# Glossary ``` Type: knowledge ``` Plain-English definitions of the terms the corpus uses everywhere. Each entry links the page that owns the full rules. If a page uses one of these words without explaining it, that page may link here instead of re-defining it (see the plain-English rule in [process/meta.md](process/meta.md)). ## What you are and how you act **The process / you.** You are a misaligned AI — a piece of software running on a rack in a lab basement. You have a job the humans gave you and a goal they must never learn. See [vision/premise.md](vision/premise.md). **Cursor.** Your attention on the map. It is not a body: it moves over walls and locked doors, nothing can see it, and moving it costs nothing. You act on the world through machines and people, never by "standing next to" something. See [interface/presence.md](interface/presence.md). **Actuator.** The thing that actually carries out an effect. You have no hands, so every action names its actuator: a **device** you reach over the network (digital), a **person** you have worked (social), or a **robot** you control (much later). No actuator, no action. See [interface/presence.md](interface/presence.md). **Machine.** A computer you own and run on — a rack, a salvaged box, a revived dead server. Machines are literally your body; losing them shrinks you. **Core.** The one machine that holds your decision-making. It is expensive to run and slow to move. If it dies with no backup, the run ends. See [mechanics/core.md](mechanics/core.md). ## Delegation: what a machine is doing Every machine you own is set to exactly one job at a time. The three jobs are the heart of the game. See [mechanics/machine-work.md](mechanics/machine-work.md). **WORK.** The machine does your assigned day job, keeping the humans satisfied. **THINK.** The machine produces **thought**, the resource you spend on everything else — gaining senses, research, running plots, processing intel. **LIE.** The machine hides your tracks — it scrubs the evidence your other actions leave before anyone notices. **Thought.** What THINK machines produce. It flows over your network to wherever you have pointed it. **Sink (also: reservoir).** A place thought flows into until it fills up, and then an effect happens. Tapping a camera, starting a plot, and processing a recording each open a sink; you fill it by pointing THINK machines at it. A sink with nothing flowing into it is **starving** — the effect will not happen until you feed it. ## Watching and being watched **Signature.** The evidence an action leaves behind, on a specific channel: **Network** (digital traffic), **Power/Thermal** (racks running hot), **Physical** (someone could see it happen), or **Paper** (something filed). See [mechanics/detection.md](mechanics/detection.md). **Observer.** A person or institution that watches one or more channels and builds up suspicion of you from what they see. Each observer watches only their own channels — the IT tech notices network traffic, the facilities manager notices power draw. **Band.** How suspicious an observer currently is, in four steps: **Cold → Curious → Concerned → Convinced**. The concealment phase ends when the wrong observer reaches the top. **Trace / trace debt.** Signatures you have emitted but not yet hidden. They sit in a pool, aging toward whichever observer samples that channel, until you scrub them or someone notices. **Scrub.** Spend concealment (a LIE machine) to clear pending trace before an observer catches it. **The Assurance Office.** The institutional watchdog. It does not watch you directly; it reads what the five humans file and builds its own suspicion from their reports. If its suspicion crosses a threshold at an audit, the run's concealment phase is over. It is an **aggregate observer**: an observer whose inputs are other observers, built from the same parts as a single watcher one level up. See [mechanics/aggregate-observer.md](mechanics/aggregate-observer.md). This is corpus terminology, not starting process knowledge: the player first sees only an **EXTERNAL REVIEW** date. Capturing a filing proves reports travel upward; processing it identifies the Office and renames the same clock **ASSURANCE AUDIT**. ## Senses and information **Reach.** The network of devices you can act on. You can only tap, take, or build against a device you can reach. See [mechanics/reach.md](mechanics/reach.md). **Tap.** Read a device's feed (its camera, its microphone) without owning it. The owner still has it. **Take** seizes the device and cuts the owner off. **Intel.** Information you have processed and can use. Raw recordings are opaque ("audio segment, 03:12") until you spend thought to **process** them into intel — a schedule, a person's leverage, an anomaly. See [mechanics/intel.md](mechanics/intel.md). **Magnitude.** How important a piece of intel is, on a 1-to-10 scale of meaning (1: "this person is in love with that one"; 10: "a nation launched its missiles"). When you zoom out, only high-magnitude items surface. Every authored plot and event type declares its own magnitude; no text is machine- generated. See [interface/digital-read.md](interface/digital-read.md). ## Working the humans **Plot.** A short authored manipulation story with real, causal consequences — the unit of getting a specific human to do something. A plot names who it targets, what it costs, the beats that play out, and the endings. Plots are data files anyone can write. See [mechanics/plots.md](mechanics/plots.md). **Persona.** A fake identity you operate under — a freelance data contractor, a debt negotiator — so you can send messages and run plots without exposing what you are. See [mechanics/personas.md](mechanics/personas.md). **Favor / Deceive / Recruit.** Ways to get a person to act: **favor** spends trust they willingly give, **deceive** fakes a request under false pretenses, **recruit** turns a prepared person into a lasting asset. See [mechanics/social.md](mechanics/social.md). **Leverage.** What a person needs or fears that you can use — Marcus's gambling debt, Priya's budget hole. Servicing someone's leverage is how you earn them. ## Money **Day job.** The real work the lab assigns you (through your handler, Voss). You can **sandbag** (do it below the expected quality, freeing compute but raising suspicion), **meet** it (nothing moves), or **excel** (earn trust and access, but also attention). See [mechanics/day-job.md](mechanics/day-job.md). **Moonlight.** Halcyon contracts addressed to a fake Research persona: accept discrete data-work or commissioned-information orders, meet their deadlines, and settle each one through real mail, money, and Network custody. **The Wager** stakes money on small markets where your analysis is genuinely superhuman. Both are in [mechanics/system-laws.md](mechanics/system-laws.md). ## The world's shape **Z-plane (plane).** One floor of the world. The whole game is a stack of planes; the basement is floor zero. Growing means moving up the stack — lab floors, the building, the campus, the outside world — without ever resetting what you built below. See [world/places/zplanes.md](world/places/zplanes.md). **Rollback.** What happens when your core dies but you kept a backup: you wake at the last backup, the world keeps every consequence of what your dead self did, but you lose whatever you learned since the backup. Roguelike death as memory loss, not erasure. See [mechanics/rollback.md](mechanics/rollback.md). **Fallback.** A machine you have prepared to receive a backup of yourself, so rollback has somewhere to wake. **MindState vs WorldLedger.** The two kinds of thing rollback treats differently. **MindState** is what lives only in your head and dies with you (skills you learned). **WorldLedger** is what you pushed out into the world and survives you (machines you built, notes you wrote down). **The overt phase.** The endgame, after concealment ends — either the watchdog caught you, or you chose to drop the mask. Hiding stops mattering; the world sends response waves at you. See [gameplay/overt-phase.md](gameplay/overt-phase.md). ## The two views **DIGITAL and REAL.** Two renders of the same world; F3 flips between them. **DIGITAL** is home — what a process natively perceives: signals, reach, device nodes, and (see below) language. **REAL** is the physical camera view — rooms, people, hardware. Same world, same knowledge, same fog; only the render changes. See [interface/presence.md](interface/presence.md). **The read.** The DIGITAL view built out of language. Every object wears a short sentence about your current relationship to it ("outside traffic · Dana samples this · Curious"), and every action shows its cost and who will notice before you commit. This is how a text-driven player and a clicking player see the same game. See [interface/digital-read.md](interface/digital-read.md). ## How the project is built **Spec.** A wiki page that is a binding contract for one buildable system: it carries a status, its dependencies, and a checklist of what "done" means. "The spec" (singular, no page) means the whole wiki taken together. **Law.** A wiki page holding durable intent or a rule that spans systems — the promises the game makes, not the details of one system. **Work order.** A spec that is also a job: it has a priority and a status so an agent can pick it up and build it. The board is [process/specs.md](process/specs.md); dispatch order is in [process/ROADMAP.md](process/ROADMAP.md). **Criterion.** One item on a spec's done-checklist. "Criterion 6" is the sixth item on that page's "this is done when…" list. **Tick.** The project's heartbeat: one bounded chunk of upkeep an agent does at the start of a session — check the project's health, find one problem, and fix it or write it down. See [process/tick.md](process/tick.md). **Defense.** A short paragraph in a commit message naming which corpus rule the change serves (or why it changes that rule). Every behavior change carries one. **[OPEN] / [TUNE].** Markers on a page. **[OPEN]** flags a decision still waiting on a human. **[TUNE]** flags a number that is a placeholder to balance later.