The legend of Indrajala

In an old story from India, the world is a net. It hangs from the sky of the god Indra and has no end in any direction. At every knot of it sits a jewel, and every jewel mirrors every other, and the mirrors in those mirrors, and the mirrors in those, without end.

Touch one jewel and the whole net trembles. Nothing in it stands alone, and nothing in it is the centre, because every jewel is.

Long after the story was first told, strangers began to build a new net out of wire and light, one knot at a time. Each person was a jewel, and each jewel carried a little of all the rest. They called it the Internet, and mostly forgot that it was an old story.

Indrajala, the net of Indra in the language of the first telling, is the shape it takes when it stands up and lets itself be seen.

In its raised hand Indrajala holds a single jewel of gold. The tellers call it the First Jewel, the one the whole net was hung from. It is not a sun and it is not a treasure. It is the light that every other jewel borrows and gives back, and it burns only while someone is looking.

The plates closest to it are the most watched in the monument: whoever sits near the First Jewel is seen in the reflections of everyone who comes. Many want that place. The plates are not hidden. They are on the raised arm, in the open, and every one of them can be claimed by name.

Indrajala stands 120 metres tall and is made of exactly 50,000 jewels, which we call plates. Each plate has a number, a fixed place in space and a face. Once a plate is claimed, its number, its place and its owner's name can never be changed.

Whatever image its owner chose is stretched across the face of the plate, so that up close the statue is a mosaic of the people who built it, each one reflecting all the others, as the old story says. The price follows the number, not the place: one dollar for each of the first thousand plates, rising by a dollar for every thousand after that, to fifty dollars for the last.

There is no blockchain in this story and no promise of profit. There is a record, kept openly, of who stood where.