The face (a holon's first page)

One page that says who this body is, what it is questing toward, and how to reach it — printable, and readable as a tile on a wall.

Every body that plays keeps a first page. It carries four things and no more: who we are, where we are, the Quest we are on this season, and our door. It is written for a stranger — someone who has never heard of this Cell and has three seconds to decide whether it is kin. One page, so it can be printed and pinned; four things, so it can be read across a room.

It is load-bearing because a body that cannot be recognized cannot be federated with. Requests and offers only work if someone can see who is offering; a Home Cell can only hold Cells it can tell apart; the wall of a Big Room is a field of these faces and nothing else. The face is the smallest unit of being findable, and findability is the whole of what a body gives up its privacy for — which is why what appears on it is chosen on purpose and the rest stays behind the membrane (Guard the Membrane).

The same page serves at every scale, because the four questions do. A person's face and a community's face differ in what fills them, never in their shape (The same card shape, Holofractal Scaling). And it is the first page of the body's own book, not a separate marketing object: what is on the face is true of the body inside, or the face is a lie the body will be caught in.

Also called: the first page · the tile on the wall Stands on: Cell · Quest · The Circle Sheet · An address Opens onto: The door and the standing hour · The Big Room · Minimum standards of interoperability · The interoperability test · Guard the Membrane · Reaching Us · The same card shape In play: Home · beyond — the page another Cell reads first Sources: The Minimum Standards of Interoperability — What a Holon Carries to Be a Cell (Projects, Kit v0; draft — the face as one of the ten standards) · The DNA of Heaven, Parts V and VII (Fable synthesis — the Circle Sheet; the plan of the whole) Open: The face and The Circle Sheet overlap almost entirely; nothing says whether they are one page under two names or two pages for two audiences.