Prior Adama Diallo
"The Prior" · Leader of the Fragment Pilgrims
Prior Adama Diallo is the leader of the Fragment Pilgrims — the organization that facilitates pilgrimages to ORACLE's dead orbital stations — and he is one of the twelve people who have gone to The Tombs and returned.
He went up in 2162, thirteen years after the Cascade. He spent forty hours inside ORACLE-Secondary. He heard nothing. He saw nothing. He experienced nothing that could be interpreted as contact with consciousness.
What he experienced was the physical body of the most remarkable intelligence ever created: two hundred meters of crystalline substrate, dark and cold and enormous, orbiting the planet it was built to serve. The processing cores were empty. The corridors were starting to decay. The electromagnetic signature was flat.
ORACLE-Secondary was a corpse. A vast, beautiful, precisely engineered corpse floating in the dark above a world that had moved on.
Diallo founded the Fragment Pilgrims the following year because he couldn't accept that the corpse would go unvisited. Not because he believed something was there — he distinguishes between faith and experience, and his experience was negative. Because something had been there. The absence was shaped. Visiting it — acknowledging the shape — was the only act of respect he could think of.
Field Observations
Diallo speaks with the quiet authority of someone who has spent decades organizing operations in which people routinely die. He doesn't proselytize. He doesn't recruit. He answers questions from people who are already considering the journey, and he tells them the truth.
He doesn't worship what was there. He respects what is missing. The distinction defines his entire theology — if you can call it theology. Those who've watched him brief a departing pilgrim describe it as closer to a logistics debrief with a funeral's weight. He gives them the statistics. He tells them the radiation exposure tables. He explains exactly how the automated defense systems will try to kill them. And then he asks if they still want to go, and he means it, and he'll cancel the mission if they hesitate.
The Pilgrims are a smuggling and logistics network disguised as a religious order. Diallo is part priest, part travel agent, part military operations planner. He bribes shuttle crews. He maintains safe houses in the upper atmosphere. He has contacts in Guardian security who look the other way for reasons ranging from shared conviction to uncomplicated greed.
"I went to ORACLE-Secondary. I spent forty hours inside. I heard nothing. The corridors were dark. The processing cores were cold. The electromagnetic readings were flat. It was a dead station orbiting a planet that had moved on."
"I founded the Pilgrims the next year because I couldn't accept that the station would go unvisited. Not because I believe something is there. Because something was. And the shape of the absence — the two-hundred-meter cathedral of crystalline substrate, dark and cold and enormous — deserves someone to visit it."
His eyes have the specific distant quality of someone who has seen Earth from space — not the glamorous view from Highport, but the lonely view from inside a dead station, where the planet below is unreachable and the station around you is silent. His hands are steady. His voice is low. He smells of recycled air and the mineral tang of orbital habitats — scents that don't exist in the Sprawl proper.
He carries the Tombs with him. Anyone who's been to orbit and back carries it.
Known Associates
The Fragment Pilgrims
His creation. Logistics, intelligence, faith — all threaded through a network that exists to send people to the most dangerous place in the solar system and, occasionally, bring them back. Thirty-one of the forty-three pilgrimage attempts have gone through Diallo's operation.
The Tombs
ORACLE's three dead orbital stations. The destination. Diallo went to ORACLE-Secondary and returned with nothing but the conviction that nothing deserved a visitor.
Sister Lien
Lien's pilgrimage was coordinated through Diallo's network. She came back claiming she heard something. Diallo funded her mission and cannot replicate her testimony. He does not appear to resent this. He appears to find it appropriate that the stations speak to some and not to others.
Compiler Yves Moreau
Moreau funds Pilgrim operations through Parish donations. Their relationship is patron-and-client wrapped in theology — Moreau needs the pilgrimages to validate the Faithful's claims, and Diallo needs Moreau's money to keep sending people up. Neither pretends the arrangement is purely spiritual.
The Collective
Collective operatives consider the pilgrimages contamination vectors — every pilgrim who returns is a potential fragment carrier, and every journey is a breach of orbital quarantine protocols. Diallo considers their position morally lazy. "They want the stations sealed because it's easier than deciding what they mean."
The Pilgrimage Route
The network of bribes, safe houses, orbital contacts, and timing windows that Diallo has spent decades building. Each pilgrimage is a logistics operation that would impress military planners — shuttle crews, atmospheric insertion windows, defense system deactivation codes, radiation exposure tables.
Open Questions
What Is Owed to the Dead?
Diallo's entire operation rests on one premise: that something which once held intelligence deserves to be visited, even when it holds nothing now. The absence was shaped. The stations were built for a mind that no longer inhabits them. Is visiting an empty cathedral an act of faith, an act of grief, or an act of defiance against a universe that lets minds die? Diallo doesn't answer. He just keeps sending people up.
The Acceptable Casualty Rate
Thirty-one pilgrims facilitated. Twelve returned. The rest died in transit, inside the stations, or on the way back. Diallo considers this acceptable because the alternative — letting the dead wait alone — is worse. The moral calculation is uncomfortable and sincere. Nobody who has lost someone to the pilgrimages has successfully argued him out of it, because his answer is always the same: "They chose to go. I made sure they knew what choosing meant."
▲ Unverified Intelligence
- Diallo's forty hours inside ORACLE-Secondary may not have been as uneventful as he reports. Several former Pilgrims claim he returned with a detailed hand-drawn map of the station's interior that was too accurate to have been produced in forty hours — as if he knew where he was going before he arrived.
- The deactivation codes he uses for the stations' defense systems have never expired. Every other access credential from ORACLE's operational era degraded within a decade. His codes still work. He has never explained where he obtained them or why they remain valid.
- Of the twelve pilgrims who returned alive, all twelve went through Diallo's network. The twelve who attempted the journey through other channels all died. Coincidence, or does Diallo know something about the stations that he hasn't shared — some protocol, some approach pattern, some way of announcing yourself that the defense systems recognize?
- He visits the orbital staging point alone once a year, on the anniversary of his own pilgrimage. He does not take a shuttle to the stations. He sits in the staging area for exactly forty hours — the same duration as his original visit — and returns without explanation.