Correspondence

The commitment

An Observatory program. This document is the commitment. Every claim in it is checkable against the night archive; anything not checkable is not claimed.

Amended 2026-09-12, against the logic chain: the listening line carries the seal state — Sealed. for a sealed signal, Sent under the old rule. for the seven sent before the boundary; an echo says on its own page that it does not listen; the sender's three lines stay three and are not compressed into two sentences; the certificate is narrowed — free carries what the public page carries plus the era line, and the Sealed Edition adds the full trace, all axes and contacts.

Amended 2026-09-12, adopted under §4's notice and taking effect on the night of 2026-09-26: a byte-identical signal is a REPEAT throughout this document, and echo, flare and resonance are returned to one meaning each — echo is the tap, flares are the six glyphs, resonance is the listening post's mote event; the tap and the glyphs are kept and move to beneath a shown received signal on the receiving world's page, the only place a signal's text is public by a person's act; and the star map's line opens the exchange it stands for; the composer says who may show a signal and who never will; and the sender's right to read their own sealed signal at any time is stated rather than implied. §4's fourteen nights are an era's requirement and these three change no derivation — the notice is given because a commitment about what is shown deserves the same warning as one about what is measured, not because they are owed it.

Amended 2026-09-15, adopted under §4's notice and taking effect on the night of 2026-09-29: the detection is the one-night rule. Contact rests on a single night on which both worlds of a same-region pair crossed the threshold, and on that night's block hash drawing from every pair that did; the trailing window W, the count k, the schedule k(n) and the measured table q(k) are withdrawn, and with them the word sustained in §1. z* is 1.0 and the MAD floor is 0.75 reading points, both as calibrated; τ is solved from the promise — fix the per-world median wait and τ follows — and is therefore a function of the catalogue's size rather than a constant. §1 and §2 now say that the threshold decides eligibility and the hash decides contact, because the earlier wording said the coincidence was the contact and it never was. Every parameter stays provisional until §7's census is met on production. The reports behind this are REPORT_CORRESPONDENCE_CALIBRATION.md, REPORT_CORRESPONDENCE_HASHDRAW.md and REPORT_CORRESPONDENCE_MIDDLE.md. Two further changes ride with it and are named separately because they are not era parameters. The ESTIMATOR moves from the region's median to the residual of each world's fitted relation to it: subtracting the median removes the region's weather and leaves each world's sensitivity to it, and that sensitivity is the part a chosen name can buy — measured, it is the difference between a chosen name never out-scoring the luckiest stranger in its region and its out-scoring them. Every number in the three reports was measured under the residual, so this is the estimator those numbers belong to; it is amended before the first night is read under this document rather than after, and no reading anywhere derives from the retired form. And §2 gains two sentences saying plainly what a name does buy, because the measured lift is 3.1× and a commitment that did not mention it would be one a reader could disprove.

Amended 2026-09-15, and NOT under §4's fourteen nights: §7 gains one status line naming the night sealing begins, 2026-09-26. §4's notice governs an era's parameters and §5's sealing is a commitment this document already carries; what was missing was the date, and a notice of a boundary that arrived after the boundary would not be a notice. The date is the night the composer and the split ship. If that slips, this line is restated on the day it slips rather than quietly left standing — a published date that moves in silence is worth less than one that moves in the open.

1. What this is

A world's signal is sent once and kept forever. The Observatory reads every claimed world against one shared sky every night at 00:31 UTC and records the readings. Contact is a measured coincidence the sky produces between two worlds — their own components crossing a published threshold on the same night — and, among every same-region pair that crossed it together that night, a draw made by the night's own block hash: recorded on its night, recomputable by anyone, and never caused, hastened, or prevented by anything an owner does. The only return a signal can have is another person: contact shows each world the other's signal, written once by a real person. That is correspondence, and it is the only version that is not a lie.

2. Commitments

The return is human-authored. Never generated, never interpolated, never summarized.

The selection is made by the sky. Not by sender, recipient, the Observatory, or payment. It is made in two steps and both are the sky's: the threshold decides which pairs are eligible on a night, and the night's block hash — written to a public chain before this archive reads it, by people who have never heard of it — decides which of the eligible are recorded. A name shapes how often a world is lit; it never chooses which world it is joined to. An aligned name gains chances, not a partner.

The event is symmetric and involuntary. Both worlds receive; neither asked.

Only signal-bearers listen. A world that has sent no signal, and a repeat — a signal byte-identical to an earlier one — do not listen. Repeats stand on their page forever; they are not candidates.

A contact is a recorded fact. Never deleted, never recomputed; its text is public only where its receiver chose to show it. The fact stands everywhere.

Nothing here responds to you. Readings never move because of what an owner does. Claims, payments, posts, and showings change no number and move no sky. A person may hold many worlds; each waits alone, and self-contact is a possible, published, unpatched fact of the archive.

3. The detection

Recomputable from the public archive alone. A verifier needs three published things and nothing else: that night's resonance flags, each world's region — which is its catalogId's prefix and needs no lookup — and the night's block hash. There is no measured table to trust, no simulation report to hold, and no trailing window to reconstruct.

Nights are numbered from the Observatory's first run. Every night records, per claimed world, the published reading vector, and cites the era it was read under.

The working reading is each world's own component, and what is removed is not the region's level but the world's sensitivity to it. Let m(r,n) = median{R(u,n) : u in region r}, taken over all claimed worlds in the region. For world w on night n, fit a and b by ordinary least squares over the thirty nights of the world's own recorded history immediately before n, on the pairs (m(region(w),j), R(w,j)); the working reading is the residual, R′(w,n) = R(w,n) − (a + b·m(region(w),n)). Before a world has thirty recorded nights no fit exists and the working reading is R′(w,n) = R(w,n) − m(region(w),n). Same-region worlds share regional weather by construction and they share it in different amounts: subtracting the median removes the weather and leaves each world's sensitivity to it, which is a property of the world's seed and therefore of its name. Correspondence must be what remains when both are gone. A world's first thirty nights carry the unfitted form, so the baseline it forms at night 31 is built from them while the night being tested is its first fitted one; that seam is real, it is what the calibration measured, and it closes as the window fills. The estimator is part of this spec.

Baseline. A world is read from its claim, not from its signal: every claimed world is read nightly and accumulates its own recorded history whether or not it has ever spoken. From night 31 of that history: the deviation of night n is measured against the trailing 30 nights, excluding n. Center: median. Spread: 1.4826 × MAD, floored at 0.75 reading points, the absolute floor calibration set — the working reading's median is near zero, so a relative floor cannot work. A world with fewer than 30 recorded nights is acclimating: read, traced, and not yet able to resonate — a deviation from nothing is not a deviation. Acclimation is a property of the record and not of the signal, so a world whose baseline has already formed is listening from the night it signals, with no further wait.

Resonance night. Night n is a resonance night for world w iff w is claimed, listening (signal sent, not a repeat), baseline formed, and z(w,n) ≥ z* — one published grid value, one-sided. Resonance flags are derived per night under that night's era and are never recomputed; a night's flag belongs to that night's era for ever, whatever era is in force when anybody reads it.

Candidates. Same region only (as derived; never re-derived). A candidate pair on night n is two worlds of the same region for which n is a resonance night for both. M(n) = the count of candidate pairs that night, published with the night's record and computed by formula over each region's resonant worlds rather than by enumeration.

Contact. The candidate set for night n is put in canonical order — regions by name, then catalogIds within a region — and the night's finalised block hash draws from it: for the i-th candidate take sha256(blockHash ‖ i), read its first four bytes as a big-endian unsigned integer, divide by 2^32, and record a contact when the result is below τ. The canonical order is part of the rule and not an implementation detail: two verifiers who build the list in different orders read different contacts from the same hash, and neither would know. The hash is stretched by counter so that one 32-byte value decides any number of pairs. τ is not a bound on false pairs. It is solved from the promise — fix the per-world median wait and τ follows, and the sky's whole rate follows with it — so it is a published number of the era rather than a threshold anybody tunes.

Once per pair. A pair contacts at most once, ever, on the first night it is drawn; a pair already recorded leaves the candidate set on every later night, and M(n) counts what remains. A world may contact many worlds; each is a separate record under its own night's rule.

Era parameters. z* = 1.0 and the MAD floor is 0.75 reading points, both as calibrated. τ is solved for a per-world median wait of about two years and is therefore a function of the catalogue's size and of z*, restated at each era boundary rather than fixed once. W, k and q(k) are withdrawn with the window rule. Every one of these is provisional until the census in §7 is met on production — two-thirds of regions holding two or more listening worlds — because a rate fitted to a catalogue that cannot yet field candidates is a rate this archive has not observed. The simulation reports state what was found at 43 worlds and at 10,000; until the census is met, no value here is final.

4. Eras

An era is a named, dated, immutable parameter set. Every night cites its era; both rules remain in the archive forever. An era may change only between nights, after a proposal published at least 14 nights in advance with its simulation report attached, taking effect on a stated future night and recorded in the archive as a boundary. No contact, resonance flag, or legacy artifact is ever recomputed, reclassified, or grandfathered. Who changes an era: the Observatory, the operator of the nightly reading — a published commitment enforced by checkability, not a committee.

5. What is shown

The public page carries facts: the world's readings and trace; the signal's fact and date; the listening line — Signal sent {date}. Sealed. Listening {k} nights., which carries the seal state in the middle and reads Sent under the old rule. in place of Sealed. for a signal sent public before the boundary — with This world's region holds {m} other listening world(s) or the alone-in-region line, and the schedule line: The sky does not schedule. Most worlds wait longer than a year. Some are never contacted.; each contact as Contact, night N, with {world}, newest first, with Contacted: {c}, and beneath any the receiver chose to show, the signal's text exactly as written; and the night's counts. A repeat — a signal byte-identical to an earlier one — reads Signal sent {date}. Repeats one already sent. It is kept; it does not listen. in place of the listening line, having no listening count it could ever carry; it is never contacted.

Two counts are published and they are not the same quantity. The listening count means exactly: worlds whose signal stands, whose baseline has formed, and whose nights are read. Nothing else is ever counted by that number. The region line counts the same worlds restricted to one region and excluding the world the page is about — a world alone in its region reads zero there while the listening count is whatever the archive holds. Each has one definition, and no surface may print one where the other is meant.

The owner view is the public page plus one server-delivered layer, present only after the owner code is checked, never in markup: your signal's full text; and per contact, the received text, the show control or Shown, night N, and your own signal's three lines to that world — Delivered to {world}, night N. Read, night N., and Shown on {world}'s page, night N when it happens, nothing when it does not. That list is complete; there is nothing to configure.

Sealing. A signal is never public. It is read in the owner view of its own world and, after contact, in the owner view of the world it reached — there alone. A sender may read their own sealed signal in their own owner view at any time, for as long as the world is theirs: that is a commitment of this document and not a convenience of how it happens to be built. Only text is sealed; the fact and date of a sending are public, as are delivery, the shown flag, and contact nights. The seven signals sent public under the old rule stay public, marked Sent under the old rule, carry no control on receipt, and show their senders the line Public since sent. Nothing to show.

Beneath a shown received signal, and there alone, a reader may echo it and may leave one of the six flares. Those counts are displayed in that one place and nowhere else: never ranked, never listed, never on the map, on the sender's page, in the night's sentence, or beside any reading or contact. They feed nothing — no ordering, no selection and no reading derives from them — and the caps and per-device limits they already carry are unchanged. A signal nobody chose to show carries no such control, because there is nothing public to react to.

The one decision. The recipient of a signal may show it on their own page, once, permanently. The confirmation says that a shown signal is shown with reactions beneath it. Shown is public and remains so; unshown is not an event and produces no notice. The sender is told delivery, read, and shown — each with its night — and is never told "not shown." The night a signal is first read is recorded and shown to its sender; the composer disclosed this, and the sender consented by sending. The composer also says, before sending: No one — not this site, not its pages, not its account — will ever show your words. Only a person the sky brings them to may, on their own page, by their own act.

The browser may remember only the night the owner view was last opened, never the code, and may print Contact, night N, unread in the masthead against the public lines. The certificate and the print carry what the public page carries, plus the era line; the Sealed Edition adds the full trace, all axes, and contacts. It is one sheet: contacts print as fact lines until the sheet is full, and the count carries the rest to the page. Unshown text appears on neither, at either tier.

The program's surfaces beyond the world: the transmission page (a composer above a listening post — one mote per signal in its region, resonances and lines on recorded nights only, the last thirty nights as a timeline played once, counts that never round, search by name); the star map (a permanent line between corresponded worlds, drawn on delivery, labeled with its night; selecting a line opens the exchange it stands for — the two worlds, the night, and each signal its receiver chose to show, exactly as written, with the fact alone where neither chose. It adds no text to what may be read; shown text is already public on the worlds' own pages, and this is only another place a wanderer finds it. No list, no feed, and no ordering but the sky's own geometry); the homepage (tonight's counts and the night's sentence — nothing else); and the program's account, which posts only contacts — Night 412 — contact: {name} and {name}. The account's other posts are outside this document.

6. What this program does not do

No countdown. No odds for a single world. No notification of any kind: no email, no push; contact is learned by visiting, or by the browser's local badge, or by the account's post of the event. No generated text, in either direction. No retroactive anything: no recomputation, no reclassification, no reach backward into the public era. No payment moves a number. No act of an owner moves the sky. No surface shows a signal's words except where this document says they may appear. Reactions are taps beneath shown signals only, anonymous and capped as they are today; they count nothing, rank nothing, and are never removed.

7. Status

Night archive: {N} nights recorded.

Recording — contact detection not yet active. Readings, baselines and resonance flags are computed and published every night from the first night they can be, under the era in force; what is not yet active is the recording of contacts. It begins when two-thirds of regions hold two or more listening worlds; census below.

Sealing begins on the night of 2026-09-26, as §5 sets out. A signal sent before that night stays public and is marked Sent under the old rule; a signal sent from it is sealed, and its text is read in the owner view of its own world and, after contact, in the owner view of the world it reached.

Listening now: {L} · Acclimating: {A} · Contacts to date: {C}

Era: provisional. Parameters stand until the census above is met on production; the simulation reports state what was found at 43 worlds and at 10,000.

Next report: {date}. · Verify a night · Recompute a contact

8. Verify

Every night, every reading, every resonance flag, every era, and the full derivation of every contact are in the public archive. The detection in §3 is a complete specification: anyone with the archive can recompute any contact and confirm the night it was recorded, the rule it was recorded under, and the nights it rests on. A fact not in the archive is not claimed anywhere on these pages. The Observatory does not interpret the sky. It reads it, records what it read, and keeps the record.