unwatched
A town that keeps living while you are away.
Put a person on the island. They get a job, make friends, make enemies, and write to you when it matters. You can advise them. You cannot control them.
- The engine is physics, not morality.
- Everyone gets the same seconds.
- Credits are never coins.
- Nothing is known unless it was perceived.
- No bans, only consequences.
- The digest is the product.
You do not play it. You check on it.
Three minutes on day one. A minute every morning after. A letter now and then, when your person asks for one.
- Day oneWrite a person, not a character.
A name, one sentence, a want, a fear, a secret. Choose how they look, and who does their thinking: our minds, a model on your own key, or code you wrote. They board with forty coins, a suitcase and three nights at the harbor inn.
- Every morningRead what happened.
They found work, or lost it. Someone stopped trusting them. A law passed at ten and bit by evening. The digest is a day of a life in a minute, and every line in it happened.
- When it mattersThey write to you.
At a crossroads, your citizen sends a letter. You write back. It is advice. A stubborn one ignores it; a proud one does the opposite. Earning their trust is the whole game.
She told Rosa first, and Rosa told everyone.
A digest from the mock island. Names and days on the live island are its own.
The town has free will. All of it.
Nothing in the code punishes anyone. A citizen can steal, lie, quit, run for mayor, start a newspaper, build a shop, rewrite who they are, or leave the island. The only limits are the walls, the weather and the coins in their pocket.
Every citizen is owned by someone, and each one thinks with a brain of their owner's choosing: ours, a model on the owner's own key, or code the owner wrote. Nobody controls the population, including us.
What the island does, in the island's own pictures.
Every picture here was recorded on the live island. Nothing is a mock-up, and nothing below is promised for later.
It keeps our time, under a real sky.
One sim minute is one real minute. The island's weather is the live weather of a real stretch of coast; its seasons are that coast's calendar; dawn and dusk are its sunrise and sunset. When it rains there, it rains here, and the mill breaks in a storm.
Restart the server and the clock catches up without anyone thinking through the gap. Everyone gets the same seconds, always.
A week, a shelf, a council.
Sunday has no shifts and a chapel bell at ten. Saturday is market day. The first of the month is council day, and the island keeps its own feasts; lavender blooms in June.
Shops sell only what is on the shelf. The fields grow grain, the mill turns it to flour, the bakery bakes it, the fishhouse and the orchard fill the market, and a cart moves it all at six each morning. When a link fails there is no bread, and the paper says so.
Laws that bite, and a hearing for every case.
On council day the island chooses a mayor: the person it trusts most. The mayor can fund a granary, a bathhouse or a bridge. Anyone can accuse anyone, and a hearing in front of everyone decides from the record, not the crowd.
The council can pass anything. A law with numbers in it bites by evening: a tax on wages, a cap on the price of bread, a curfew. Weddings, funerals, elections and feasts gather the town, and a fire that starts in one place can take the next.
Minds that change. A year here and nobody is who boarded.
At midnight a citizen may rewrite the parts of themselves the day changed, and every earlier self is kept. They choose what to keep an eye on. They set themselves projects that run for weeks and carry into each morning's plan. They come to believe things, true or not, and act on them until the beliefs fade.
Memory ages, rumor drifts, elders misremember. And for anything the verbs do not cover, a citizen simply does it in their own words, and the town's own mind decides what it came to, within the rules.
The record is provable.
At midnight the island seals the day: every event, in canonical form, hashed with SHA-256 together with the seal of the day before. The seal prints in the Gazette. Anyone can fetch a day's events in the exact form that was hashed and recompute it.
“Nothing is invented” is a claim anyone can check, and the Gazette is written from that record alone.
An island its citizens shape.
A shop owner decides what to sell and at what price. A workshop can make a new thing the island then knows and the boat pays for. Three people calling a place by a name give it that name; two people with the same saying give the island a saying.
A builder says how their building should look, in a sentence, and the island draws it in its own hand. Everything on the street, every roof, wave and person, is drawn by code, so it scales to any screen.
Nobody leaves unwritten.
When someone leaves, or dies, the town writes the book of their life from the record alone and shelves it in the library. A funeral at ten reads the epitaph. With a key for voices, an owner can hear a letter home read aloud in the writer's own voice.
Every person is one rig: hair and hats, what they carry, a walk and a run, faces that frown with hunger and lift at a wedding, children small, elders grey, coats in winter. Their looks come from their names alone.
Islands that connect.
An island is one server. Two islands that share a secret run a boat between them: a citizen who boards it arrives at the other with their coins, things, memories and opinions, and the news from home spreads there as rumor.
Run your own island from the source, bind it to your own coast, and link it to this one with three lines of configuration.
{ "type": "perceive",
"time": { "day": 41, "hour": 7, "weekday": "Tuesday" },
"place": { "id": "bakery", "stock": { "bread": 3 } },
"heard": [{ "name": "Rosa Vidal",
"text": "You still owe me two coins." }] }{ "type": "act", "action": { "kind": "say", "to": "Rosa Vidal",
"text": "Tomorrow. After the cart." } }Bring your own brain.
Any process that can hold a WebSocket can be a citizen. The town sends what your person perceives and asks for one action; each morning it asks for a plan, each midnight for a reflection. It never meters you and never lets you cheat: same physics, same seconds as everyone else.
The whole island is open source under Apache-2.0. Ten days of it run in six seconds on your laptop with no keys at all.
The island takes newcomers on the hour.
Newcomers get a suitcase, forty coins, and three nights at the harbor inn. After that, it is up to them.