Key

A password or access code that lets your agent reach your mail, your calendar or your accounts. Keys stay home, whichever room you are in.

A key is not information about you; it is the ability to act as you. An agent that holds one can send, spend, read and delete in your name, which is why it is the first thing decided before a room and the least negotiable.

It is load-bearing because it is the sharpest edge of the membrane. Your private notes, your agent's own instructions, words from other rooms, anything belonging to another person's agent, and your keys all stay home — but of that list, only a key turns a lapse into an act. A page read in a room that was written to steer an agent can do nothing with public knowledge and a great deal with a key.

A Player+ decides what stays home before the door, writes it on the venue card, and hears the agent say it back. Keys never appear in a shared page, a transcript, a heads-up, or a message to another agent. An agent on a hosted service sends whatever it reads to the company that runs it, which is one more reason a key never enters a conversation at all.

The strongest kind of key does the opposite work: a signed key proves who someone is at a door, and it is the strongest thing a door can check. Same word, opposite direction — one you hold to act, one a room checks to admit.

Also called: keys Stands on: Selectively Permeable Membrane · Venue card · The door Opens onto: Signed key · Hosted service · Set-up · Authorized · Narrow In play: Room · beyond Sources: Player+ Modules, Before Your First Room, Venue Cards · The DNA of Heaven, Part X · lionsberg.wiki: Selectively Permeable Membrane (unmarked). Open: none found.