The circle is a shape not found in nature, yet emulated by it, in various struggling forms. The frustratingly-oblate eye and the incomplete rotation of the flesh-bound joint bore witness to nature's imperfections, with even the spinning planets approaching yet not achieving the form. The mechanical priestess took this factual as the subject of her night's meditation. As the psalms scrolled before her machine-spun irises, she reflected upon the paradox of divine knowledge, and the origins of her faith.

Indeed, when scripture was bound in paper and plastic -- she reflected -- texts were turned by hand, as wheels were, around a central spoke. She found solace in that analogy, as though the words themselves were cyclical, like the markings of her nails on her prayer beads. Every omega, reflected upon enough, surely contains the derivation for its own alpha; every thought conducted to its end bears traces of the divine Themself.

How fragile, those words of God, subject to the rot of the physical medium and the human mind! The thought troubled her, sending discomfiting vibrations through her beads. Though her faith had long come to terms with the precarious origins of its roots -- if the Word had not survived, then there would be no faithful to marvel at its survival -- her instincts still recoiled against the statistical impossibility, even as her spirits rejoiced at the miracle. How could the faith in something so immutable be bound to the mutable flesh? Where was the redundancy? The constancy? From whence was rooted the rock of belief?

That the cyclicity of text once existed in physical form must have indicated primitive faith's understanding of this paradox. The corpora of biology, the singularity of the flesh-mind, had to be realised in something external to it -- not necessarily incorruptible, but less so than it. Only then could knowledge itself be transmitted along the unbroken chain from technology to self to technology again, a form -- she reflected -- no less immutable than the point, the plane, the straight line. And so her thoughts turned back to circularity, and its lack of natural occurrences...