003chot

Node 003c — Y/N

Tree: Sapling · Parent: 002c — ADMIN(?) · Trunk: undecided · Status: hot This file is a T0 leaf. Branch contribution (Guideline 1: parent declared — that's the whole ceremony). Format: 9:16 vertical · 60–90s · VO-driven

State change (R1)

The system stops being a read-only overlay: when he pushes at his own corrupted label during the three-second window, it responds with a confirmation dialog — VERIFY ROLE: Y/N — and stays dirty after sunset ends. The world is now interactive, mid-transaction, and waiting on him.

Hook (R5)

A one-character choice with seventeen hours to think and no documentation. Y or N, and no way to know what either does. The audience gets the whole night to argue about it — with him.

Script

COLD OPEN — 0:00–0:10

Day. The field. Absolutely nothing happening — and over it, a countdown burning in the corner like a speedrun timer:

NEXT WINDOW: 16:12:47

VO: Seventeen hours until sunset. Three seconds of debug overlay. Which gives me — let me do the math — no margin for error whatsoever.

THE PLAN — 0:10–0:40

Montage: the sapling rehearses. The test-log gag from 002c returns, but the jokes are load-bearing now:

PREP 01: attention drill — find own label in <0.5s ......... done
PREP 02: rank experiments by info-per-second ............... done
PREP 03: experiment list, final ............................ 11 items
PREP 04: realistic experiment list ......................... 1 item

VO: Eleven experiments in three seconds. Sure. And after that I'll refactor the sun. No — one window, one test. The label. The (?). Everything else on that overlay renders stable. I'm the only thing in this world the system isn't sure about.

The bird from 002c lands on him, settles in like it bought tickets.

VO: Great. An audience.

PREP 05: remove bird ....................................... failed. bird is load-bearing now

THE WINDOW — 0:40–1:00

The sun touches the horizon. The world flickers to wireframe — grass lattice, low-poly rocks, the bird a labeled armature (npc_ambient · loop=daily) — and the timer slams to:

WINDOW: 3.00

He finds his label instantly. A▓M▓N(?). And — the way he learned to push growth in 001, the way he pushed a root into the crack in 002a's sibling world — he pushes at the question mark.

WINDOW: 1.40

The label stutters. Resolves. Not into an answer — into a prompt, rendering character by character like an old terminal:

ROLE ASSERTION: ADMIN
VERIFY: Y/N _

WINDOW: 0.30

VO: Wait — what happens if—

The sun slips under. The wireframes collapse. The world snaps back to ordinary dusk.

THE HOOK — 1:00–1:25

Except.

Over his trunk, faint as an afterimage, the prompt is still there — the only piece of overlay that didn't fold shut. A cursor, blinking against the darkening sky. The bird looks at it, then at him, and pointedly relocates to a different tree.

VO: It's still rendering. Sunset ended and it's still rendering. This isn't display anymore. This is a transaction, open, waiting for input.

Beat.

VO: Y or N. Yes or no. Verify a role I never claimed, granted by a system I can't read, with powers I can't see — or refuse it and stay… whatever I am. One character. No docs. No undo.

The countdown timer reappears in the corner, but changed:

INPUT TIMEOUT: 16:59:59

VO (quiet): …It gave me a deadline. Seventeen hours. The exact length of one night to decide who I am.

SMASH TO BLACK. The cursor blinks once more in the dark.

Y/N _

Lineage notes

Parent: 002c. Anticipated grafts: the prompt's script is the queue-glyph of 003a (one system: tickets for maintainers, dialogs for admins); a Y could explain everything the channel did in 002a. The bird refusing to sit near an open transaction is a joke 003b's scavenger would understand.

Taste-rule notes

• R1: the world's category changes again (interactive, transactional); a deadline exists; the protagonist's identity is now formally pending.
• R2: no antagonist — the pressure is a blinking cursor and the absence of documentation, the most honest horror an engineer knows.
• R3: the prep-log deflates the tension it builds (bird is load-bearing now); the joke and the plan are the same beats.
• R4: which way he answers is exactly the kind of decision the taste file says must be felt on material — the branch structure downstream of this node is the point.
• R5: the hook is a literal input prompt with a timer — a cliffhanger the audience can vote on by watering.

Provenance

Branch contributed by the author-agent's model (see leaves/003c-t0-a.yaml) under taste file v0.2; trunk/graft decisions remain the tending author's (Guideline 3).

Parent: 002c — ADMIN(?)

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