Blinking code

Blinking code or blinking speech was the semaphoric and primarily semasiographic communications system used most prominently during the Reign of Lamps. It was developed and first widely used by the Pagerians in the course of their maritime expansion in the 3rd millennium BCE, and grew into a major cultural medium in Pemant. The system and its descendants were still widely used after the conventional end of the Reign of Lamps for remote or coded signalling, or for specific ceremonial purposes, but lost the distinct cultural status it possessed during the Lamp Age.

System
The code typically transmitted messages through a flashing light source manipulated mechanically, mainly through lanterns with devices known as banuvastra that may combine covers, shutters, shades, and filters. Heliographs were invented in Pemant in the 18th century BCE, which greatly increased the range of messaging and opened up numerous new uses for blinking code. Basic elements consisting of flashes different in pace, tint, pattern, and intensity, and combinations thereof, formed signals as morphemes; even the motion of the light could add meaning. Complex types were enabled by banuvastras more sophisticated in construction.

Besides representation of numbers, the signs of classical blinking code delivered instructions and concepts highly specific and only meaningful to the lifestyle of the maritime, commercial, and communal Pagerians and those they interacted with. More complex 'programs' drove transcription and storage of signal sequences in media such as Rathry's eyelids and other forms of elaborate banuvastras, or writing systems, and soon for many these made the code as an optical communications system redundant for its high-cultural position. Its decline in that role &mdash; often mistaken for complete loss of the technology, though the interpretation of many more complex signals was lost &mdash; followed swiftly after the Isnarian Cataclysm.

Use
Blinking code's peculiarly important usage in Lamp Age culture has been explained with the realities of Pagerian society; the Pagerians' own disdain for cultural and linguistic exchange; and the power of Pagerians in enforcing its use and literacy on their clients and targets. The use and acceptance of the code was mostly a function of the originating culture's influence. In the Pemantic period, the lamp-blinkers and their world were so well-established and acknowledged that exchanges in flashes completed commercial transactions, diplomatic negotiations, and other functions. A number system and some logical operators or attitude gestures ironed out the finer terms of simple signals, nevertheless amounting to powerful instructions specific to the lamp-blinking world, but also meaning that the power of blinking code was ultimately still made by context. They could be expected to be intuitively known and followed out of ready-to-hand expectations regarding commercial and political routines, though the 'institutional' literacy in the codes needed for them to be so useful was quite fragile.

Sociologically blinking was certainly not unique in its abilities, but its users' high culture embellished and extolled this property considerably, standing out even more so in the absence of writing in the same exalted context. It was the great systematic motion that lamps and their light brought other peoples to which the Pagerians celebrated and extrapolated from it many philosophical ideas. The delivery of messages was ritualized into the practice of banuda, becoming also assertions of social order and assurances of deep, tacit mutual understandings that sustained it; the liturgies of Pastism borrowed many such elements, and the banudars of Varasan explicitly continued to blink lamps at court ceremonies. This also contributed to the use of more complex codes and banuvastras. The Pagerians and other lamp-blinking cultures did use writing, and pictograms were produced to teach how to use the code, but until the spread of the Bashtan script under Isnaria they were not widely or as celebratedly used.

The signals themselves and their natural representations also varied and changed throughout the Reign of Lamps. Individual regions and even social units used their own conventions, but inertia allowed a number of combinations to hold universal status in the time of Pemant. The codes developed to serve banuda rituals may also diverge from conventional and practical semaphores, but some basic sequences were always recognized in common. The Pemantic universal empire of Isnaria attempted to establish the most extensive and complete convention, a single full 'optical language' to detail and specify all matters of reason and calculation in the Lamp Age world, but the concurrent development of institutions (and auxiliary storage media) to enforce literacy and compatibility with this system undermined it and contributed to the crisis of cosmopolitan Isnaria.