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alpha 9.9 — The world has people in it, and they are nobody's spare parts

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@N0819 N0819 released this 29 Aug 15:31
· 542 commits to main since this release

153 commits, most of them found by playing rather than by
reading. Two long live runs — a forty-turn Enterprise-D shift and the town
generations before it — produced the defects that shaped this release, and the
pattern they share is that the engine knew something and no one downstream was
told: a person standing in the room who never reached the view, a handover
resolved and filed nowhere, a mind that could not remember what it had said one
sentence ago.

A generic name is never made out of a named person

The mint read name lists. Where a law was written by a model reading a story's
lore, those lists ARE the story's cast, so a twenty-body institution issued
"Jean-Luc Crusher" and eighteen more like it. Filtering cannot fix this: two of
the elements the planner supplied appear in no lore entry anywhere — it wrote
them from its own knowledge of the setting — so no reservation, however
complete, can reach them.

So the mint no longer reads names at all. It reads a phonology: syllable
fragments that name nobody, written back into the story's own lorebook as an
entry an author can open and edit. The pools are refused before they reach a
body, the fragments are refused where they are a piece of somebody
(measured: the old law could mint a registered character's surname exactly,
from a three-letter opening plus "er"), and what replaces refused material
comes from the law's own other field and from the setting's PLACE names —
because a place is not a person.

Canon characters still appear. lore_cast_residents reads a lorebook, works
out who is not already in the active roster, and hands them over as real
background residents under their own names, with the post the lore gives them.
What is forbidden is cutting them up for parts.

The Charter is the cheap persistent mind, and it was already one

The presim builds acquaintance, reputation and shared service and nothing read
it, so a crew who had served together for years began as strangers. Background
people are now Charter bodies rather than a second population with its own
rules; acquaintance is DERIVED from the simulation instead of seeded by hand;
and a body may now go somewhere for its own sake — a lounge, a commons, a place
whose purpose is being in it — where before charter_places was every place
with a post or an upkeep, and off-duty circulation had nowhere to send anyone.

Presence is composed in the view, not inferred from who spoke

A player walked into a room holding five simulated people and could not see,
address, or be answered by any of them: four turns of speaking to a table, and
silence every time. The roster a view is composed from was the cast plus the
players — a presence reached a view only if it had already spoken. Meanwhile
the crowd projection subtracts everyone "presented individually", and nothing
ever presented one, so the subtraction deleted people instead of relocating
them. A captain and a lieutenant commander had been standing unseen on a bridge
since turn 0.

A mind is present at its own conduct

Nothing commits mid-turn, so the within-turn views are the only ledger a
character has for the beat it is in — and the actor was excluded from its own.
A character granted a second round had no record of the first, which reads as a
person who does not listen. Its own speech now comes back verbatim (a mind
knows its own words, not a muffled rendering) and its own deed by the same
intent-free surface everyone else gets.

Beside it: one mouth's consecutive lines with nothing between them are ONE
utterance. A round emitting three speech elements became three quoted lines set
back to back on the page; the speech budget's own sheet already forbade it and
nothing enforced it.

A mind's record of itself now covers the beat it is standing in

A character granted a second speaking round restated what it had already said
— an order reissued, a fact reworded, a question re-asked — and it read as a
person who does not listen. The obvious explanation was that they did not know
what had happened yet in an unresolved beat. Measured, that is false: the prior
lines were in the view handed to them, verbatim, and their own stored results
cite the observation that carried them.

What was true is narrower and worse. The conduct arrived only as VIEW TEXT — a
perception of the room — while every structured record a mind keeps OF ITSELF
is projected from committed turns. So the beat's own rounds sat in the mind's
picture of the room and in none of its records of itself, including the one the
engine's own anti-repetition rule points at. The ledger now extends into the
running beat, and a deterministic floor drops a later round that re-delivers a
line the same mouth already gave, with short interjections and completions of a
cut-off line exempt.

The cross-turn version of the symptom was never this defect at all: an order
addressed by rank-plus-name was matched against a bare canonical name by exact
equality, so the reply debt never registered and the asker re-issued into the
silence. An address now resolves through every key the body answers to.

The author owns the tense, and the clock owns the time

Narration tense was nobody's decision and is now the author's, read per turn so
the dial applies to the next beat with no restart. Memories are dated in
fiction time rather than in beats, and a passage phrase ("moments later")
stopped being handed to minds as a time of day.

Bodies have insides, and the inside is rooms

A body that has taken another one inside HAS an inside, whether or not anyone
authored it: the floor mints a room from the record itself. Metric space,
extended bodies and instruments landed with it, along with a crossing that
takes real time on the clock.


Fixes

The run that found most of these

  • A transfer is evidence that a thing exists. A handover of an object the
    scene had never minted was resolved perfectly and filed nowhere — 26 beats
    across 7 chats. Four turns after handing a padd away, the prose had it back,
    because nothing had ever contradicted her holding it. A transfer now mints
    the record, and never mints over a body.
  • A quarter of a run had no player view at all. perception_outcome's
    player view was NULL on six of 38 turns and the narrator wrote four hundred
    words of the room anyway. That was in no defect register; it was found by
    reading the pipeline data after the fact.
  • An object contact was narrated as a person. A combadge resting on a
    uniform reached the page as a body pressed continuously against the player,
    with three absent people's scents attached to it. The identity floor was
    person-shaped and had no answer for a thing, at three separate sites; the
    third — the one that actually feeds the narrator — was still wrong after the
    first two were fixed.
  • Clothing is not a surface that touches. A garment is the layer BETWEEN
    two surfaces, never one of them.
  • Tenure is not a tense. A card saying "serving aboard" or "has served as
    Chief Engineer of" was refused as insufficiently explicit while "officer of"
    passed, so two of four attached characters generated ZERO pre-story memories.
    The router was reading the verb's inflection, not the claim.
  • One person, one body. A caller pinning a cast member's post and rank AND
    requesting their history got two bodies for one person — two captains with
    the same name in one institution.
  • A demand reaches a person through a channel or it does not reach them.
    The voice gate spent 29 of a run's 51 calls on a body two decks from the
    player, which qualified on stale evidence for 14 consecutive beats and
    produced not one line.

Correctness, found by review

  • A body that changed room was graded from the room it left.
  • A doorway declared from one side is a doorway from both.
  • An object that exists is somewhere; a minted entity had no position, ever.
  • A re-description is not a new fact, in four ledgers that kept both.
  • A goal the world has invalidated must be closable by the world.
  • A silhouette receives no face; a diagnostic is not a fact about the room.
  • A presence is tracked on an id, and its name is an attribute of it.
  • The phonology entry a caller who passes lore as text never got — the artifact
    that makes the one model naming judgement reviewable was silently never
    written for exactly the callers most likely to want it.

Performance and testing

  • Parallel is the default for every caller, not only for make.
  • Twenty-one reads of a forty-one megabyte registry, for one turn.
  • The suite's wall clock was two tests, and neither needed what it spent.
  • A charter presim forks across institutions and replays identically.

Thresholds introduced in this release

Named here rather than buried, because a cap that is not stated is a cap
nobody can argue with.

  • Beat-reissue similarity, 0.7. Calibrated over all 40 recorded turns of
    the run that found the defect: every true within-beat reissue scored
    0.75–1.00, the closest distinct pair scored 0.33, and nothing was measured
    between. It catches all seven recorded instances and touches nothing else,
    including a healthy beat where one speaker asks a question and then gives a
    different officer an order.
  • Beat-reissue minimum, 6 tokens. Under it, a short line that is a prefix
    of a longer one reads as a reissue when it is a completion.
  • Name-element floor, 2 characters. Two letters that open or close
    somebody's name are a piece of that name. Set at 2 rather than 3 because a
    measured law carried canon name-heads at exactly that width. Unmeasured
    cost: on a very large lorebook, every two-letter opening of every character
    entry becomes unavailable as naming material.

Known residuals

  • A contact's identity key excludes manner, so two wordings of one claim are
    one claim. Where a floor refuses one wording it refuses the claim — which is
    correct for the measured case (a placement verb defeated by a synonym) and
    can lose a genuine second contact between the same two parts. It fails
    toward subtraction, which is the safe direction, and is left documented
    rather than changed in a hurry.
  • Sub-threshold paraphrase reissues rely on the ledger and the prompt rule
    rather than the floor. Literal guards fail when models rewrite.
  • A line addressed to a GROUP still raises no voice demand: a line naming a
    person is answered, the same line aimed at a table is not. The prerequisite
    is a representation for "has joined this group", which charter figures do
    not have.