The Carpal Saint of Infrared City
Decoded from subsurface broadcast, 2438 CE, District Omega-Vermilion
Before the towers fell and the marrowfields were burned clean by thermocalcination, there was a saint who healed with only her wrists.
They called her Saint Carpal — not because she spoke (she did not), nor because she performed the sanctioned bone miracles (she refused), but because she had seventeen wrists, all functioning, all precise, all humming with overlight.
Infrared City was a vertical ruin of red glass and moaning vents, its citizens bent double from radiation stress. Still they queued, up the scaffolds and across the melted causeways, to kneel before her bench of chrome and tendon.
With each wrist, she unwound a wound. With each twist, she absorbed a spasm. With each turn, she erased names no longer safe to speak. The Bureau of Alignment watched, but dared not interfere. Her wrists rotated in ways unlicensed by physics.
They sent drones. The drones bowed. They sent judges. The judges forgot language. They sent glyphfire. It hissed against her ulna like rain on old steel.
One dusk, after 10,000 supplications, she performed her final gesture — a complex radial knot known only to extinct species. Then she removed her wrists one by one, placing them gently in the hands of her last visitors.
Seventeen citizens departed with seventeen gifts, none the same shape by morning.
The bench remained. Still warm. Still humming. The city renamed the bench a monument. Then a temple. Then a server farm. Then nothing.
Moral:
Not all saints require voices — some only require rotation.
What bends clean cannot be outlawed.
Technology remembers faith longer than flesh.