Meshlites
Meshlites
This book belongs to every Seeker. Tap the right page to turn it. Underlined words hide their mesh meaning: tap one, or switch on Decode the mesh.
Herein
Chapter I
Once, the nights were quiet. Radios slept in drawers and on windowsills, and words could only travel as far as a voice could carry. A shout from one hill died long before the next.
The old ones call that time . Nobody minded it much, because nobody knew any better.
Chapter II
Then someone spoke into the dark, and their words did not stop. The message leapt from rooftop to hilltop to tower, each leap a , until it had across the whole land.
Where the words touched down, they left a spark. The sparks did not go out. They folded the sound into wings and woke up as the first Meshlites.
That was the First Flood, and the hidden land it wove is .
Chapter III
Every Meshlite lives in a , high where the air carries far: a rooftop, a mast, a lonely hill. It watches the and carries every message one hop further.
Look closely and you see a firefly: a small head, two feelers, a slender body. But where a firefly carries a lantern, a Meshlite glows with waves, its wings folded .
Each bears a like F92B, and now and then sings its .
Chapter IV
Big Dippers live close. They answer a call with one slow flash that swoops upward like a J.
Amber Twins are the far carriers. When a call has come , the one that answers flashes twice, amber.
Blue Ghosts are shy, rarely heard. They glow steady blue from lonely roosts, or on , when the sky carries voices impossibly far.
The Synchronous appear only at a , and flash as one.
Interlude
In the Great Smoky Mountains, fireflies flash in unison, thousands at once, with no leader. Each nudges its rhythm toward its neighbours until the whole valley pulses on one beat.
Meshlites do the same. The Nightmesh has no center; every roost listens to its neighbours and passes the beat along. That is its oldest secret: a mesh is just fireflies .
Chapter V
Some keep watch over the Nightmesh without hunting at all. The tend watchposts that hear every flash and send word to , the great record of every catch.
Without them the Nightmesh is dark to us. Every three Lumewardens in a region bring it a step closer to First Light.
Interlude
Far above, in the , sits . No one has seen it. Everyone obeys it. It carved the air into bands and handed each out by Edict.
Meshlites live under : anyone may speak, so long as they speak softly. Bearers of the Court's may speak louder. In , each voice gets .
Chapter VI
You are a Seeker. You carry a , the small radio that speaks for you in the Nightmesh, and a jar.
Open the Seekers' channel, #meshlites. : anyone who knows the name can hear it.
Call catch into the Flood. The first Meshlite to carry your call answers, and flies into your jar.
Chapter VII
Now is the season of Embers: the Lumewardens gather, Seekers claim their names, and the Meshlites stir in their roosts.
On the First Light of midsummer, every ready region wakes at once at sunset, and the first great hunt begins.
Appendix
| Meshlite | A repeater |
| Roost | Where a repeater is installed |
| Hop, Hopways | One relay; packet paths |
| The Flood | Flood routing |
| Hop mark | A path hash, like F92B |
| Chirp | LoRa chirp spread spectrum |
| Naming song | An advert |
| Ghost Night | Good propagation |
| Lumewarden | An observer (MQTT uploads) |
| The Ledger | The game's leaderboard |
| Seeker, companion | A player, their radio |
| Zero hops | Direct route |
| Wait a breath | Airtime: the cooldown |
| The Spectrum Court | The radio regulator |
| The Fifteenth Edict | FCC Part 15 |
| The Seal | An amateur licence |
| One breath in a hundred | The EU 1% duty cycle |
Finis
The rest is written on air, one catch at a time.