The spine

# The spine

North stars: **training, learning, immersion** ([strategy 01](../strategy/01-the-north-star.md)). What
we sell: **training worlds** (an hour, solo — the visual novel) and **pocket dimensions** (a small kept
world a few people step back into — the populated World in its bounded form), carved from one recorded
Domain; agents get the same two. The category is the **causal simulator**, and the priorities are: the
simulator enabled by Meridians World Search (MWS) first (value today: simulations causally deployed from a voice
interview), micro sonic analysis as the value-add, the VNMMO as a stretch goal on a separate roadmap that relies on the
simulator and runs it more automated ([strategy 12](../strategy/12-the-practice-monopoly.md#what-we-monopolise-2026-09-18),
[specs map](../../../specs/README.md#priorities-2026-09-21)). The primary roadmap is **Causal MCTS VNs**;
VNMMO is a stretch goal on a separate roadmap.

1. **Extraction — or, as direction, an interview — turns a premise, corpus, source, or a person's own
   situation into a recorded Domain** — rules, cast, places,
   artifacts, stances, open questions — that can be run forward.
2. **Fate Exploration scouts the question worth building a world around**, the canonical good route that
   vindicates the right answer, and the diversions a real player would take.
3. **Scenario resolves consequence.** Will enters as a typed, attributable act; the world computes what
   follows; the branch keeps it.
4. **Factory and Stageplay make it a place** — cast, rooms, staging, voice, the discipline of a scene —
   prepared before anyone plays so nothing stalls.
5. **Experience delivers the hour.** Prepared, served, replayable; a reading given back at the end.
6. **A pocket dimension pins a moment of that branch as a place a few wills can enter and return to** —
   the same insertion, among other people, its history kept between visits.
7. **The same kept world takes a policy in the seat**, and the log is the result.

## The ramp

1. One original training world, played end to end, read back, replayed from another seat — and beside it,
   one brought situation turned into a world and rehearsed, its pathways searched before play.
2. A small catalogue of them in one setting, sharing cast and rooms.
3. One of those worlds kept open as a pocket dimension — a few players, a bounded run — with a debrief
   that is richer for what another seat knew.
4. One of those worlds with an agent in the seat and a measure that holds.

Each step is a gate, not a promise; a world may stop at any step and still be worth having.

## The moat

A frontier model can write the scene. What it cannot regenerate is **the world around the scene, the
searched pathways through it, and the person's history in it**: kept history, situated context, programmable mechanics, parallel-world lineage,
and the record each will carries away and brings back
([strategy 05](../strategy/05-the-moat-ordered-by-what-survives-the-worst-case.md),
[12](../strategy/12-the-practice-monopoly.md)).

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