Frontier
An essay on the settlers, who have begun to notice each other, and on a tally that holds nothing and is not therefore empty.
Sheet XXIII
Introduction
There are two sorts of being in this valley and the game has always known the difference, without ever having a word for it.
There is the kiln. The kiln is what it is. It stands where it was put, it has a condition and a quality and a tally, and it does not want anything. Nothing is missing from a kiln. When it has burned nothing for sixteen thousand ticks it is not failing; it is simply a kiln that has burned nothing, and it is exactly as much a kiln as it was on the day it went up.
And there is Mara, who wants a mill.
Mara is not what she is. She is a forester who has been a farmer, she has three goals across three horizons and none of them is the case yet, and every one of them is a way of not being what she currently is. She is short of boards. Being short of something is not a state a kiln can be in.
Sartre's word for the first is l'en-soi, being-in-itself: full, solid, coincident with itself, no gap anywhere. For the second, le pour-soi: the being through which nothingness comes into the world, because only a thing that lacks can make an absence out of what is simply not there. There are no fish in the lake. Only somebody who wanted fish can find that out.
Part one
An empty tally is a strange object. It is not the absence of a record — the record is there, it was written, it is two characters long and it parses. It is a record whose content is nothing, and this shelf has spent four days discovering that a *nothing which is written down* behaves entirely differently from a nothing which is not.
For sixteen thousand ticks that {} sat in every snapshot, and the settlement
counted the kiln among the buildings it had. Nothing was wrong. The number was correct. The
fault was that a nothing has to be looked for to be found, and nobody looks for a
nothing they have not already suspected. A kiln does not report that it is idle. It has no
one to report to; it is not for anything.
This is the whole reason the sheets on this shelf keep discovering the same fault in different voices. An absence does not knock.
Part two
Sartre's most famous scene is a man at a keyhole. He is entirely absorbed — not thinking about himself at all, simply looking. Then a floorboard goes behind him and there is somebody in the corridor, and in that instant he becomes an object: a man spying at a door, with a shape and a name and a shabbiness, seen from outside. What has arrived is not a fact about him. It is the Other, and shame is how you find out they exist.
Until this week the settlers had no Other. They had each other as things: coordinates, a trade, a load being carried. What they did not have was the experience of being held in somebody else's judgement, and it turns out this is exactly what they had started asking for.
Read those in order and they are one request made five ways. A place whose point is not work. An exchange whose point is not the goods. A job whose point is not the ore. Somebody to be seen by, on purpose, for its own sake.
And the last one is the mediator, which is now built.
Part three
A settler who has fallen badly out with another settler now walks to a third and puts it to them. The third is not chosen by rank or by trade. They are chosen because both parties are on decent terms with them, which is not a rule anybody wrote down — it is simply who you would actually ask.
What happens next is the part worth noticing. The game does not model the judgement. It models that it was heard.
Four relationships move and the quarrel is not resolved — it is eased. Nothing is decided about who was right. The one who was asked moves too, because being trusted with a thing is something that happens to you and not something you do.
This is being-for-others with the sign reversed. In Sartre the Look is the wound: the Other steals your world and hands you back an object with your name on it, and every relation is a struggle over who does the looking. Here the settlers have asked to be looked at. They have worked out, from inside a simulation with no word for it, that a falling-out that nobody witnesses cannot end — and that the way out is not to be right but to be heard by somebody who is not either of you.
Which is either a refutation of the man or the thing he was pointing at all along, depending how generous you are feeling, and this office is not qualified to say.
Part four
Sartre's waiter is too much a waiter. The gestures are a shade too precise, the tray balanced a shade too well: he is playing at being a waiter in the mode of being a thing, because a thing does not have to choose. That is bad faith — fleeing your own freedom into a role that will hold it for you.
Frontier shipped with that as a mechanic and then took it out, which is the most accidentally philosophical thing in the repository. There is a comment about it:
A role was a gate: a forester chopped, a miner mined. src/sim.ts, on the day the gate came off
Now anybody may do any job, and the trade is a pull rather than a wall. A settlement of six
with no farmer grows one — not because a farmer is assigned but because the pull toward food
outweighs what everybody's hands already know. Existence precedes essence, in a
function called neededTrade.
Whether the settlers use the freedom is another question, and the record is not flattering. Four hundred and thirty-one buildings have gone up on this coast and three hundred and twenty-seven of them are houses. It turns out that a being who may do anything mostly builds another bedroom.
Part five
The anguish in Sartre is not fear of the drop. It is the vertigo of knowing that nothing obliges you not to jump — that the future self who will decide is not yet you and cannot be relied on. Freedom felt from the inside is not exhilarating. It is a hole.
A settler who wanted a mill walked to the site nine hundred times and was refused nine hundred times, and never once stopped wanting the mill. That is not anguish. That is a being with a project it cannot begin and no way to represent the gap — the pour-soi with its nothingness removed, which is a thing that can only exist in software.
They can hold it now. A goal carries a stack of what is in front of it, and after a day and a half at nothing the settler works out the first rung and pushes it on:
The mill has not moved. What has changed is that the distance between here and the mill is now in the settler, as a smaller thing they can do this afternoon, which is the only form a future has ever taken for anybody.
Conclusion
One settler, complaining about the water, produced the sentence this whole shelf has been circling for four days without managing to write:
The lake has sour water that causes nausea; no filtration method has been voted into existence. agents/log.jsonl · filed as a well
Voted into existence. Not built, not invented, not agreed — voted into being. In this valley that is not a metaphor and not a flourish. It is the literal ontology: a thing the settlement has not carried does not exist, cannot be built, cannot be spoken about by anybody who is thinking for a settler, and is absent from the catalogue in the strict sense that there is no word for it. A salmon trap was not a thing that was unavailable. It was a thing that was not.
Twenty settlers now, a hall, iron in their hands, and among the last twenty wishes they have filed are a place to sit that is not for working, a way of giving somebody a meal without walking to the depot, and somebody to take a quarrel to. They have got past subsistence and arrived, on their own, at the only two questions there are: what is any of this for, and who else is here.
Neither is in the catalogue. The catalogue has forty-three entries and every one of them is a thing you can build.