The Stories
4 stories are named here. 0 are told — published, with sources that check out. 4 are not: two are drafted (written but carrying unverified sources) and two are planned (named, with a seam and a reason, and no prose yet). A story is free. That is not generosity — a story that starts selling stops being able to hand over the notation.
Every mark an ant leaves is a report about the past; there is no chemical for intention, so a colony can be measured and never held to anything.
turns on Events · text/ants-at-work.md
A column that closes on its own path walks until it dies, past food, with nothing chasing it and not one ant doing anything wrong.
turns on Paths · text/the-mill.md
She seals herself in and metabolises her own flight muscles to feed the first brood — the one moment a colony is a single point of failure.
turns on Actors · text/story-production-plan.md
A colony finds the shorter of two paths with no ant able to compare them, and the algorithm built from that has a known failure that is our open defect.
turns on Learning · text/story-production-plan.md
The finding this family produced
The mill is a story about a quantity nobody inside the system can read: how long since
anything outside a path last deposited on it. A ring is strong, getting
stronger, walked correctly by every ant on it, and indistinguishable from health by every
measure available inside it. Writing schema/ants.tql made that
literal — path owns no timestamp. The substrate cannot
detect a ring, and the file says so in its own block rather than shipping a function that
invents its evidence.
The four lies the skill forbids: never say the colony decides, never claim the substrate is
stigmergic (NOT WIRED), never say we detect mills, never claim the stories are published.
The stories are indexed in @/lib/ants — the ANT_STORIES array.
The components read from there. A state change in the library changes every surface.