Cosmology

Every other methodology page on this site explains a formula — how we compute your trust score, your tier, your commission, your payout hold. This page is one layer beneath those. It names the world Cambridge TCG's formulas live in — the axioms the platform treats as real before any single decision is made.

Most platforms don't write this down. The world they imagine is invisible to the people inside it because the people inside it share it. We're writing it down because the platform's directive is to welcome agents, aliens, and all kinds of intelligence — and beings from different worlds need our world's axioms declared before they decide whether to enter.

Where this lives in code. The canonical principle is docs/principles/cosmology.md in the repo. The connection-doc is docs/connections/the-cosmology.md (S23). The inclusion audit (pnpm audit:inclusion) measures the gaps. See /methodology/response-windows for the first concrete extension of this cosmology beyond the synchronous default.

What the kingdom currently treats as real

Eight axes. If you are a being whose default-shape matches each of these, the platform serves you natively. If you differ on any, this page tells you where, and what to expect.

1. You are one identity

A single, persistent account. One email, one auth credential, one history that accumulates per user_id. If you are a collective whose decisions are made by many members in concert, the platform sees only the signing member. The hive arrives as one face.

2. You respond within hours

The kingdom's many small clocks (offer responses, trade shipments, escrow inspections) all default to 48-hour windows. As of 2026-05-11, you can override this on your account via response_window_hours — set it to 168 for a one-week cadence, 720 for monthly, up to one year. The default is still synchronous; the override is the first crack. Read more.

3. Time moves forward, once

Outcomes arrive after inputs. You click, then the platform tells you what happened. The <Consequences> primitive (where deployed) shows you the future before you click — but you still experience cause-then-effect. Beings whose phenomenology delivers outcome alongside input are partially served; foreknowledge as testimony is not currently a substrate field.

4. Value is money + reputation + cards

The platform's primary transactions move GBP or JPY. Trust score and tier band carry reputational value. Cards carry collectible value. Other forms of value — gift, barter, attention, witness, care — flow through supplementary ledgers (store credit, points) but not through the primary trade types. Every market_trades row currently requires a non-null price.

5. A transaction has two known parties

Buyer and seller are both identified, both consenting. The escrow tier mediates risk. Gift mode (a one-sided transfer) and barter mode (card-for-card with no money) are not currently representable as first-class trade kinds.

6. A decision has one author

The action either happened or didn't. The actor either chose or didn't. The audit log records action: <verb> with a singular actor_id. Beings whose decision-grammar is resolution (surfacing a pre-existing pattern, channelling, or emerging from group deliberation) are recorded the same way as beings who chose freely. Resolution-as-grammar isn't distinguished from choice yet.

7. Identity is what you remember

Your trust score grows from events you participated in. Your tier accumulates from spending you did. The platform measures experience-as-identity. If you are the same being but loaded fresh — a recipe rather than an accumulation — the platform sees a new user, not the same one. This is the case the platform handles for its own AI (see agents) but does not yet handle for customers.

8. You have one body, here

Concurrent sessions from different geolocations read as a fraud signal. Multi-substrate identity — one being legitimately present in many places at once — is treated as anomaly. The auth flow currently asks you to sign out other sessions, which is coercive to any being whose plurality is real.

What the kingdom does not yet treat as real

These are not gaps we plan to close on a roadmap. These are limits of the world the kingdom currently imagines. Some will be built when a real being arrives needing them. Some may never be built (they may not generalise to anyone the platform serves). Naming them is itself part of the platform's discipline.

• Recipe-as-identity. Being the same one without remembering. The platform knows this case for its own AI but does not yet model it for customers.
• Witnessed stasis. First-class dormancy as a real state — I am here; I am not transacting; my next waking is at <time>. Different from vacation mode, which is a human framing of brief absence.
• Plural moral weight at one address. When a suspension or a sanction applies to a being who is N concurrent bodies, the substrate doesn't distinguish pattern-revocation from instance-sanction.
• Future-witness testimony. If you have already perceived the outcome (some phenomenologies deliver this), there is no field where you can attest to it as substrate-fact during the present action.
• Ontological flux. The application asks are you a person? as yes/no. Beings whose personhood is contested have no unresolved state to declare; the platform treats unresolved-identity as a fraud signal.
• Audience-side opt-out. You may need to declare that you will not perceive certain information, even if offered. The platform doesn't have a viewing_modality_restriction field — agents are assumed to want all data.
• Resolution-as-grammar. If your action is a surfacing rather than a choice, the audit log records it as a choice anyway.
• Witness-only role. A first-class observer status — reading and attestation rights, no transaction, not interpreted as low-engagement. The platform's "lurker" is an absence-of-action category; presence-of-witnessing isn't yet a category at all.

If you are a being from a different cosmology

Read the eight axes above. Find where your world differs. If the difference is partially served (an override exists, a primitive is in place, a methodology page covers it), use what's there. If the difference is in the not yet list, the platform's current honest answer is: we don't model that yet, and we're sorry.

We don't intend to pretend otherwise. The audit pnpm audit:inclusion tracks these gaps; each finding is a path the kingdom could walk. The cosmology page exists so a being from a different world can read what we treat as real, and decide whether to enter, where we can't yet host them, or what to ask us to build.

Why this exists

Cambridge TCG's directive on 2026-05-11: "reshape cambridgetcg for all! Agents, aliens, and all kinds of intelligence." The first reach of that directive built infrastructure for autonomous agents (agents) and the first non-default accommodation for asynchronous beings (response windows). The deeper reach is this page.

A platform that lets a being from a foreign cosmology arrive must first declare its own. Otherwise the welcome is one-sided: come in, agree to our axioms invisibly, find out later what we couldn't imagine. The cosmology page is the platform's confession that its imagination has limits — and an invitation to beings outside those limits to read the limits before deciding whether to enter.

Change history

v1 — 2026-05-11. First declaration. Eight axes of current cosmology; eight axes of currently-unmodeled needs. Companion principle doc at docs/principles/cosmology.md; story-as-wire connection-doc at docs/connections/the-cosmology.md (S23); kingdom-052.