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forever. 112 REVELATIONS and the mathematics of Tlon. But they only reveal a little bit of it at a time to the unsuspecting public. The founders, who are members of a secret society called Orbis Tertius, have sworn to remain hidden On Tlon, as in UMMO, the number system uses the base 12. And there is no concept of time as we know it. The past only exists as a present memory, and the future as a present expectation. Therefore it should be as easy to alter the past as it is to change the future. There is also a theory that all common objects have doubles. Duplicates of those objects that have been lost can be retrieved, provided one believes strongly enough in the lost object. For example, assume that two per- sons are looking for a pencil. One finds it and says nothing. The other person may find another pencil, equally real, although slightly different; the second pencil is called a hron. Experiments have been performed on Tlon to systematically generate hronir of fictitious objects, notably archaeological artifacts. Thus, four groups of students were instructed to excavate at certain sites. They were told the sites were expected to yield great treasures, when in fact no such evidence existed. Three of the experiments failed. But in the fourth one, the director of the exercise (who knew the truth) died during the excavations. The leader- less team of students, who did not know there were no buried artifacts, found a golden mask, an ancient sword, and beautiful amphoras—all of which were hronir, created out of nothing, by their finders' own beliefs! Following the gradual release of the Memphis collection of the secret forty-volume Tlon Encyclopedia, more and more people will start to believe in Tlon, a belief reinforced by the discovery of Tlonian objects made of unusual materials around the world. Borges points out diaboli- cally that as the belief in Tlon grows, our own society, which doesn't know that there is no such thing as Tlon, will start producing its own spurious hronir, pseudofacts and quasimemories of Tlon that will slowly replace the old reality. Borges even envisions a future state where the hoax begun by the secret society he calls Orbis Tertius will have totally disintegrated the rational world.