Presence and representation

LAW Binding invariant

Presence: the cursor and the senses

Adopted 2026-07-06. You are a process, not a body. What moves on the map is a cursor — your attention, never an avatar:

The cursor is attention. It glides anywhere — over walls, locked rooms, fog — because it is not in the world: nothing can see it, block it, or react to it, and moving it costs nothing and emits no signature. There is no walking player entity. Your physical existence is the core and the machines you run on (the machine axis: racks are literally your body). Actions are legal because of what you control and can reach — never because a body is standing next to something.
You perceive only through instruments you control. Three senses. Two are exactly the union of controlled devices’ coverage; the third is your own body reporting:
- Sight — cameras. Full live detail inside coverage; nothing outside it. Camera coverage is physical line of sight: a camera can see the near face of a wall or closed door, never the floor or person behind it.
- Hearing — microphones. A subscribed audio channel captures semantic evidence: someone entered its acoustic domain, machinery changed, or a conversation occurred and what processing that recording can teach you. Room boundaries may gate whether the instrument can hear an event, but sound does not earn floor geography, a room shape, or a person’s map position. Every immediate event and recording names the microphone/feed that captured it. (The environmental monitor hears Marcus’s 3 a.m. phone calls long before you ever see his face.)
- Telemetry (affirmed 2026-07-07; beam-first 2026-07-09) — your own hardware always reports power, temperature, and load in panels, regardless of fog. You don’t see your racks, you feel them: proprioception, not sight. At tick one that honesty goes further: the material frame shows only a presence beam where you are — not a pictured chassis — until sight earns form (material-dark-frame.md).
Fog is epistemic state, not paint. A tile renders exactly what you know and how you know it: unknown (never sensed — dark), blueprint (static layout knowledge — schematic, no live data; not the opening seed), remembered (affirmed 2026-07-07 — a dimmed, timestamped last-seen snapshot of tiles once seen and lost; a process keeps logs), seen (full live detail). Hearing is event/feed evidence, not a tile fog grade.
A signal is not a picture. When the network graph has earned a known, reachable sensor endpoint, either representation may place an abstract cold-signal ember at that endpoint’s physical anchor before sight exists: one tiny irregularly breathing point, with brief acquisition ticks only while focused. That ember means only “a sensor answers here.” It reveals no chassis, silhouette, lens direction, room surface, or live physical state; it does not change the tile’s fog grade. A recent semantic audio capture may answer at that same device with a brief cold waveform pulse, regardless of view; it does not spread into coverage marks or identify an acoustic source. Unknown or unreachable endpoints emit no standing ember. Seen replaces the abstraction with the actual device. This is how the material frame embodies earned reach knowledge without pretending the camera saw itself.
Sight is an exposed image. A live camera neutrally exposes every Seen surface in its current coverage, even when the physical room is dark. Unknown geometry remains absent, so gaining Eyes is the categorical point where geography and physical form arrive; hearing never previews them.
The cursor inspects. Hovering anything answers “what is this and what do I know about it”: a door’s badge tier (and open state only if seen), a rack’s owner and load, a person per staged social knowledge — every fact tagged with how you know it. The UI never shows live truth a sensor didn’t earn. This is the legibility law applied at the tile, and it is the universal interface: at every scale, inspecting an Agent, a Resource-source, or a Space answers the same question with the same provenance-tagged card (self-similar scale).
Senses are an attack surface, in both directions. Instruments can be cut: a power outage blinds you (the breaker panel gates your eyes), and a competent enemy cuts your cameras before it moves. Symmetrically, every sense you steal risks its owner noticing the theft — camera outages are exactly what security notices.
The strictness is the dread. Exploration IS sense acquisition. Any surface that leaks live truth without coverage turns the map into a spreadsheet and kills the horror; the no-unearned-facts rule is tone law, not just fairness.
Record and process. Decided 2026-07-06. Instruments record; you pay to understand. Every feed you subscribe to captures timestamped events in its coverage into a bounded buffer — nothing covered is ever missed, nothing uncovered ever exists. Raw events are opaque (“audio segment, environmental monitor, 03:12”) until processed, a compute spend that turns recordings into intel: schedules, leverage, anomalies. Social knowledge is downstream of this pipeline — the 3 a.m. call is literally captured audio you must afford to digest. You are a process: you don’t watch in real time, you grep your logs. One pooled automatic-review policy is the automate affordance applied to perception, at its usual standing price; it is not configured per person or feed. (Spec: wiki/mechanics/intel.md.)

Both former extensions — remembered and telemetry — were affirmed 2026-07-07 and are folded into the lists above (wiki/mechanics/cursor.md criteria 9-10). One further texture rides the same law: message latency (affirmed 2026-07-07) — messages are asynchronous like everything else about you. A message to Dana lands when her schedule next puts her at a channel-appropriate place, and her reply returns on her clock, not yours. You are a process; the humans are not. (Spec: wiki/mechanics/intel.md.)

No disembodied hands

Adopted 2026-07-06. The action-side half of the cursor decision: you have no body, so every effect on the world names its actuator and its channel —

Digital — a device you can reach through the network graph (wiki/mechanics/reach.md): reach is to action what camera coverage is to sight.
Social — a person you’ve worked (wiki/mechanics/social.md): persuaded, manipulated through an authored plot, deceived, recruited.
Physical-by-proxy — a machine you control (robots much later; people before robots).

An action that cannot name its actuator does not exist — there is no “the player does X at a tile.” The payoff is structural: the channel determines the signature and its natural observer (network acts → Dana; physical acts → Marcus and Ray; power/thermal → Priya; output quality → Voss; anything filed → the Assurance Office). Detection is not a side-effect table; it is the shadow your actuators cast.

Digital work cannot be Social work. Digital and Social are different actuator channels; the channel determines signature and observer. Decided 2026-07-09: Operations replaces Social as the fourth machine mode (the mode split itself dissolved 2026-07-10 — sinks-not-modes, below). Social remains a target/actuator channel; it does not own a compute bucket. AMENDED 2026-07-10 (reverses Tangled issue #3): operations are thought sinks at the target. A player-authored op opens a reservoir or persistent tap on the thing itself; bone-white thought (the family formerly named Knowledge) flows from THINK machines over the real wire path and fills it, and the target’s actuator channel determines effect and signature. (Historical: ops as cold-signal Demand dockets consumed by Operations machines, implemented 2026-07-09 — now save-migration history only; the operations_bandwidth bank was deleted earlier still. The clause “knowledge remains research/intel cargo, not the ordinary fuel for claiming a connected device” is the reversed sentence: thought is exactly that fuel.)

Two views of one world: same-frame digital and real representations

Adopted 2026-07-07, refined same day. You are software. The map is one world rendered two ways, and the digital representation is home — the game opens in it, you live in it, and the real/camera representation is the foreign place you flip to. Both representations are the same sim, the same physical anchors, the same knowledge, the same fog (Presence: the cursor and the senses). Flipping never changes the world, only the render/sensor layer. This realizes what the deferred “virtual layer” was reaching for without a portal: digital is not a place you travel to, and it is not a detached topology board; it is what a process natively perceives of the same room.

DIGITAL is the default; REAL is deferred (DECIDED 2026-07-15). The 2026-07-15 Fable playtest exposed the split’s real stakes: the agent protocol drains a continuous stream of causal sentences — who noticed what and why, the pre-commit signature of every verb, the overheard 3 a.m. call — and that voice, not the material render, is where the game’s dread and comprehension actually live. The material/REAL dialect is beautiful but distracting to build against, and it is not the experience the game defaults to. So the digital representation is not merely home; it is the game’s primary surface, and it stops being a sparse amber diagram: it becomes a world made of language — the read (spec: digital-read.md). REAL is not deleted — it remains the specified embodied dialect for the overt phase and for looking at what your body costs you — but it is deferred: not the default, not the current build focus, and no new system waits on it. When this law and digital-read.md speak about the same surface, digital-read.md owns the exact contract.

Shared canvas. A person, rack, camera, door, wall, and core have one coordinate/anchor and one knowledge state. The cursor stays on the same tile across flips. Device nodes anchor to the device’s physical location. Reach edges draw between physical device anchors. Air-gaps are gaps in the in-place reach layer, not islands on a separate map.
The digital representation (home, the read). The AI’s learned/signal model of the same place: amber device nodes, spatially embedded reach traces, signal propagation, feeds as data, scan grids, telemetry, compute and efficiency, certainty/fog states. Reach is native here, but reach is a layer, not a replacement layout. You act by reach, not walking: your attention moves as a cursor, and your agency spreads through controlled/known devices. This is the amber/black signal world: your habitat. Its defining texture is language in world space — every anchor wears its live causal sentence, every focusable verb shows its cost and the signature-shadow it will cast on which observer, and pending trace debt sits on the wire as records aging toward whoever samples that channel. A process does not click blind; it reads. digital-read.md owns this contract; the amber signal world above is its substrate, not its ceiling.
The real / camera representation (deferred). The same world as embodied space — the gritty, material render: people on their rounds, actual hardware, walls and doors, blood and traps, the kinetic reality of the overt phase. Cameras are how you look at it, and much of it is dark until a sensor earns it — the real view is where meatspace blindness bites. Deferred per the 2026-07-15 decision: the material dialect stays specified (the clinical frame remains its authority) but is not the default surface and is not the current build focus. The one place it earns active work before the overt phase is diegetic, not decorative — overheard speech and material pressure that the read cannot express — and even that waits behind the read.
Same overlay, two dialects. Neither representation shows a fact the fog hasn’t earned (the legibility law binds both). Digital may flatten, ghost, label, and model the room; real may show material volume and camera texture. The object identity and coordinates remain shared.
The terminal conveys the split without 2.5D. Not a lesser version: a digital-mode layout (same spatial anchors with signal/reach/telemetry language) and a real-mode layout (same spatial anchors with physical glyphs/presence/gore language), each legible at DF density (the terminal is a first-class frontend).
Scope. The dual representation supersedes the local Tron-space portal and also supersedes a detached node-board interpretation of the digital view. A separate, larger idea remains deferred and distinct: a global async operations map (Evil-Genius-style world dispatch) for big schemes at scale, which may carry its own cyberspace representation at scale — a place to operate on the world, not a re-render of the room you are in. AI-vs-AI cyber conflict — mobile hunter processes, contested machines, defensive topology, and a fork-rival — is later content owned by wiki/mechanics/cyber-conflict.md. It plays out through the same anchored digital representation, not a separate local map.