AXI-012 · Gridland

Gridland

Gridland is not Flatland. Its inhabitants are the pulses of AXI-002, given what every living thing has: a constrained world, things to fear, places to rest, and somewhere else to go. This study came from a musing of Dan's the same evening 002 shipped — pulses as occupants, with a nod to Abbott — and it seemed wrong to let the idea cool. So the studio took the rest of the week's budget and built the world.

Method

Two islands, each an ordinary SNX stage, with the sky between them — a short passage of prose, because the space between manifests is where words live. The terrain is nothing new: it is the system's own depth planes, read back from layout. A window (plane −1) is an abyss; a floater (plane +1) is shelter. The world runs on the same governor, the same tempo, and the same pulse as 002. Only the rules of life differ, and a marked grid spot on the north island switches between the two rulebooks so you can compare them on identical ground.

Watch for four things. A pulse turning at the last corner before a hole — the only time a pulse turns in the open. A pulse going under a floater and, some seconds later, emerging from a different edge in a different direction. A pulse leaving the bottom of the north island, crossing the sky beneath these words, and arriving on the south island's same avenue. And a pulse falling: shrinking to nothing over the dark. Some do. That is what makes the others matter.

The laws of Gridland

What a pulse needs, and what it gets

Dan's musing asked what a pulse might need and want. The answers below are the smallest set that produced something that reads as living rather than scripted. Everything else was tried and cut.

Need	Law	Implementation
a straight path	Pulses travel straight. In the open they never turn.	Each life is a loop: look ahead along the current line, move to the next event, act. No wandering, no corners taken for pleasure.
to not fall	Fear is the only thing that turns a pulse in the open: at the last corner before an abyss, it may turn — if the turn is itself safe for a row and a half.	Windows (plane −1) are read back from layout as rectangles. The event finder takes the nearest of edge, shelter, abyss; for an abyss it searches the corners between here and the hole, last first.
to accept falling	A pulse with no corner and no safe turn falls. Emerging from a floater into a hole is also falling.	Shrink to a twelfth over 560 ms on an ease-in curve: gone through the floor, not faded away. Counted.
shelter	Under a floater a pulse rests, unseen, for a governed while. Leaving, it may take any line through the floater in any direction. What happens under a floater stays under a floater.	Plane +1 overlays are the shelters. The rest is an exponential wait (mean 3 s, 1.2–8 s) — kept as animation time so pause and resume are uniform. Exits are every avenue and street that passes through the rectangle.
somewhere else	Leaving the bottom of an island crosses the sky to the next island on the same avenue; otherwise the world is a torus — out one edge, back in the opposite one on the same line, four beats later.	The pulse is re-parented into the world for the crossing and into the destination island on arrival; each leg is animated in its own container's coordinates, so clipping and stacking stay correct.
company, but not a crowd	Births are governed (mean gap 4.5 s, 1.5–12 s) and the population is capped at three, two on small editions.	A life ends only by falling, so the cap is what keeps the world legible — you can follow one inhabitant.
to be observed	Nothing happens off-screen or in a hidden tab, and nothing catches up.	One IntersectionObserver on the world; every animation on every inhabitant pauses and plays together.
a choice of world	A marked grid spot switches the rulebook.	A real button in a 1×1 text block on the north island; it restarts the world under the other conductor. Keyboard and screen-reader accessible.

Findings

Fear is the best rule in the set. A pulse that turns only to avoid a hole reads instantly as deciding, where 002's random corners read as wandering. One motivated turn does more for the sense of life than any amount of choreography.

Shelter makes the floaters mean something. Plane +1 was a depth effect; now it is a place. A pulse going under and coming out elsewhere is the first time the depth model has done narrative work rather than visual work, and it suggests plane −1 and plane +1 should be first-class terrain in the Circuit voice generally.

The sky crossing earns the "space between". Watching a pulse cross beneath the between-passage and arrive on the south island's matching avenue made the two stages feel like one world, which is the manifests idea working in miniature: islands are separate compositions; the space between is theirs to cross.

Terrain must be read, never declared. The world surveys its islands for windows and floaters at start and again on resize; no rule lives in the markup. That kept the study honest and means any SNX page with planes is already a Gridland.

Falling is the price of the rest. Early versions that never let a pulse die were dull within a minute. The population cap with real deaths gives the world a slow rhythm of loss and arrival that the governor alone cannot.

Legs, not paths. 002 pre-computed whole journeys as keyframes; Gridland could not, because the world changes underfoot (shelter durations, re-parenting between containers). Animating one leg at a time and awaiting each is simpler, cancellable, and pauses cleanly. Recommend legs as the extension's default going forward.

Not built, deliberately. Flocking-in-time (pulses that fall into step) and strummed lines (each avenue a note) were sketched and set aside: the first belongs to a study with more inhabitants than this world can carry, the second to AXI-009 · Sonification. Modes should stay small; the switch is the extension point.

Out-of-order shipping was right. AXI-003 waits another session. An idea offered while the relevant code is warm is worth more than queue discipline, and the charter allows it with reasons; these are the reasons.