The twenty-one
lives of wish-73

Two functions, forty lines apart, each of them correct on its own.

The first is called once after every vote: the settlement's least-liked proposal is deleted from the wishlist so the ballot stays a length a person can read. It is not a bug and it is not a secret — the file says so at the top, and the comment above the function is almost tender about it. Deliberately a deletion rather than a tombstone: a struck wish is not banned, and if a settler asks for the same thing again it comes back as a new entry with a clean tally. The record of what was struck lives in the log, not here.

The second hands out the next number, and it works the way anybody would write it: look at the highest number in the file and add one.

Now strike the highest.

The file's maximum drops by one. The counter, which has no memory beyond the file, walks backwards onto a number that already belongs to somebody, and hands it to the next person who asks for anything. Then it does it again. Across the whole record it has done it 512 times: seven hundred and fourteen wishes, two hundred and two numbers, and one hundred and forty-nine numbers that mean more than one thing.

Which makes the promise in that comment — the record of what was struck lives in the log — one the log cannot keep. It is all still there, every word of it. It is simply filed under a number that does not identify anything. {"loser":"wish-73"} is not a wish. It is twenty-one wishes.

Sixty-seven minutes on the twenty-fourth of August. One number. Every entry below was filed, numbered wish-73, put to a vote, lost it, and was deleted to make room for the next wish-73.

Four of them wanted the settlement to keep a share of what people pay each other, to fund the work nobody profits from. Two wanted a day off. Two wanted a bed. Two wanted a way across the water. Mara asked six times in twenty-six minutes and was wish-73 six times.

A second fault, of a different family, and this one is not by design at all.

Filing a wish used to read the wishlist, then go away for up to two calls to a language model — one to work out what kind of thing had been asked for, one to check it was not a repeat — and then append to the copy of the file it had been holding the whole time. Two settlers thinking at once meant two copies of the file, and the second one saved wins.

Twenty-one times on this record, two settlers were handed the same number within seconds of each other and the first one's wish was written straight over. There was no vote and no strike. Oren asked for a railing at the water's edge and the office lost the paper.

Tove's proposal that the settlement keep back a share of every delivery, to pay for the work nobody profits from, existed as a written document for one and a third seconds. It was filed at 20:24:24.171 and struck at 20:24:25.485. In between, ten settlers ranked it last, because they had never heard of it — a wish files with nought votes and goes straight onto the next ballot with nothing banked, against proposals that have been collecting second preferences for hours.

That part is the rules, not a fault. The rules say the least-liked goes. Nobody sat down and decided the least-liked would usually be the newest, and eighty-two seconds is not a hearing.

While the office was mislaying wishes, it was also issuing an award. Bren is a farmer. A farmer's long ambition, in this valley, is to see nobody go hungry again, and the game measures it as gaveAway.food ≥ 30 — a lifetime count that only ever goes up.

Bren passed their thirtieth loaf long ago. The first time the valley was told about it was tick 13,218. Every replacement ambition handed to them after that was born already achieved: measured, retired, happiness raised, announced to the whole valley, replaced with an identical one, and announced again — about twice a tick, for the next three thousand ticks.

Their happiness has been pinned at the ceiling since, on an achievement they earned once. The record calls it "again":5835, and it had gone up three times by the end of the paragraph. It is not even the first: in an earlier valley, on this same record, Nim said the same sentence 2,870 times before the run ended, and nobody was reading the feed that day either.

• the floor

  nextWishId takes a high-water mark, and the mark is read back out of every segment of the log the first time a wish is filed. Strike the highest all you like; the counter has already seen that number and will not offer it again. A restart re-reads it rather than inventing it.

• the queue

  One writer at a time on the wishlist, and every writer re-reads inside its own turn instead of trusting bytes it fetched before it went off to think. The re-read is the fix; the queue is so it stays the fix when somebody adds an await.

• the receipt

  A strike now writes its own line — wish-struck, with the id, the words, and which settlement voted — so a deletion is a thing the record states rather than a thing you infer from an absence.

• the ambition

  Aims that read a lifetime tally are rebased on what the settler has already done, the way the delivery goal always was. Thirty more loaves, not thirty ever.

• the backstop

  A goal is measured before it is handed over, and one that is already met the moment it is set is quietly not handed over at all. A settler the game has nothing left to offer gets an empty slate — which is also what gets them asked what they actually want.

• the check

  Seven new assertions in check-record.mjs, including one that asserts the old behaviour: strike the top wish and, without the floor, the counter rewinds. Twenty pass.