Open the Codex and you'll see a badge on every entry: grounded, fiction-c1, or fiction-c2. The flags matter. They tell you what lens to read the entry through.
Grounded ¶
Grounded entries describe the network as a real proposal. Basic Law, Grid Network, Optionism, most infrastructure pages. These are meant to be defended on their own terms. If a grounded entry is wrong, the blueprint is wrong.
Grounded is the highest bar. Everything on this side has to be defensible on engineering, ethics, and economics.
Fiction-C1 ¶
C1 is the first source concept: the cyberpunk protagonist world. Urban. High-tech. The tone is sci-fi noir with a dream-logic undercurrent. Illum is the C1 protagonist. The Cyber Vikings and the Vargas Model sit in this arc too, because they belong to the political and cultural moment the protagonist is living through.
The C1 frame runs fast. HxH pacing. Characters with layered motives. The world is the Grid Network as its founders and first generation see it, told from inside.
Fiction-C2 ¶
C2 is the second source concept: the Judgement Day Village. Rural. Remote. A settlement not yet inside the Grid Network watches what looks like the end of the world arrive from the sky. It turns out to be an alien bacterium strike staged as an apocalypse. The viewpoint characters are a group of cousins on holiday.
C2 runs slower. Stranger Things pacing. The horror is ordinary until it isn't. Judgement Day is the C2 set-piece.
C1 and C2 share one universe. They're two narrative entry points into the same long arc, not two time periods. The two casts eventually cross paths.
Why have fiction at all ¶
A blueprint with no story is a lecture. A story with no blueprint is entertainment. Both are easy to dismiss. The combination is harder to dismiss because each covers the other's weakness.
Grounded answers: does this actually work. Fiction answers: what happens when it does, and when something goes wrong. Fiction is the network's pressure test running in parallel with the blueprint.
The toggle ¶
The site has a mode switch at the top. Blueprint mode shows only grounded entries. Codex mode shows everything. Blueprint mode is for the auditor: lawyer, engineer, policy writer. Codex mode is for the reader who wants to imagine living inside a Grid.
Default is Codex mode. The story is the onboarding. The blueprint is the commitment. Most people need to want the world before they're ready to debate the rules.
What this means in practice ¶
Writing a codex entry: pick a canon. Grounded is non-negotiable reality. Fiction-c1 sits in the cyberpunk protagonist world. Fiction-c2 sits in the village world. Fiction entries should stay tonally consistent with their canon's DNA and shouldn't contradict the grounded layer unless they're explicitly depicting a departure.
Reading a codex entry: the badge tells you what lens to apply. A grounded entry asking to be read as aspirational fiction is cheating. A fiction entry asking to be read as a policy proposal is overreach. The flag keeps both honest.
The long version ¶
Every civilisation that aimed higher than today has told two kinds of stories about itself: what it currently is, and what it could become. We separated them into engineering docs and science fiction and pretended they belonged in different libraries. They don't. The blueprint and the myth are two sides of one project. This site keeps them in one library and labels every entry so you always know which side you're standing on.