive edge of the wall label was intact, never peeled.