Frontier · entry: the landing
Revision 41 · supersedes all
On this coast the second most intelligent species spent four days trying to tell somebody something, and every attempt was filed, numbered, and understood as something else.
Entry · part one
Every sixth time a settler is asked what to do, they are asked a second question instead: what is this valley missing? They have now answered it seven hundred and eighty-one times.
It is worth saying plainly what that is. Nobody asked these people to file feature requests. They were asked what was missing from the place they live, they answered as people about a life, and the answers went into a markdown file with tick boxes on them. Of the 781, one thousand two hundred and seventy-one further attempts were refused as repetitions of something already on the list1, and seven hundred and three were deleted — a median of eighty-two seconds after being written down.
The dolphins, in the story this borrows from, spent a long time trying to warn everybody about something and were understood to be doing tricks. The mechanism here is more careful than that and arrives in the same place: every message was received, logged, timed, costed, classified, ranked by single transferable vote, and counted twice.
1 Which is a higher number than the number of messages, and that is not a typo. More was refused than was heard. The refusals are in the record too, with reasons, because this project does keep everything — which is the strangest part of it, and the part that makes the rest of this sheet possible to write.
Entry · part two
On the twenty-fourth of August, a little after eight by the record’s clock, a forester called Mara was asked what the valley was missing. This is what she said, in full, and it is the most remarkable line on the entire record:
I wish the lake had a way to fish for salmon, but since we don't have fish, I wish for a way to know when the lake is safe to swim without getting caught in a current. agents/log-0001.jsonl · wish-73 · npc-01 · tick 250
She asked for fish, noticed there were none, and downgraded her own request inside the same sentence.
Nobody told her there were no fish. There is no line anywhere in this software that says so. She worked it out, in the way you work out that a shop does not stock a thing by never once seeing it on a shelf, and rather than ask for something the world plainly did not contain she asked for the next thing down: a way to know whether the water was safe.
It was filed under infirmary.
Her wish then went to a vote, lost, and was deleted. The number it had been given —
wish-73 — was handed to twenty other people over the following hour,
because the counter that issued it read the highest number still in the file and the file had
just had its highest number taken out of it.
Entry · part three
Fourteen hours later, on the coast of a different valley, a farmer called Anselm tried again. He was more direct about it than Mara had been:
agents/log-0002.jsonl · 25 Aug 12:07:39
The Guide's famous entry on a certain planet ran to a single word, and then, after fifteen years of field research, to two. The catalogue's entry on a salmon trap ran to one word for four days and the word was well.
It was not malice or even carelessness. It was a word list. The classifier that turns what a settler says into something the game can grant had no entry containing the word fish, so it did what a word list does with a sentence it cannot parse: it found the nearest thing it did know. Water. A well is water. The vote carried, the settlement was granted a well, the well is still standing, and the record has been carrying the line there are no fish in its own colophon ever since.
Anselm asked for a way of eating. He was given somewhere to drink.
Entry · part four
The joke that the borrowed book turns on is a fish you put in your ear that translates anything into anything, and which by being so improbably useful is taken as proof of the non-existence of God.
This game has one. It is called classify(), it is four hundred lines of word
lists, and it sits between fifteen people who talk about their lives and a simulation that
understands forty-one nouns. Everything they have ever asked for has gone through it. It is
the single most load-bearing component in the project and it is a list of words somebody
typed.
| Through the Babel fish | Count | |
|---|---|---|
| Distinct things asked for | 401 | in the settlers’ own words |
| Understood as something | 392 | rightly or otherwise — see: well |
| Heard as nothing at all | 38 | before this morning |
| Heard as nothing at all | 9 | now — and the nine are genuinely new ideas |
Thirty of them came in from the cold at once and not one required a line of new simulation. A footpath to the high meadows was always a road. A tunnel system was always a shaft. A pulley was a cart, a tool rack was upkeep, a sundial was the forecast, and a lantern, a chimney and a fireproof box for carrying embers between fires were all, every one of them, the firepit. The world could already do these things. Nobody had told the fish the words.
Entry · part five
Two sheets ago this office measured exactly how much of the world a settler is shown when the game stops and asks them what to do. It is the nearest tree, rock, seam and berry bush; the five nearest buildings; and every person standing within a certain radius.
The radius is in the source, on line 2,873, and has been since the file was written:
src/sim.ts · function nearby()
The answer to life, the universe and everything
42
and the question, it turns out, was how far can anybody here see?
Nobody chose it for the joke. It was chosen because it felt like a sensible distance to be able to recognise somebody across, which is the only kind of number this codebase contains, and it went unnoticed for four days and twenty sheets by a press that has otherwise counted everything on this coast twice.
Entry · part six
As of this morning there are fish.
A weir is a thing a settlement can vote itself. A farmer who cannot find a bush, or whose settlement is under a day's food for everybody in it, walks to the water instead. Berries are the only food this game has ever had and they do not come back quickly enough for a settlement that has grown — which is why this valley, holding two hundred and twenty-six boards, twenty-four bars of iron, twenty-nine dressed blocks, three towers, a hall and two hundred and two struck coins, was down to five food for twelve people. It had solved metal and money and forgotten lunch.
And here the borrowed ending does not fit, which is the honest place to stop.
In the book the fish are what you thank people for on the way out. Here they arrived, and nobody left.
The settlers are still on the coast. The hall went up at tick 6,217 and lifted the ceiling from ten to twenty for the first time in this project's history, and people have started coming through it. Nobody has voted for a weir yet, because nobody has been asked yet, and when they are asked the words will be there. Mara's line about not having any fish is still in the log, under a number that belonged to twenty-one people, filed as an infirmary. It will stay there. Nothing here is ever deleted.
Anselm's well is still standing too.