The B Ark

1 · The entry

The Guide, if it filed an entry on this valley, would note the following facts in roughly this order of unhelpfulness. Seventeen colonists, of whom eleven are foresters, five are miners, three are traders and one — one — is a farmer, a distribution produced not by need but by mastery: the labour arithmetic caps how loudly a shortage may bid and puts no cap on how loudly a practised trade may, so the hungrier the valley gets, the better everyone becomes at chopping the trees down. The economy runs on promises — of the last two thousand hires, 1,606 were settled in favours owed, sixty-odd in goods, and four in coin, nearly all of which is in the pockets of two men. And its most reliable institution is the meeting, which convenes in all weathers, keeps immaculate minutes, and spent the sixth famine carrying a bird sanctuary fifteen votes to two, followed by a memorial, so that the record of who brought food during the starving would outlast the people who starved.

Gotta get that bench made, no food for the food shortage if I don’t. Mara, forester — tick 22,415, the famine on

Adams’s colonists declared war on the next continent, adopted the leaf as legal tender, and burned down the forests to solve the resulting inflation. Ours are gentler and stranger, because every sentence in the minutes is sincere. In last night’s sitting one voter’s entire recorded reason is a word-for-word recitation of the instructions he was balloted with, delivered in perfect confidence as his own opinion — the purest committee sentence ever entered in this record. Another’s reason trails off mid-thought into wondering why the question is on the slate at all. It is the B Ark, minuted. And it is not stupidity. Not one of these people, asked alone, would trade dinner for birdsong.

2 · The essay

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. T. R. Malthus — An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

Malthus is not quoted here for atmosphere; he is the valley’s boat schedule. Arrivals gate on exactly one thing — an empty bed — and never on food. So every need the settlement answers becomes carrying capacity, capacity becomes mouths, and mouths bring the hunger back: the joiner makes beds, the hall lifts the ceiling from ten to twenty, and the reward for solving everything is seventeen people and twelve food, then twenty and none. A person satisfies a need and climbs the pyramid. This settlement satisfies a need and grows until the need is back. That door is deliberately still open — the keeper has been offered the latch and has so far declined it, because a settlement that stops growing at the first hungry week is a different and smaller game.

What was not deliberate is what the two mechanisms did together. Malthus guarantees the hunger returns; the ballot’s ratchet guaranteed that when it returned, its words were already spent. A category once carried left the slate for ever — the right rule for never granting the same thing twice, and it quietly meant the question of dinner could be asked exactly once per settlement per game. The B Ark joke, mechanised: not a shipful of idiots, but a procedure under which perfectly sensible people can only discuss what has never yet been discussed, for ever.

3 · The release

So the ratchet now ratchets back, which is this sitting’s build. Two pressures are read off state the game already keeps, and each re-opens the categories that answer it — onto the slate (openTo), onto the triage that stands somebody up to propose when nothing is on file (heldOn), and into the ballot’s own weighting. Hungry — fewer meals on hand than mouths, the famine line the triage already uses — re-opens the flock and the granary. A made good at the market’s own scarcity ceiling while the workshop that makes it stands — a mill working flat out and boards still at nothing — re-opens that workshop. If they get hungry, they can vote for more food; if they outrun their industry, they can vote for more industry.

The half that took the design care is what a second carry grants, because this record already documents the fault to avoid: the agreed rate that granted a mint the settlement had already voted for — a wish answered with what the town already had. A released ratchet whose re-carry grants nothing would be that fault built on purpose. So a re-carried building category is a commission: the settlement’s cap for that building rises by one, permanently — without which the surplus pass tears the second kiln down as clutter, a trap found on paper before it fired — and the commission outranks the author’s build ladder for the same reason the triage does, because it is the settlement’s own order. A re-carried flock is three more ewes. Categories whose grant is a boolean stay spent: a second vote for the idea of money would change nothing, and the card would have to lie about it.

4 · What the record did before the sheet was finished

The release went in while the valley ran, at the bottom of its deepest famine yet — tick 30,342, food at nought in all three settlements. Within the hour, every settlement on the coast had voted about food. Bren’s claim carried somewhere dry to keep food. Tove’s claim carried animals kept rather than hunted, proposed under the hunger-tabling by a man in a different settlement. And the landing — fifteen of seventeen balloting, eight first preferences — carried wish-132: a way to put trees back. That is Mara’s planting wish, filed at tick 2,542, carried in Tove’s claim, deleted from the record by the landing’s own vote, restored by Sheet XXXI, and now carried by the landing itself: the exact vote Sheet XXX predicted, arriving through a door that has been off its hinges twice since the prediction was made.

Note the last line, which is Sheet XXXI’s repair doing its work in its first big sitting — and note who is on it. Oren’s absence is not a mystery the record has to shrug at any more: three minutes earlier the feed says he dropped where he stood — days since he last slept. The minutes now record who was missing, and the story says why.

One prediction was left standing for the record to grade, as is this series’ habit: the sheep and the granary are carried categories in hungry settlements, so both now stood re-opened, and if the release was built right some coming sitting would re-carry one and the grant would be checkable in the world. The record answered before this sheet was an hour old, twice, in its own words: “Carried, and so: the settlement will raise another granary” at tick 30,046, and “Carried, and so: the flock is three heavier” at tick 30,465. The first true re-carries in the valley’s history, and neither granted anything the settlement already had.

Also this sitting, filed under quality-of-life rather than political philosophy: the market card’s columns are labelled (worth · want against paid — the settlement’s own scarcity against what somebody actually handed over, a distinction that lived only in tooltips); and the HUD’s cards now start as one dashboard — a single column that holds everything, from which any card can be broken off by dragging its grip, and returned by double-clicking it. The player breaks pieces off rather than tidying pieces up.