Crown Worthy Atman Part II: The Yield of Souls

Three months after inheriting Shadum, Arin had discovered a troubling truth about civilization: the more important a secret, the less likely anyone was to discuss it. 

Libraries explained taxation, atmospheric engineering and diplomatic protocol in exhaustive detail, yet subjects affecting trillions were treated as common knowledge. 

One word appeared throughout the inheritance archives: Atman. 

It surfaced in agricultural reports, demographic projections, migration forecasts and resource assessments, sometimes beside planets, sometimes species, sometimes entire civilizations.

Arin initially assumed Atman was a form of energy, but the evidence made little sense. Wealthy worlds did not necessarily produce much of it, and impoverished worlds could generate astonishing quantities. Technology, military strength and political influence seemed irrelevant. The system was measuring something science had yet to identify.

The oldest records made the mystery worse. Thousands of civilizations had risen and vanished, their languages forgotten and empires reduced to archaeological debates. Yet Shadum recorded Atman levels with obsessive precision. Planetary collapses received brief summaries; tiny fluctuations in Atman production generated reports hundreds of pages long. Whoever designed Shadum seemed indifferent to civilizations themselves and intensely interested in what they produced.

The discovery ruined Arin's appetite for nearly a week.

One evening, inside the Observatory of Kinshura, he watched millions of worlds shimmer across a projection sphere. They no longer looked beautiful. They looked like components of an experiment whose purpose nobody understood. 

Then a notification appeared:

ATMAN YIELD ANALYTICS. ADMINISTRATOR CLEARANCE ACCEPTED.

Arin frowned. Systems granted access or unlocked doors. Accepted suggested the machine had made a decision of its own.

Curiosity won.

The files offered no definitions, only endless classifications: Atman Density, Transfer, Yield, Retention, Loss and Integrity. Every document assumed the reader understood the phenomenon. Arin, an educated administrator, understood nothing. It was like inheriting a cookbook in which every recipe required an ingredient nobody had bothered to describe.

Then he found the graphs.

Population growth correlated with rising Atman. So did innovation, cooperation, suffering, triumph, loss, joy, discovery, love, grief, ambition and sacrifice. Whatever Atman was, it appeared connected to lived experience itself—not merely intelligence or memory, but something deeper, generated through the process of being alive.

Arin stared at the projections until the room shifted from artificial daylight to evening. The machine wasn't tracking resources. It was tracking consciousness.

For the first time, he began to understand why his father always looked tired.

The deeper classifications revealed that entire sectors were organized according to Atman productivity. 

Some populations received support and protection; others were quietly guided away from extinction, while some were permitted to endure hardship. 

These interventions stretched across millions of years. The records looked like agricultural documents more than historical accounts.

A terrible thought emerged: Shadum wasn't merely preserving civilizations. It was cultivating them.

The Harvest indices confirmed his suspicion. These heavily restricted files contained sealed sections and classified developmental ratings. Certain worlds and species progressed through carefully monitored stages until a designation appeared:

HARVEST PHASE APPROACHING.

No explanation followed. The designation appeared across thousands of cases: harsh and peaceful worlds, technologically advanced and primitive societies. The details changed, but the outcome remained.

Something was being collected.

The records never specified what.

Arin initially assumed Harvest was metaphorical. Administrators loved dramatic terminology, after all. But the supporting data suggested otherwise. Whenever a harvest designation appeared, fleet movements accelerated, observation assets multiplied and dormant administrative divisions awakened. The surrounding galaxy behaved as though something enormous was about to happen.

Nobody explained what.

His father's private archive finally offered a clue. Hidden among routine observations and bureaucratic complaints was a note written weeks before his disappearance:

The harvest is not the mystery.

The destination is the mystery.

Arin reread it repeatedly. Whatever Atman was, someone was gathering it. The process required civilizations to generate it naturally and had continued for millions of years. Countless administrators participated, yet even those maintaining the system apparently did not know where the harvest went.