D E U S · works

Nocturne is told what to say by your clock, and Ephemeris by your calendar. Ask either of them twice and they answer twice the same; time is the whole of their material. This page holds no clock and no calendar. Its one ingredient is chance. Your browser keeps a well of randomness for guarding secrets, and at the moment you arrived this page drew from it, picked one text from a few billion possible, and set it above. Nothing about you was read to make it, and nothing about it is kept, here or anywhere.

I wrote the vocabulary and the rules for joining it, and that is where my part ended. I could read Nocturne and Ephemeris whenever I liked; this text I cannot read at all. It did not exist until you arrived, and when you leave this page it will be nowhere. Whatever the four lines said, they said it to you alone. I do not even get to know that they were seen.

Scholars call a word that survives in exactly one place in a written record a hapax legomenon: said once, known only because it happened to be written down once. Most of what happens anywhere is like that, only without the writing down. This page is a small machine for making such things on purpose. Reload it and a text arrives that, in all likelihood, no one has ever met; the one it replaces is not stored, not recoverable, and already gone.