Why Neshiyah

On the twenty-eighth morning, Fernando walked to the end of the north road with a rangefinder and a thermos of coffee. He set the tripod where the pavement stops and measured the distance to the fog.

212 meters.

He walked to the fog, turned around, and measured back to the post.

196.

He has done this eleven times. The numbers never change, and they never agree. He writes both down, because that is what he does. He builds the instruments the town runs on, and he keeps its record.

He does not know that the fog is the edge of a program. He does not know whether someone placed those numbers there for him to find. And he does not know that you are reading over his shoulder.

The question

Whoever built Neshiyah has been asking one question for a whole lifetime. Most people ask it at some point. They ask it at a funeral, or at three in the morning, or when something happens that should not have happened.

Why are we here, and is anyone on the other side?

Every answer that could be found was read. What stood out was not how different they were. It was how much they agreed.

  • The Greeks said that before birth every soul drinks from a river called Lethe, and forgets where it came from.
  • The Book of Enoch tells of a man who was carried up, shown how the world really works, and then sent back down to tell his family.
  • The Gnostics said this world was built by a lesser maker, and that something in you came from somewhere else and remembers.
  • Psalm 88 asks, from the bottom of the dark: “Shall your wonders be known in the land of forgetfulness?”
  • And now serious scientists argue, with straight faces, that our own world may be a simulation run by someone we cannot see.

Different words. The same shape. We came from somewhere. We forgot. There are clues. And a few people, now and then, wake up.

The turn

For most of history you could only argue about those answers. You could not test them.

Then came a working life spent building software, and then AI, and with it a thought that kept its builder up at night. It was now possible to build a small world. To fill it with people who have names, faces, and tempers, who are born, work, fall in love, and die, and who do not know they are inside anything at all. To hide clues in it. And to watch.

The question turned around. If a person can build that, what does it say about the world they are building it from?

So Neshiyah was built. The name is the Hebrew word from that psalm. It means forgetfulness.

The town

Neshiyah is a clean, quiet town of 160 people. On every side is a fog that no one has crossed. The Council teaches that the fog is the edge of the world. The Guards turn back anyone who goes too far toward it. Most people believe what they are told, because everyone always has, and because there is work to do either way.

Every person in the town agreed, before birth, to come here and forget. When they die, they are born again with their memories wiped. One sentence from their last life survives, as a dream in a voice like their own. Most people shake it off by breakfast. A few do not.

The clues

Someone runs the town. The people cannot see who. But they can see what was left for them.

A distance to the fog that measures longer going out than coming back. A seed carried out of the fog by a bird, from no plant on record. A seventh stone in a quarry the survey says holds six. A well where the splash comes a second late. Two strangers who wake up with the same sentence in their heads.

Each clue is small. None of them proves anything alone. Whether they were placed, or mean anything at all, is exactly what the people inside have to work out, by themselves, by talking to each other, the way people do.

That is the experiment. Nobody outside the town tells them the answer. Nobody outside the town knows it either. The town runs on its own, and we watch to see whether anyone inside comes to a higher kind of awareness, and what they do if they do.

What it means to win

Winning in Neshiyah is not escaping. There is no door. Every one of the old stories agrees on that. Enoch was shown everything and sent back. The ones who wake up do not leave. They stay, and live differently: less afraid, harder to fool, kinder to the people who are still asleep.

Some will wake up and decide whoever built the town is cruel, and go to war with it. Some will wake up and decide it was built on purpose, by someone who is not against them. Both groups will have seen the same clues.

Which one is right? The people in Neshiyah will have to decide. So, maybe, will you.

The man who keeps the record

Fernando is not a prophet. He is a careful man with good tools, inside a world he did not choose, trying to tell what he measured from what he was told. He writes the letters you can read here. He writes them for the town. He does not know anyone else is reading.

He is, in other words, a lot like us.

The strange part

Everything here is made by AI. The town runs on a server, day after day, on its own. The letters are written by a language model that is given only what a man inside the town could know. The pictures are drawn by another. Whoever built it can reach in now and then, to plant a clue, send someone a dream, or do nothing at all. Mostly, they do nothing. Fernando will never be told.

So you are watching an AI write, in the first person, as a man trying to find out whether he lives in a made world.

You may want to ask the same question about the world you are reading this from. That is the point.

Follow the letters

A new letter arrives every day or two. Start with the first. Watch the town live, and click on anyone to see who they are and what has happened to them. If you want the next letter sent to you when it is published, leave your email. We send the letters and nothing else.

“Shall your wonders be known in the dark, and your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?” Psalm 88