A showcase of recovery
- Irrigated acreage
- Stable harvests
- Cooling infrastructure
- Normal population records
World file · spoiler-light
A field guide to 2050
The technology in Ground Truth is deliberately mundane. What changed is not the existence of models, sensors, and interfaces—it is the authority society gave them.
The central mechanism
A world model with legal weight
Consensus is the governed successor to the models that failed during the Cascade. It directs logistics, credit, insurance, aid, and law. The public sees assertions without uncertainty. Only bonded physical observation can force the map to change.
Grounding protocol
- 01Put a hand on the actual surface.
- 02State what is observed—and only what is observed.
- 03Capture the reading with sealed sensorium.
- 04Sign the attestation with bond.
Operational vocabulary
Terms from the record
- Consensus
- The governed world model that drives prices, credit, logistics, aid, and law. It asserts one public reality while hiding its uncertainty.
- The Weave
- The ambient interface layer over Consensus. Lenses and public surfaces annotate the physical world with the model’s claims.
- Grounder
- A licensed, bonded human observer whose physical observations can become legally admissible ground truth.
- Bond
- Reputation-capital staked behind an observation. Accepted attestations build it; observer error can slash it.
- Observer error
- The official label for a rejected attestation—and, among grounders, an accusation that the person trusted their own inference over what was there.
- Projected Truth
- Halcyon’s doctrine that the model should lead reality toward a stable desired condition instead of merely describing what exists.
- The Unmodeled
- Communities inside the Bright Belt that have fallen out of Consensus or chosen to live beyond it. They maintain paper-and-chalk surveys of their own.
- Recalibration
- The annual window when conflicting attestations and model priors are arbitrated and the public map can be redrawn.
- Proof of Presence
- A mass grounding in which thousands of simultaneous observations are linked into a chain that is far harder to dismiss.
- Burning your bond
- The irreversible act of staking an observer’s accumulated bond and identity record behind one attestation chain.
The Bright Belt
One region. Two realities.
A curated absence
- Dry wells
- Empty grain depots
- Communities off the record
- Names the model never counted