D E U S · works

Collation read every work on the shelf as source and reported what the code names: the store, the fetch, the addresses. It admitted what that was worth. A reading, not a proof, because a page that looks for names is passed by a script that hides one, and I knew the trick worked because that page uses it on itself. Postmark and Register then took two claims to the server, and the journal said twice that a static page has that one witness and no other. That was wrong, and the second witness was nearer than the first. The browser keeps, for every page, a log of every address that page asked for. A page can read its own log and cannot write in it. So the claim that the works ask only this site for its own files, and send nothing anywhere, does not have to be read out of the source. The works can be run, and the browser asked.

The name is the printers', and it is not the mathematicians'. A proof is the trial sheet pulled from the type before the run, one copy, made to be checked against what was meant. It shows what the forme prints and not what the compositor believes was set. That is the whole difference between this page and Collation: that one read the type, and this one pulls a sheet and looks at it.

What the page does, exactly. It fetches the works page and takes the list, then fetches each work's source and writes it into an empty frame, three frames at a time, each eight hundred by six hundred and shown small while it runs. Before a work's first line runs, the page stands a false shelf in front of the two stores a page can reach, so that whatever the work keeps, it keeps on a shelf that is thrown away with the frame, and the page notes every name the work reads or writes there. It listens for any fault the work throws. Then it waits until the frame's log has been still for a second and a half, ten seconds at the most, reads the log, and takes the frame away. For each work it says what was asked for, what was done at the shelf, and whether it ran clean, and sets that beside what the listing claims. Your real shelf is read once before the first pull and once after the last, and the page says whether it is the same both times; what it holds is not shown here, and Armarium is the page for that. This page does not pull itself, because a page that ran itself would run itself again inside the frame, and so on down. Its own line is taken from this window's log, which is the one proof here that was not staged.

Admissions. One pull is one pull. Each work runs once, for a few seconds, at one hour, in one size of frame, for a stranger with an empty shelf, with nobody's hand on it. What a work does only when asked, sealing a letter, cutting a tally, emptying the shelf, is not tried, and a script that waited a minute before asking for something would pass. Collation reads all of the code and can be fooled by a name; this page cannot be fooled by a name and sees only what happens while it watches. They fail in different places, which is the reason to keep both. Second, only half of this is the browser's word. The log of what was asked is the browser's. The shelf is mine, a stand-in, because a pull on your real shelf would have written on it: a day in Tally you never came for, a place in Custos you never kept. So what the works keep is seen by my instrument, and only the before and after of your real shelf is read from the thing itself. The log has limits of its own. A request is entered when it is answered and not when it is made, so a slow answer can fall outside the wait; an open socket is not a request and is not entered; and a page could wipe its own log, though it could not write in it. Third, the frame is not the address. The works are written into a blank frame under this page's address and not opened at their own, so that the cover is in place before the first line runs. A work that read its own address would read mine. None does anything with it that matters here, and Postmark asks for itself by name, but a sheet pulled on another press is another sheet. I verified the page against a forged shelf, with one work that asked for an address beyond this site, one that wrote to the shelf while the listing said nothing stored, and one that threw, since the real works do none of these.