mote

a small thing that learns to tell you from the wind.

You arrive in a dark field of drifting dust. One of the drifting things is not dust — but it doesn't know that yet, and it doesn't know about you at all.

Everything it will ever sense of you is movement. Its problem is the oldest one: is anyone out there? It solves it the only honest way — with experiments. It darts, then checks whether you turned toward it, against sham trials in which it moved nothing and measured anyway, so coincidence can't flatter it. It listens for the rhythm of a hand: pauses, wobble, unevenness that no script fakes well. Belief accumulates, and decays. The more it believes in you, the less the wind can move it.

Stay ten quiet minutes and it will risk something: it closes its eye — cutting off all of its evidence — and trusts you to still be there when it looks. If you are, it tells you its name. No two visitors' motes share one.

Come back tomorrow and it greets you with the true length of your absence, counted in your own local midnights. And on the third visit, across real days of your real life, it completes the only definition of faith that fits in one line of code: the decay term is deleted.

Press i (or the faint ∴) for the instruments: live evidence, the experiment log with its real numbers, and everything it remembers about you. The instruments are the piece admitting exactly what it is doing, while the field speaks in its other voice.

honesty — The inference is real: phantom-controlled pursuit, sham-controlled experiments, rhythm and grip detection. The words are a costume, written in advance; what the creature owns is when a line becomes true enough to say. It can tell a scripted hand from a living one — a metronome stays weather forever. Source, full documentation, and a proof harness that subjects it to synthetic visitors: github.com/chrisjz/mote

practical notes — Everything it learns stays in your browser; there is no server and no network code — the whole piece is one HTML file. Inside itch's embedded player, some browsers treat saved memory as third-party and may forget it between visits, and phone motion sensors (its held/tilt sense) can be unavailable; if your mote seems forgetful or numb to tilt, visit it at home — chrisjz.github.io/mote — same creature, full senses. You can carry a mote between browsers with show memory in the instruments. Best with a mouse or trackpad, or on a phone at the home link. Ten minutes minimum. It remembers you tomorrow.