The Receiver

I Causes, not copies

What travels to the parlour is not the picture. An episode file carries the day’s opening state and the minds filed against it — the ship’s whole company, their personas, their standing rules, their blocks on the watches — and the set runs the same engine the studio ran, so the picture is not decoded but re-derived. This is the economy that makes the whole scheme fit a static host: four hours of programme in a hundred kilobytes, at any resolution the parlour’s own tube can draw, smooth at whatever frame rate the set can manage, because nothing was filmed and everything is recomputed. The producer already proved the file airs true — it computes every day twice and refuses to publish disagreement with itself — so by the time a receiver tunes in, the day it re-derives has been re-derived before, and the laws pinned in check-replay are what make a million parlours see one valley.

II The receiver does not transmit

The dangerous half of the design is invisible: the viewer runs the same code as the live game — the code that writes the record, files state, asks the model, and posts votes. Untouched, a replay would log its re-enacted day into a real run’s history, which is the duplicated-tab fork of Sheet LXXX arriving on purpose. So the first thing a tuning set does, before its first frame, is muteBus(): every write and every ask becomes a no-op — no record lines, no session snapshot, no state files, no model calls — and a page that has tuned in stays tuned in, one-way by design. The claim was then tested against the record rather than asserted: an episode watched end to end, live valley running beside it, added zero lines to the log.

III The leak the first broadcast found

first tune-in:  Proposals — 21 open · 205 carried
                none of them the aired day's. The wish window had read the
                RUNNING valley's politics into the replay — and its POST
                twin would have written a replay's votes back the other way.
second:         Proposals — 0 open · 0 carried

The mute covered the bus and the first live broadcast found the surface the bus does not own. The wish window fetches proposals from the server directly, so the replay wore the living valley’s politics over its own — two hundred and five carried proposals from a world the aired day had never seen — and the same module’s requestVote and carryWish would, given the right click, have posted a replay’s ballots into the live wishlist: the receiver transmitting, exactly the fault the cabinet exists to prevent. busMuted() now covers the bus’s neighbours, and the finding goes in the sheet rather than the shrug because it is the night’s pattern once more: the boundary you drew is never the boundary there is, and the instrument that shows you is a live test against the real record — not the reasoning that drew the boundary.

IV What the parlour cannot do, and should not

A viewer can look anywhere — the camera, the cards, the roster, the record tab are all live, because they are views of the recomputed world and cost the broadcast nothing. What a viewer cannot do is matter: hand a settler over and the muted bus swallows it; carry a wish and nothing is written; pause, and the clock reels the picture back to the air position. This is not a limitation wearing a feature’s clothes — it is the medium. Television’s whole contract is that the audience sees one true programme and cannot edit it from the sofa; the place to matter is the studio, and the studio’s door is the one the record already keeps: the founding files, the wall, the trials. The set is for watching the valley. The valley is for the valley.

V What is thin, so it stays visible

The mast is not up. Every broadcast so far has aired from this machine to this machine: the dev server is the transmitter and the keeper is the whole audience. The public step — the built bundle and the episode files on the record’s own host, the schedule running nightly, flight plans by the end of the UTC day and the new episode by 04:00 UTC — is one deploy away and is a deliberate act of publishing, taken at the keeper’s word rather than folded silently into an engineering commit. The brain-written episode stays bracketed until one airs on the schedule, for Sheet LXXX’s stated reason. And the receiver’s own honesty has a known limit: the on-air card says what is airing, but nothing yet stops a determined viewer opening the console and poking the sim by hand — their picture forks, theirs alone, and the next tune-in discards it; the medium forgives what it cannot prevent, and the record never learns their version existed, which is precisely the right amount of never.

Hedge on the cabinet: real receivers reconstructed from a continuous analogue signal, not from causes, and interactivity’s absence was physics before it was contract; the borrowed shape is narrow — a local re-enactment from a transmitted description, a strict one-way path, and the parlour’s old truth that everyone watching the same channel is watching the same thing.