AetherNet: the world model gameplay commits to

v1.1 | 2026-07-29

What this is. The bridge between the fiction and the runtime. AetherNet has been canon since the worldbook was written, and the gameplay tree named it without a model, so cartridge designs invented mechanics that the fiction already specified. This document states the model once, in the fiction’s own vocabulary, and maps each term to the mechanism that implements it. v1.1 adds the feel targets, the visibility economy, and the Edgeware reading.

Authority. Fiction facts belong to the Kinoshita World master canon, mirrored at ../../marketing/narrative/worldbook.md. Runtime facts belong to world-engine.md, mission-control.md, and the ADRs. Where the two disagree on a mechanism, the working code wins and the mirror gets patched. Where they disagree on lore, the master canon wins. Hardware values are never restated here; see ../../device/hardware/canonical-spec.md.

What AetherNet is

A wireless protocol, mesh, stealth, point-to-point with store-and-forward. No central server. No registered identifiers. Packets propagate operator to operator across the sprawl, hopping through any deck in range. To an outsider with a spectrum analyzer it reads as noise. Operators call it “pulling contracts from the aether.”

Contracts are not downloaded. From the worldbook:

The mission board doesn’t “download” contracts in the conventional sense. It listens — pulls procedural hashes from the AetherNet, reconstitutes them locally as MissionInstance records seeded by the operator’s deck state.

That is already how the runtime works. The World Engine generates one coherent world and the board reads offers off it (ADR-0051), so the fiction and the implementation describe the same act.

Operator-to-operator messaging rides the reverse path. Operators leave packets at coordinate hashes, and a recipient holding the matching key retrieves them.

Visibility is the resource

The single fact the whole intrusion loop rests on:

Operators are invisible by default. The protocol’s stealth properties were engineered into the original spec.

Invisibility is the resting state of the world. The operator begins every session unseen, and three canon conditions describe the fall from it:

Canon condition	What has happened
Invisible	Nothing. The default.
Emitting a signature	The operator is running specific cartridges in specific configurations, or has run too long without rotating procedural keys. Something is detectable; nobody has attached it to a handle.
Hunted	Someone has actively targeted the operator’s handle and is sweeping for signature.

Two standing exceptions: Black ICE strips invisibility outright, and Edgeware sees everyone, because Edgeware designed the protocol.

The Identityless Premise is why the stakes hold. Operators have no government identity. The TradEcon is closed to them, and the synthetic identity that would reopen it is the thing the deckline ladder is climbed for. An operator who is seen has no legal person to retreat into, so being hunted threatens the one asset that cannot be re-rolled. The stealth loop is the fiction played straight.

Use these three words on operator-facing surfaces. Earlier drafts of the cartridge specs coined parallel vocabularies (unaware / checking / tracing; oblivious / noticed / counter-recon). The canon terms are older, they carry the fiction, and one vocabulary across every surface is the requirement.

What makes visibility play

Three feel targets, in the sense economy-model.md uses the term:

1. The held breath. Most of a mission runs in the middle state: something is detectable, and nobody has attached it to a handle yet. Invisible is comfort. Hunted is crisis. The middle is the game, and a good mission keeps the operator there for as long as skill can hold it.
2. Press on or cool off. Signature accrues from action, and walking it back down is itself action. Every few moves the same decision returns: push deeper while exposed, or spend moves quieting a defender. Both choices carry a price the operator can see before paying it.
3. The alarm is earned. Awareness moves one state per threshold crossing, and a verb shows its noise before it commits. Arriving at hunted always traces back to a decision made with the cost in view, never to an unreadable roll. Dread comes from foresight.

The visibility economy

Visibility has faucets and sinks the way credits do, and stating them in the economy model’s idiom gives cart designers a checklist: a cart that touches visibility says which side of this table it sits on.

Flow	What	Mechanism	Cost to build
Faucet	Working a channel; every verb’s noise	Per-action noise against the defenders whose watch covers the channel	Cart data
Faucet	Dwell on an open session	Move ticks advance the world clock; CONDUIT shows the dwell readout	Exists
Faucet	Stale procedural keys	Canon names the cause; the measure is unbuilt	PROPOSAL
Faucet	Black ICE	The forced unmasked beacon, as a cart-authored event	Cart data
Sink	Quieting a defender (the FEED / MASK / DIVERT family)	Cart verbs demoting awareness one state	Cart data
Sink	CUT	Removes a defender at the price of noise now	Cart data
Sink	Key rotation	Keyring generate and revoke, Cipher Garden key generation; the tie to trace	Programs exist; the tie is a PROPOSAL
Carry	Recon heat entering a mission as its starting trace	world-engine.md §3.2	Exists
Carry	Exposure accumulating across a chain run in one session	The mission’s own region meter; a chain inside one mission needs no transfer	Exists

The carry rows are the escalation device. A contract whose chain runs in one session shares one region meter, so exposure earned in the first system is still on the meter in the last, and the run tightens as it deepens with no new machinery and no timer. ICE Breaker’s Tier 1 is the worked example.

Nothing in this table requires a new FFI primitive. The model runs on the bound read surface, cart-owned data, and two shipped programs. The one open runtime item the loop waits on is the ADR-0055 outcome surface (tracked as GWP-719).

Every transition can be narrated at zero engine cost. cipher-emit is cart-bound, and canon gives CIPHER the observer’s role: “CIPHER observes; CIPHER does not respond.” One fragment per promotion or demotion puts a narrator on the loop from the auxiliary display without touching the main grid.

What ICE is

ICE is network-layer defensive software. It does not attack data; it attacks invisibility. Every class works by moving the operator toward being seen, and defeating a defense means returning to invisible rather than destroying the defense. Destruction is available and is the loudest route.

Class	Canon	Consequence
JUNK	The cheap common case	Contributes signature
RED	The cheap common case	Contributes signature
BLACK	Rare. Reserved, per canon, for “infrastructure that really doesn’t want to be seen.”	Strips invisibility outright: forces an unmasked beacon for the duration, pinpointing the operator to roughly 50 meters
HUNTER	Sweeps for signature against a targeted handle	Moves the operator to hunted

Black ICE is the dread object. Rare, severe, and avoidable, which is the combination that makes approaching it a choice. The fun of a dread object is deciding to go near it with the readings in hand, so a node carrying Black ICE is identifiable in advance to an operator who does the recon.

Its consequence needs no abstraction, because the hardware performs it. Canon has Black ICE emitting a strobe through the amber screen and a phase-cancellation pattern through the YM2149, with career-ending outcomes for operators who take a burn. The renderer can strobe the phosphor and psg.c can phase-cancel, so the fiction describes an effect the hardware can produce as built.

The render stays inside photosensitivity safety limits. The fiction’s strobe injures operators; the product must never risk injuring a player. Any on-glass Black ICE effect suggests the attack through a bounded flicker and a safe audio level, and the injury stays in the prose. This is a hard constraint on every implementation, stated here once.

Edgeware and the engine

Canon gives the architecture a diegetic reading, and it costs nothing to adopt because it is already true twice over.

Edgeware sees everyone because the protocol was their design. The World Engine holds the complete state of every region, and no operator-side tier can write it from outside play. The engine’s omniscience and Edgeware’s are the same fact told in two registers. DOSSIER being the operator’s view, partial and read-only, is the operator’s position in the fiction: instruments observe the mesh from inside it, and the complete ledger belongs to the entity that built the mesh. Black Ledger closes the circle from the other side, since the shell audit reads Edgeware’s fingerprints in the operator’s own revenue, roughly 18 percent of which routes back through Edgeware-controlled structures. Operators fund their own surveillance, and auditing the funding is a cartridge.

Whether any cartridge ever plays the reveal directly is OPEN. The alignment stands on its own: the architecture decision that the engine owns truth and programs read partial views is also the fiction’s power structure, so honoring one keeps the other.

How the runtime expresses it

Canon	Mechanism	Tier
How visible the operator currently is	trace, one uint32_t per region, read through (world-trace w)	Engine-owned. No cart or program can write it.
A single defender’s state	Cell fields on the defender, per ADR-0046	Cart-owned
An action emitting a signature	Per-action noise against the defenders whose watch covers the worked channel	Cart-owned
Key rotation as a mitigation	Keyring’s keystore and its generate and revoke operations	Program, durable in DeckState
Reading exposure without changing it	The six read accessors bound by nosh_world_bind	Both tiers, read-only
Narrating a transition	cipher-emit to the CIPHER-LINE	Cart-bound
Capability disclosed by study	knowledge_index, the sanctioned gate value (ADR-0061)	Deck-wide, outside the element classes

The bindings settle ownership. A cart cannot write region trace, and a program cannot write anything, so “who owns visibility” is decided by the tiers: the engine holds the number, the cart moves it through play, every program reports it.

Key rotation is the mechanic hiding in the fiction. “Running too long without rotating procedural keys” makes an operator visible, which ties Keyring’s generate and revoke, and Cipher Garden’s key generation, directly to the trace an intrusion accumulates. That connection is canon and no cartridge spec has used it.

What each cartridge adds to the narrative

One row per cartridge. Sourced entries derive from Josh’s premise or from canon. Open entries have no narrative contribution stated yet, and inventing one is what the premise audit exists to prevent.

Cartridge	Contribution	Source
ICE Breaker	The visibility contest itself: emitting signature under pressure and walking defenders back to invisible. Owns the middle state.	Premise
Depthcharge	Underwater AetherNet datajacks: the mesh reaches places that need a submersible to access.	Premise
Relay	The dead-letter drop. Operator-to-operator packets left at coordinate hashes on the reverse path.	Premise + canon
Threshold	The Cartographers Guild, a loose academic and anarchist confederation mapping the digital underground and treating the network as a shared commons. An alternative posture toward AetherNet: commons rather than contest.	Premise
Sysop Mode	The defender’s side of visibility, in linked play. Someone is doing the sweeping.	Premise
Black Ledger	Edgeware’s shell siphon. The named structures that route roughly 18 percent of operator revenue back through Edgeware, which is how operators fund their own surveillance.	Premise + canon
The Vault	Corporate lineage as playable research: KEC, its three partners, and the successor entities. Raises knowledge_index, the sanctioned gate value other cartridges read for progressive disclosure (ADR-0061).	Premise + canon
Cipher Garden	Key generation and rotation, the canon mitigation against emitting a signature.	Premise + canon
Drift	Signals on the wire: Morse, plus reading captured transmissions. What the mesh sounds like to someone listening.	Premise
Nodespace	Contested territory on the mesh: claiming, fortifying, and scouting nodes.	Premise
Null	CIPHER leaving its display and speaking on the main grid about the operator’s own deck state.	Premise
Marty Glitch	Broadcast piracy, and a crossover character out of the GWA.	Premise
NeonGrid	The operator’s first contact with the deck’s capabilities. Its narrative role is teaching, and the tutorial is where invisibility gets explained.	Premise; the framing is a PROPOSAL
Tunnel Rat	Finding a physical route to data, information, or an ID. Ties to the Identityless Premise, since an identity is what operators are climbing toward.	Premise; the identity link is a PROPOSAL
SynthFence	Drug Wars. A contraband economy running beside the TradEcon operators are locked out of.	Premise; the TradEcon link is a PROPOSAL
TRADECON	Market trading. Shares its name with the canon legitimate economy.	Premise; whether the cart is about the TradEcon is OPEN
DYNAMO	An enhancer that raises what other cartridges can output. Systems-theory framing, in the register of Project Cybersyn.	Premise; its narrative place is OPEN
Pathfinder	Convoy routing and supply lines. Physical logistics rather than the mesh.	Premise; the AetherNet tie is OPEN
Shellfire	Artillery.	OPEN
Takezo	Calm and puzzle-like. No mission idea stated.	OPEN
NIGHTOWL	Drone piloting on two trackpoints. Josh: “no narrative yet.”	OPEN
IF Creation Kit	Making interactive fiction to influence an audience. Provisional name.	Premise; its narrative place is OPEN

Rules for anyone designing against this

1. Invisibility is the default and the prize. A design that treats being seen as the baseline has the world backwards.
2. Use the canon vocabulary. Invisible, emitting a signature, hunted. No parallel set.
3. ICE attacks visibility, never data. A defense whose consequence is lost data is a different genre.
4. Black ICE stays rare and telegraphed. Canon supplies the rarity; the dread depends on the operator meeting it informed or choosing to.
5. Black ICE renders inside photosensitivity safety limits. The injury stays in the fiction.
6. The engine owns the number. A cart moves trace through play and a program reports it. Nothing else writes it.
7. A visibility mechanic names its flow. Faucet, sink, or carry, per the table above, so the economy of being seen stays balanced on purpose.
8. A cartridge that adds nothing to the world is marked OPEN rather than given an invention. The table above is the record.