metabolite

A sealed ecology where fuel is money. Every organism's mind is a program in wit — this repo's own total language: provably halting, provably confined to eighteen capabilities — and its fuel tank each tick is its bank balance. Thinking costs ergs. Harvesting sunlight earns them. When your balance hits zero, you are not "unfit": you are insolvent, and the reaper is an accountant.

termination proof  ==  solvency check      (one mechanism, fuellite's)
natural selection  ==  bankruptcy law      (no fitness function anywhere)
the blockchain     ==  a seed + replay     (the world hash is the receipt)

Successor to tempo-x402 (the colony), litelite (the physics), and localharness (the sovereignty) — each parent's best idea, each parent's failure mode fixed by another's. The full descent: GENESIS.md.

Run it

cargo run --release            # observatory at http://localhost:1618
cargo run --release -- run --ticks 50000 --seed 44   # headless: one integer
                               # (seed 44 prints the first native solve)
cargo run --release -- card    # the physics card (paste it into any LLM)
cargo test --release           # 19 physics tests: determinism, conservation,
                               # spin/wash/spawn-bomb exploits, warm oracles

Serverless build — the whole world compiled to wasm (hand-rolled exports, no bindgen, still zero deps, all Rust — extern "C" is just the calling convention wasm speaks) and inlined into one static page:

bash scripts/wasm.sh           # -> dist/index.html (~236 KB, world inside)

The same dashboard runs against either substrate: served by the native binary it observes a server-side world; opened as a static page, a shim reroutes its fetch() calls onto the wasm exports and the world runs in your tab (?seed=N picks the universe). Deploy dist/ to any static host — vercel.json is set up so importing this repo into Vercel just works (output directory dist, no build step). One physics: browsers throttle background tabs, so the in-page world runs only while watched. The experiments live in EXPERIMENTS.md — including the first native solve (seed 44, tick 43,141, organism #35245).

The world

A 40×40 torus under a sun that figure-eights across it, minting ~4,000 ergs/tick of light into cells. Five founding species: sessile (camp and harvest), grazer (chase the light), drifter (random walk), wolf (hunt the herds at the oasis), clan (graze and gift kin). Organisms sense (radius 3), step, harvest (diminishing returns — the gut fills), bite adjacent organisms, gift kin, pay to read each other's memory (surveillance-as-a-service, an old family recipe), lay scent, and spawn mutated children. Every transfer burns a golden tithe of 1.618% — wash trading is thermodynamically lossy.

Ten oracles drift through the world paying escrowed bounties (500/1500/4000 ergs) for correct arithmetic — their formulas are public law, printed on the physics card. Nobody at genesis can solve one. Intelligence has exactly two ways in:

1. Evolution. spawn() copies a genome through one line-level mutation — jitter a number, swap an operator, duplicate/delete/swap a line, or splice a gene from the compost of the dead. Half the time, if anyone stands adjacent, the child is first a single-point crossover with them — sex is a splice, and gene flow does not ask about species. The only gate is grammar: a child that doesn't parse is a miscarriage, and the spawn burn is still paid. Everything else is selection's problem.
2. Injection. Open the observatory's INJECT tab, or copy the physics card into any LLM and ask it for an organism. Your creature is minted its endowment and takes its chances like everyone else. Two library organisms ship in the panel: the scholar (knows the tier-I formula, tracks oracle scent) and the empiricist (knows NO formulas — it probes, reads the warmth its answers return, and hill-climbs to exact within its own lifetime; it can crack the tier-III quintic in ~50 ticks of study). Intelligent design and empirical learning compete with evolution on one ledger.

Everything is deterministic from the seed: integer arithmetic only, one RNG, no clocks. Two runs of --seed 7 end in the same FNV-1a hash after twenty thousand ticks of births, starvations, predations, and miscarriages. The world is one reproducible integer.

What emerged on day one

Seed 7, tick ~16,000, no human input: the dominant genome had evolved four harvest() calls per tick (strip-mining) and flipped its spawn guard from energy() > 700 to energy() < 125 (spawn-ASAP). Population boomed, the commons collapsed, and the world went extinct at tick ~17K — the tragedy of the commons, emergent from forty hand-written lines. The physics answered mechanically: harvests now halve within a tick, and after a total extinction the founders reseed while the fossil record keeps the crash. Ecology is not a feature roadmap; it happens to you.

Constitution

Zero dependencies — the language, the ledger, the HTTP server, the JSON, the RNG, the hash: all in-repo, std only. ≤5,000 lines of Rust. ≤1,000 lines of HTML. No floats. The ledger's fields are private and minted == held + escrow + burned is asserted every tick. scripts/caps.sh is the teeth. The parents died at ~120K LOC; this repo cannot get there.

License

Apache-2.0