The last structural promise in the design doc. No level gets a chord any
more. Every bed in the game is derived from a real number belonging to the
era it plays under, and src/score.js says which one and why in a comment
above each line.
coldboot/stack 1000 Hz, the reference tone every piece of telecoms test
gear on earth agrees on. The fortress is tuned to a
calibration signal.
timewait 50 Hz mains and its harmonics. The room's own hum was
always the entire score; now the bed agrees with it.
war the 1800 Hz V.32 carrier folded down, with dial-up hiss
under it, because everybody on EFnet was on a modem.
smash 0x90 is the NOP. Read as a number it is 144, so the sled
has a pitch and the level is tuned to the byte you slide
down.
worm seven partials, and the seventh one is detuned. One in
seven, as a chord.
cuckoo 45.45 baud — the Model 33 rate, 22 ms a bit. Fifty of
them in a basement is what he actually heard all night.
board the 1200 Hz V.22bis carrier folded four times, which is
the doc's exact phrase: a modem carrier detuned into a
pad.
shell the 750 Hz terminal bell over Helsinki's 50 Hz mains.
handshake silence. The fight is the score; anything underneath is
noise competing with the only thing in this game that
has to be listened to.
copper 20 Hz ringing current, 50 Hz mains, and Strowger stepping
at ten pulses a second. Three real clocks, and the
cathedral is the beat they make against each other.
bluebox the six MF tones at once. That is literally what is
inside a blue box.
climb all of it, layered.
root 2600 Hz folded six times until it is a low room tone.
The number the whole game turns on, finally at rest.
ESTABLISHED gets its own cue rather than a bed: 350 and 440, which is the
dial tone the handshake arena opened on and called the sound a line makes
when nothing is happening — with something finally on it.
Fixed while building: the pulse gate was driven by a bare square
oscillator swinging -1..+1, so its off half was not silence, it was the
same tone phase-inverted. Tremolo where a clock was wanted. DC offset now.
All 14 hops swept clean, and no voices leak between them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three holes closed:
philes — 40 written, all in src/philes.js so the next 160 is a writing
job and not a code job. P opens a reader: list on the left,
the text on the right, attributed to whoever wrote it in
whatever year they wrote it. Every level now drops at least
one; previously you collected files you could never open.
save — ESTABLISHED. Every hop writes level/ttl/hop/baud/philes/
cargo/flags to localStorage, and the boot screen offers
R — RESUME. A 64-hop game with no save is not a 64-hop game.
MTU — the HUD has been showing your MTU drop as you take files off
the board while nothing happened. Now two files are free and
after that you arrive in pieces, one TTL per extra fragment,
every hop. You can put things down again from the traceroute
map. Lore costs distance, which is the economy the whole
design is built on.
All 13 hops re-swept: clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
You are SYN. You want ACK. Root is the only one who can give it to you.
Three load-bearing ideas, all working:
- TTL is the health bar and it only goes down. 64 hops, no healing.
- Bandwidth is resolution. One render target, one shader; at 1200 baud
and below the 3D scene renders as ASCII glyphs.
- Every header you drop is a piece of clothing. Seven wireframe shells,
one per OSI layer, shed on the way down.
Every frequency is the real frequency, synthesised, nothing sampled:
350+440 dial tone, the DTMF matrix, R1 MF pairs at real KP/digit timing,
2600 Hz, ANSam at 2100 reversing phase every 450 ms, Bell 103 FSK.
Thirteen hops, each a different genre over one renderer — FP tutorial,
OSI descent platformer, walking sim, EFnet twin-stick, 2D buffer overflow,
Morris worm RTS, LBL terminal stealth, a whole BBS with a playable LORD,
the five-boss handshake arena, the copper, a playable blue box, the climb,
and an empty room with an ACK in it.
No engine, no build step, one vendored three.js.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
