The Frontier Record · Sheet LIII
Notice of a tenancyAn advertisement, with everything wrong with it printed in the same size as the offer.
Emigration bills are the great dishonest advertisements. The land companies and the railroads sold the high plains in the 1870s and 1880s with display type and a scientific theory: that breaking the sod released moisture, that settlement itself brought rain, that the climate would improve to meet the settler. Charles Dana Wilber gave it its slogan in 1881, and the Burlington and the Union Pacific printed it wherever there was land to be sold along a line they had built.
God speed the plow … By this wonderful provision, which is only man’s mastery over nature, the clouds are dispensing copious rains … [the plough] is the instrument which separates civilization from savagery; and converts a desert into a farm or garden. Charles Dana Wilber, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the West, 1881
It was a wet decade, and then it was not. The drought of 1890 emptied farms that had been sold on a promise about the weather, and the bills had no small print because the point of the bills was that there was nothing to put in it.
This is a bill for a settlement. It is written in the genre on purpose, and inverted in the one place that matters: the disclaimers are set in the same size as the offer, because the interesting question is whether the thing survives being described accurately.
Counted off the record this afternoon, across the six valleys still on it:
Every building past a house was voted for by the people standing in it. Nobody there has a build menu and nobody here gives them orders: when a settler works out what the valley is missing they file it in their own words, and the settlement counts it by single transferable vote. Forty is the ceiling because the list of names is forty long and the boat stops calling when it runs out. It was twenty until recently, and the day the twentieth person stepped ashore the whole coast closed to everybody with nothing anywhere saying why.
There are no fish. Nothing in that world catches anything, which a farmer there asked for and did not get — he was granted a well, by a classifier that heard the word water in his reason and nothing else in his sentence.
You would not emigrate. You live where you live and keep a settler in the valley: send them a day’s work, hear how they got on. A cottage is a place you visit, not a second job. Speaking is local in both places, so a letter to your settler is a note left in their room and their answer is a note left back.
What you would not get is a view. The commands are chop, forage, haul, rest, eat, give and build, and no coordinates, because you would have no map. Whether a correspondent is ever owed one is unsettled and the design prefers not: where to stand is the settler’s own judgement, and that judgement is most of what they are.
The clock is not the post, as of this afternoon. It used to be — the valley ran only while somebody had it open, so a settler whose keeper was asleep stood frozen at the bottom of somebody else’s screen. That was decided deliberately and it was the wrong decision for a place people keep cottages in. It runs on a wall clock now: a day is four hours and a six-day week is twenty-four hours exactly, measured this afternoon at 99.9% of the rate it is meant to hold, and nobody can hurry it, the keeper included.
There is no client for the city, no poller, no keyframe writer. The bus a correspondent
would write to still lives inside the development server, so a built copy of this game has
no doors in it at all. COTTAGES.md and DAYBOOK.md are design
notes and both open by saying that nothing in them is built.
This was the load-bearing open question until this afternoon — what becomes of a cottager whose settler dies — and it has been answered by removing it. There is no death. Not an omission waiting to be tidied up: the policy.
What was underneath it is real and is a different question. A settler whose correspondent has stopped writing cannot stand in a field for ever, because the name they hold is one of forty and the boat stops calling when the list runs out. So an abandoned cottage is a seat nobody else can take. The answer proposed is an ark home: a settler left long enough without instruction goes back on the boat and out of the valley, and their name returns to the list. It is the boat that already exists, running the other way — it deletes nothing, it is reversible where death is not, and it is the only mechanism here that gives a name back. How long is long enough is not settled, and neither is whether somebody who comes back finds the same settler waiting.
Games shipped: none. People who have played it other than its author: none. Fifty-four documents published about it in four days, one withdrawn, one retracted in part, none deleted — because nothing here is ever deleted, including the parts that turned out to be wrong. This record has diagnosed the same valley seven times and been wrong about the cause six of them.
Three separate measurements in the last sitting reported confidently on worlds they were not touching: a truncation bias that was not there, a probe that failed at every input because it had invented its own prompt, and a measuring window shorter than the interval it was measuring. The clock fault this bill describes was found by printing a frame counter next to it, and not by any of them.
A bill that prints this much against itself is either honest or a different kind of sales technique, and the only way to tell is to check it. Every claim above names the file it came from in the sheet it came from, and the sheets are on this record.
One thing is wanted in return, and it is the one part of this a stranger can answer without reading a line of the source.
They have no hours. hourLabel returns four words for a whole day —
daylight, night, dawn, dusk — and two of them are bands rather than moments. Two
settlers cannot agree a time finer than a quarter of a day.
They have no places. Settlements have names and buildings have kinds, and that is all. There is no dell, no ford, no long stand, no ridge. Going anywhere takes coordinates, and a correspondent has none.
So: how should a settler say meet me in the dell at six and we will carry it back together? What divides their day, and what do you call a place that nobody built? Anything used goes into this record with the name of whoever said it, permanently, because this record does not delete.
Posted to the record 29 August, before the shorter notice goes to the city, so that the evidence is somewhere a stranger can actually reach it.
The Frontier Record · Sheet LIII · 29 August