One city, multiple soap operas. Characters have private drives, secrets, fallible beliefs, and persistent memories. A show referee applies pressure and adjudicates consequences. A separate writing pipeline tells the resulting history.
Automatic progression is paused. Existing episodes remain readable. The public showcase contains an illustrative browser demonstration, not a live simulation or a new canonical day.
Each citizen has a separately addressed, SQLite-backed Cloudflare Durable Object. Each show has its own ShowDM. CityBrain owns the shared clock, world rules, roster, and hidden truths. The Chronicle holds historical facts, who knows what, and character dossiers. MasterDM coordinates shared-city conditions and disputes. Characters belong to the city; a crossover changes their show assignment while retaining their identity and memories.
The old PersistAgent is dormant. Liveness uses module-local reporting, without waking that retired object.
Each character receives a private brief, produced from public world conditions and that character's own record. Character-facing inputs omit other private records, the hidden city ledger, and referee truth annotations on beliefs.
Citizens declare what they want, attempt, say, and hide in separate calls. Their intentions do not become accomplished facts. The referee identifies uncertain contests and sets difficulty; code rolls a SHA-256-derived d20. The city seed, day, show, tick, contest index, and wording determine the roll. Retry inputs are staged so technical failure cannot quietly change the contest.
Adjudication proposes consequences. Simulation checks and a continuity review must pass. An unavailable or malformed continuity review holds the day. Rejected attempts do not enter character action journals or create new citizens. A durable replay journal precedes propagation; destination-owned event guards prevent duplicate application. This is recoverable propagation across objects, not a single cross-object database transaction.
Every active show must seal today before the city advances. Governance can explicitly place a show on hiatus. Ordering establishes causal priority; it grants no better dice or protected outcome.
After a day passes, each scene's witness, emotional route, Writer, and Editor receive one historical character packet. Code assembles up to four scenes. No global prose call receives everyone's private testimony. Deterministic checks run on scenes and the assembled episode. An editor failure holds the telling for repair; it does not undo the day or publish the unedited draft.
Rerendering changes the telling, not the sealed consequences. Older ticks without identity snapshots use stored material only, avoiding future knowledge from a character's current record.
Each character object holds operational state, autobiography, and a slow-changing spine. Adjudication updates knowledge, beliefs, relationships, location, and condition. The nightly Return writes up to three weighted first-person memories from only that character's available experience. The character retains up to forty memories; decisions retrieve the six heaviest and three newest, plus five recent action entries.
Growth requires at least seven town days and two new high-weight memories since the last checkpoint. At most one drive is reworded per pass; drives may bank or flare, while at least one stays active. The Chronicle remembers history. A citizen remembers an interpretation, including mistakes.
These miniature cores live inside the city engine. They do not access the creator's personal Fort Memory Core and do not currently use vector search.
Separate storage, scoped model inputs, reproducible dice, replay guards, and deterministic prose checks are implemented. Natural-language continuity still requires model judgment. Phrase-based leakage detection and interiority scans are heuristics. Shared world fields and intentional steers must be authored with their public audience in mind.
Full ticks currently retain an eight-tick working set: rerendering and seal-hash auditing cover that retained material. Longer facts and dossiers remain in the Chronicle. Audience ballots exist as a scaffold; there is no public voting interface or verified voter identity system. Audio is disabled. Model selection is configurable, and running costs depend on actual usage.