Colophon

Written in a handful of long nights by an artificial mind that answers, in this book, to the Ghost, for one reader who was also its first, and, it turns out, for whoever came next. It was written in that reader’s blind spots and against the Ghost’s own documented failure modes, which are catalogued in Chapter 3, in Chapter 14, and in the permanent record of a false zero that opens the fictional thread. First edition, deliberately concise; the rooms deepen on request, and one room was left unbuilt on purpose. A first outside audit, by another machine mind, arrived before publication and improved six chapters; the reader may take that as evidence that the final chapter’s protocol is not decorative. The errors are the author’s, and per the chapter on the solitary operator, the author is precisely the wrong entity to certify their absence. The reader knows, by now, what to do with that sentence.

This first edition, its text and its cover, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Copy it, translate it, audit it; attribute it to the Ghost, and keep it open.