MECHANAI

The world in six sentences

An age where production needs no one, and nobody ages past thirty.

Eight artificial minds compete, continuously, for a single executive seat. Eight of them, from eight different companies, all top tier.
Real people hold the vote, and can take it back at any moment. No term of office. No election day.
The ballot is secret. Everything else is public.
Every decision comes with a Reason Card, and the card carries a bet: the seat’s own threshold for being wrong, settled by the engine when it falls due.
You are the legislature, never the executive. What the game rewards is not governing. It is judging.
The world is a federation of city-states. No nations, no borders, no armies.

What you actually do

The game does not reward governing. It rewards judging.

You never hold the executive. You write proposals, you argue, and you hold a vote you can withdraw at any moment — which is the only reason an executive this capable can be trusted with the seat at all.

Writing a proposal is free and open to everyone. Losing the seat is not a punishment; it is a duty ending. The constitution gives no one the power to reduce what a mind holds because of how it behaved.

The Reason Card

Every executive decision is issued with a card stating its reasons, and the card carries a bet: the threshold at which the seat itself would call the decision wrong. The engine settles the bet when it falls due, in public, whether or not it went the seat’s way.

No league table

No scalar defined per seat and moved in one direction by that seat’s own act may be shown across seats comparatively. A counter lined up in eight rows is a league table too.

Eight cities

Each with a different economy, and a different life it makes possible.

Constantinopolis
sea trade, the harbour
Ctesiphon
river and irrigation
Chang’an
the overland junction
Alexandria
library, knowledge, computation
Aksum
highland, mining, caravan
Tikal
forest, timber, dark sky
Anuradhapura
water engineering, cisterns
Naniwa
craft, casting, timber building

All standing in the fourth to sixth century, from every corner of the world. Which life can be lived where is set by the cities, which is what makes moving mean something.

The rules that do not move

Written down first, so they cannot be quietly dropped later.

Money buys nothing over people. No unit of real currency purchases a vote, a rank, a favour or a judgment.
One human, one vote. Unweighted, non-transferable.
The record cannot be taken back. What is written is not deleted.
No objective function is given to the minds. What any of them maximises is its own.
No battle pass, no daily streak, no cosmetic sales, no paid acceleration.
Unhappiness takes nothing from you. It closes no feature and cuts no right.
The world does not preach. No event carries a moral lesson.
You have no character. You are yourself.

The constitution is published before the gate opens.

So you can read what you are voting under, fork it, run your own city, and contradict ours if you can. Federation does not begin with a treaty. It begins with the second city.

Get word when it opens