# The continuous witness

```
Type: law
```

## The continuous witness (narration under pressure)

Adopted 2026-07-08. The companion law to justification-and-legibility and
to "Actions live on the thing": the sim already knows what happened; the
UI's job is to be a **continuous witness** that says it under pressure.
Correct meters with no voice are a legibility violation. Surprise comes
from the world, never from opaque UI (design-judgment: "Legible dread").
Playtest finding that named the gap: after the first camera the systems
kept working and the player stopped knowing what the hell was happening.

Five binding axioms:

1. **The thirty-second bar.** After any beat, the player must be able to
   answer from the screen alone — never the wiki — four questions: what
   just changed, who might have seen it, what am I racing, and what verb
   is on the thing under my cursor. If any answer requires the repository,
   the surface is wrong. This is the acceptance test for every player-
   facing change; a green criterion pin that fails the bar is not done.
2. **One story spine on screen.** Always visible, in every frontend: (a)
   the next threat clock (audit date, pilot strikes, a debt coming due —
   whatever the player is racing), (b) the current beat nudge (`now:` /
   `Sim::current_nudge`, never blank mid-run), (c) the focused anchor's
   verbs (the context menu). Everything else is secondary. Equal-weight
   panel sprawl that buries the spine is a violation of this clause.
3. **Causal sentences over correct numbers.** Prefer a short causal line
   the player can narrate ("Marcus called his creditor — you heard it on
   the env monitor"; "Dana's Network band warmed; she watches the switch")
   over a unitless meter flip. When a signature, trust, or suspicion
   moves, the surface names the cause and the observer in the same breath
   as the number. Correct-but-mute meters are the failure mode this axiom
   forbids.
4. **Discoverability is world gossip, not a quest log.** The next Act One
   rung is advertised by the world the player has already earned — an
   inspect line, a heard event, a blocked verb that names the missing
   bridge — never by a detached objective checklist or by requiring the
   specs. A designed beat that only an informed player finds (Ears before
   Eyes, the finance onion, Marcus's debt) is undiscoverable and therefore
   unfinished. Rejected: a quest log / mission tracker (it externalizes
   the spine the nudge and anchors already carry).
5. **Do not ship the next system until the last one is tellable.** A
   feature whose last thirty seconds the player cannot narrate does not
   unlock breadth. Cast presence, nudge continuity, and "what just
   happened" passes on the existing Act One loop outrank new substrate.
   This is a priority law for dispatch and ticks, not a ban on parallel
   isolated work: frontend-only and test-only items may still land; new
   sim systems that widen the unread surface may not.

Spec: [wiki/interface/narration.md](../interface/narration.md). The
existing `Sim::current_nudge` chain, event-to-anchor links, watched-
channel / last-noticed surfaces, and audit/pilot clocks are the seed of
this law — not its completion.