Holding I, Technology and Arcanum.
Finished Year 39. The largest single work of the founding years. Maintained since.
Terminals are how you run this fortress and how you read this Archive.
There is nothing mechanical in them. Where another people would fit a lens and a mirror, we fit a sensor that reads life. Where another would run a speaking tube, we open a channel of the mind.
Touch a Terminal with your hand or a focus. Every use, whether you are opening a door, asking after a system, or pulling a record, takes a deliberate magical act and a moment of your attention. You cannot use one by accident. That was the point: the Exemplars held that anything you can work by accident, an intruder can work on purpose.
What a Terminal does
Control. It works the systems wired to it and nothing else. Doors, locks, lights, warmth, and sound answer to the nearest Terminal. This is deliberate. A fortress where every console runs everything is a fortress that falls when one console is taken.
Talk. It reaches every other Terminal within sixty feet, carrying words and simple images between users. You need only be near one to hear. To send, touch it and hold your attention on it; once the channel is open the rest passes freely. Sixty feet is the limit of the principle, not a setting. The arcanists could not stretch it and said so in the construction record.
Ask. It reports on the systems wired to it, and again only those. A Terminal in the cooling chambers knows nothing about the elevator. A Terminal at the core knows nothing about the life support engines. What comes back ranges from where a fault is to a full account of how a component works, how it was invented, and how to build one from raw material. One question, one answer. If the answer is strange, you may have to sit with it.
Read the Archive. Any Terminal will do, unlike control and asking, which are local. The general holdings are open to anyone. Two entries are marked restricted at the top and need Elder credentials. No Terminal writes to the Archive, whoever is holding it.
The Command Terminal
The Command Terminal is the helm. See The Helm and Its Key.
Sensing life throughout the fortress is done from the Command Terminal, or from the Atrium Terminal by someone already attuned to the Command. The Atrium extends that reach. It does not grant the sense on its own.
Portable Terminals
A portable unit does everything a fixed Terminal does, so long as you are near one. Step out of range and you keep only the talking, and only with other portables.
They are issued to anyone whose work takes them away from a console.
They are not keyed to a person. A portable works for whoever is holding it. We know. It was not an oversight and it has never been fixed.