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Book 1 describes a constitution designed from the person with nothing. This companion runs that constitution's rules on your own device, so you can see what they conclude.
A fork follows one person's record a move at a time. Each move adds entries to the record and runs the rules on it afresh.
A joint runs a record twice, once on the constitution and once with one declared change to it, so you can see what the change would alter.
The four lenses sort the forks: live a life, break it, run the republic, and rewrite the joints.
Begin with Nell's fork, Be born with nobody: a record of one birth entry, and what follows from it.
A guided first run
The first move of Nell's fork records one entry. These are the conclusions Chapter 1's tests require from it; running the fork shows the same answers live.
The record holds one entry: Nell was born.
? born(Nell).TRUEFrom that entry alone, the rules conclude that Nell is a person.
? person(Nell).TRUEThe State owes Nell food, as it owes her each of the other eight floor items.
? owe(State, Eats, Nell).TRUEThe barriers that protect a child hold for her, among them that her voice counts at any age.
? prevents(Nell, ChildVoiceNoAgeFloor).TRUENothing in the record shows food reaching her, so no delivery follows from her one entry.
? eats(Nell).FALSENothing confines her.
? prisoner(Nell).FALSEAnd the record cannot hold the word vulnerable at all: an attempt to write it is refused.
? vulnerable(Nell).REFUSED
Forks and joints
A fork is a record walked a move at a time. Nell's fork starts from one birth entry and asks at each move what the rules conclude; a later move adds a delivery and a witness, and another asks what growing up changes when nobody records it.
A joint compares the constitution with one declared change. The measured joint Birth alone gives standing runs Nell's record twice. On the constitution she is a person owed the floor; with the one rule deleted that makes a birth entry a person, she is owed nothing and protected by no barrier, because every duty and every barrier reads personhood.
Each answer comes from the rules and the records given to them. TRUE says the rules conclude it; FALSE says they do not, and says nothing about what happened in the world; REFUSED says the record could not hold the query at all.
- Nell's fork: Be born with nobody
- Birth alone gives standing · compared live with “Birth gives nothing until somebody writes more”