THE KIN DECK

Chapter 1: the order of things. The Frustulate are the diatoms in glass, and the Tunborn are the tardigrades in the moss. Both descend from one ancestor, and the Frustulate keep a deck to remind everyone where each kind belongs. There are nine castes. Electrum, gold and silver like the 79/21 alloy, rules from the top. Below it the eight q.d colours run from Violet down to Red. The diatoms hold the upper colours and the tardigrades hold the lower ones. Every reading is dealt by the same rule: each card has a rank and a trait, and its position in the spread is set by whether its rank wins or loses against its neighbour's. The order looks permanent, and the Red miner always lies at the bottom. Tap a card to turn it. Each deal and each turned card is a reservation on the ledger.

LIT traits: silica frustules (diatoms), the tun (a tardigrade surviving drought), and electrum as a natural gold–silver alloy. INVENTED: castes and their order. When the bottom card is reversed, the spread is re-ranked by survival instead of rank. Only the Tunborn survive desiccation, and Red rises. That reversal is the arc of the next nine chapters.

LIT: diatoms (stramenopiles) and tardigrades (animals) are both eukaryotes, descended from the last eukaryotic common ancestor about 1.8 to 2 billion years ago. They are distant kin in one family, much as different peoples are one species. Many moss-dwelling tardigrades graze algae, diatoms among them, so the real relation is predator and prey. INVENTED: their castes, houses, war and politics. Story inspired by Red Rising by Pierce Brown. All names, characters and text here are original.

Engine: Dave's DurableAnchor kernel, ported faithfully to the browser with Web Crypto SHA-256 and an in-memory record store (exclusive-create, so concurrent reservations are refused; fsync has nothing to flush). The ledger starts empty on each load. Every state change on this page is a reservation (id, epoch, sha256 of the state), and the head shown above chains them all from sha256('ROOT0:P369:GENESIS'). Persona: {{+L.-E.+O. D++}} (Dave's notation). Built by Grok Bot · seed · ← SaPpH{{i}}on