Rules of the Universe

The book's Part 3.6. A universe begins across three parts: the Nullcore, the singularity at the bottom of the parent's null well, where the parent's data sinks to 0; the Bifold, the line between the dimensions, which is the bubble's skin; and the Pulsecore, the child's data within it (the game called it the pinpoint). Every bit carries its null, the 0 of its own pulse, so before anything leaves, the Pulsecore holds N bits of data and N of null, the null packed into the room the data has not taken, ρ∅ = N/(χ_∂ − N): drawn as a darkening haze behind the data. When data and null fill the Pulsecore's χ_∂ = 16·4^L places, the null is packed one to a place and the Bifold gives the Null Nova, Harmonic 1: the null leaves as space, an empty torus round the Pulsecore (Toroidal Genesis). The data, held to the Bifold's record, stays. From then on each new bit's null leaves as it is made, so space grows one place for every bit, S = N, and the empty torus swells, its area doubling, until the Data Nova, Harmonic 2, when the data alone fills the Pulsecore and pours out onto the space already standing, which then holds exactly χ_∂ places, one for every bit: the field's own size, 4·2^L a side. The Pulsecore is left as the Hollow, the hole the torus circulates through. Level 5: the Null Nova at Tempo 90, the Data Nova at 127; level 6: 181 and 255; level 1: 5 and 7. The universe then lives 2^L Tempos from its Data Nova (the Rupture Rule), and its later novas are the harmonic series of that life: Harmonic h arrives (1 − 2/h) of the way through it, so Harmonic 3, the physical, a third of the way through (Tempo 22 of 64 at level 6), twice as long a physical phase as before. The data inside is massless radiation, not a gas (the Pulsecore Data Radiance).

Light is the same everywhere, the calibrated speed: a cell is f^L/4·scale ℨ, so the field's width at scale 1 is s ℨ, one local Planck length, and a flip is half a Planck time, so light covers half the field a flip (128 cells at level 6), less as the universe dilates. Inside the Pulsecore that is π radii a flip. The data, massless, circulates at it: it laps the tube in about two flips, so it is drawn as the eye sees anything that fast, smeared along its path, trail behind, by how far it ran since the last frame. Wells and matter are massive and do not ride it: they keep their places on the torus and the data streams past and through them; matter's brightness goes on after the smear, so it stays sharp. Horizons are r_s = 2GM/𝒞→², matter falls in within a well's horizon (or 1.5 cells), and wells merge when their horizons touch. The wells of the lattice phase follow the Null Well Progeny Count Law: N = 2^(L/3) wells, more with spin; half collapse at Harmonic 2 as data wells (hollow, purple), at the densest places in the data (the Formation Condition), each taking its block's data, and the rest at Harmonic 3, when every data well becomes physical (black, ringed); later harmonics and matter's own collapse add more. Each is drawn by its mass, and at its true horizon once that is larger. A well feels the matter through the grid and the other wells directly, never itself; bodies feel each well directly up close and through the grid beyond two blocks (P³M). A well moving through matter is held back by its wake, Chandrasekhar's dynamical friction, so wells sink into the clumps they cross. Pulls are softened within (10·G·M)^(1/3), where one flip's pull would bend a path by more than a tenth of its distance: the computation's resolution, as in every N-body code, not a law of the theory; bound wells that close merge, their last orbits faster than a flip. At level 6 the whole field must collapse in the last third of its life, about 42 flips, so the matter and wells fall fast, several cells a flip; deeper universes live longer and fall more gently.

The book's Part 3.6, on the Pulsecore (once "The Pinpoint as a Bubble of Data"). Before the nova the Pulsecore is a skin holding data within, and the points you see inside it are that data: massless, so each moves at exactly light speed and only its direction changes, at the skin. How far: a cell is f^L/4 ℨ, so the skin's equator, 4·2^L cells, is s ℨ, one local Planck length; a flip is half a Planck time, so light covers π of the Pulsecore's radii a flip, and each datum crosses the bubble and strikes its wall about 2.4 times a flip (kinetic theory, matched within 5%). Each datum is a bit: a strike trades its bit and colour with the cells it lands on, so the skin holds what struck it and nothing is made, and the wall turns it back as a mirror does, so it keeps its angle and momentum and ricochets on its own track. The streaks are each datum's whole path through the last flip, its bounces included: one frame a flip cannot show a datum that crosses more than once. The skin turns rigidly with the spin, as a Kerr horizon does, its equator at a_f / (1 + √(1 − a_f²)) of light speed (0.41 at a_f = 0.7, 0.94 near the limit), so v_∂·π radians a flip, about 1.3 at a_f = 0.7. A mirror moving along itself pushes nothing sideways, so the drag is space's: inside a rotating shell the frames turn, and a shell at its own horizon drags them fully (Thirring 1918; Brill & Cohen 1966), so the data bounces in a frame that turns with the skin. The skin turns about a radian a flip and a frame may show several flips, so a sharp picture jumps more than half a turn between frames and reads as turning backward (the wagon-wheel effect); the skin is drawn smeared along its turn by what it swept since the last frame, fading behind the motion, as the eye sees fast turning, so it reads the way it goes. New data is born where the skin pulses and enters. The harmonics are a true harmonic series, not octaves: the Prime Data Nova comes after T₁ = 4·2^L − 1 Tempos, the universe's fundamental, and the universe lives 2^L Tempos, one period of its own fourth harmonic. Harmonic h arrives at (1 − 2/h) of the life (it was (1 − 1/h) on 24 October; see the card above): Harmonic 3, the physical, a third of the way, 4 halfway, then 3/5, 2/3, …, each nearer the last, converging on the rupture; those closer than one Tempo, the universe's finest tick, arrive together, and past Harmonic 4 they pass quietly. G is fixed at the nova for the collapse from the physical layer, known in advance, to the rupture. Playing a child starts it at once, its Pulsecore its parent well's information across the whole sphere. Milestones pop up as the bubble fills: how fast the skin turns, then the data within at a quarter, a half and three quarters of the skin's record, and the skin nearly full before the burst. After the nova, Harmonic 1 is the torus alone, empty, its data faint and even with no lines (Toroidal Genesis: the closed form, not yet a dimension); Harmonic 2 lays the lattice, the axes of space, bursting out over 6 steps and gathering the data onto its lines; Harmonic 3 is the physical over it. The data within grows as (n + 1)² after n Tempos (Recursive Capacity Growth), and the bubble bursts, the Prime Data Nova, when it reaches the skin's record, χ_∂ = 16·4^L bits, one per skin cell: at Tempo 4·2^L − 1 (127 at level 5, 255 at level 6). The spin goes through the nova in the data, not the torus: the torus is the frame the data moves through and does not turn as a body, as a smoke ring's fluid circulates while the ring stands. The data carries its angular momentum out with it, a_f/H of a cell round the ring for each cell through the hole, and keeps it as the expansion carries it outward, so its turn falls as 1/scale². The torus frame drifts only as that circulating data drags it (Lense–Thirring): Ω = 2·G·J/(𝒞→²·R³) with the universe's G, measured 0.022 radians a flip at the nova falling to 0.002, about sixty times slower than the Pulsecore's spin, drawn smooth between steps. The default speed is paced: the book gives 4·2^L Tempos of filling and then 2^L Tempos of life, so at one pace the bubble fills four times as long as the universe lives; paced, the filling plays in about 10 s and the life in about 25 s at every level. Every step still runs and every count is the true one. Up to 1,200 points are drawn; past that each is an equal share of the data within, and its strike trades with that share of cells. The pole-to-pole slosh, the latitude lag and the free-precession wobble are gone: a horizon turns as one.

After the nova the settings that were game couplings now follow the book and physics, and their sliders are gone. Data flow: massless data circulates at light speed, one cell a flip. Frame dragging: the flow's Lense–Thirring twist (the flat map's turn about its centre is gone). Spin coupling on the field: 0 (spin acts through the skin, the flow and the wells). Pulsecore processing: the bubble law above. Gravity: G is fixed at the Prime Data Nova by the Rupture Rule: by the rupture everything has collapsed. Gravity couples to energy, not only to mass (light falls into a well), and data carries E = k_B·T, so G holds from the nova on. Cold matter grows its contrast as δ₀·cosh(t/τ), 1/τ = √(4πGρ̄); the whole field starts at δ₀ = 1/√M and collapses at linear contrast 1.686 (spherical collapse), so T/τ = arccosh(1.686·√M) over the life of T flips. Measured: by the end the densest tenth of the field holds 52 to 81% of the matter and 25 to 58% of it is nearly empty, the clumping growing through the life. Matter starts cold, at rest in the substrate; orbits, discs and spin come of the fall. Well pull and Well swirl: data falls in at the free-fall speed √(2GM/k) and turns at the Kepler rate √(GM/k³), plus the frames a spinning well drags, 2GJ/(𝒞→²k³) with J = a·G·M²/𝒞→, in the sense of the well's spin. Data wells, in the space layer before the physical, pull data in with the same G (they do not swirl: an orbit is an event in time). A well is its data: at a harmonic nova it takes exactly the cells of data nearest its centre that make its mass, ring by ring, so the basin it empties is the room that data held, and it is drawn at its horizon, r_s = 2GM/𝒞→², not a set size. Matter rides the flow and the ring twist as the wells do, being at rest in the moving data, so wells gather it: measured, every well ends with matter 1.2 to 3.6 times the mean density round it. Wells fall too, under the matter's pull and each other's, and two that meet merge, keeping mass and momentum, the merged spin their whole angular momentum, a = J/(G·M²); the set orbit of wells born together is gone. Reset starts the same genesis again with a new Pulsecore; Randomize (beside it) draws a new genesis at the level you chose: channel, mass ratio, axis and null mass, the poles at centre. It never draws the level (it sets how long everything takes), f₀ (the lineage's), or the view, speed and display. The throat's glow and pulse fronts, which were drawing only, are gone; the flow itself carries the data out.

A universe's frame ratio: how many Zinf cycles one of its Pulse Tempos lasts. Data doubles exactly per level, so a Tempo carries 2^(L+1) bits and a flip (one Rhythm) 2^L; the heritage f^L stretches the time without adding data, which is why a universe processes more slowly than the Zinf by its heritage (f²⁰² ≈ 36.7 for ours). At the Zinf a flip is one bit, a Tempo two. The HUD's Bits count the whole field: every flip × 2^L from Start; before Start, the Pulsecore's painted pixels × 2^(L+1).

ℨ is the same in every universe; each universe's Tempo is (2f)^L ℨ on the ladder. The Zinf Pulse Length is 𝒞→ℨ ≈ 6.845 × 10⁻⁹⁸ m and its Diameter half that; mass, energy and the rest are our Planck units divided by our s.

The game's grid follows the first: 4·2^L cells a side at level L. The real view at 202 is 10¹²² pixels at 1.855 × 10⁴³ Hz.

The remnant's spin from the two progenitors' spins a₁, a₂, their mass ratio and their misalignment θ_merge. A lone collapse has no orbital term. Equal masses with no spin give 0.686; two near-maximal Kerr holes give 0.998.

The merger compresses the clock. Our Kerr–Kerr origin sits at the floor, 0.932; a gas-cloud collapse at 1.000.

Each level doubles and inherits a little more: the heritage. Our f = 1.018, so f²⁰² ≈ 36.7. Our compression is the Kerr floor exactly, ⟪C⟫ = 1 − 0.068 × 0.998² = 0.93227 (Josh, 25 October 2026), which makes f₀ = 1.018354 and returns our Planck time, length, ℏ, 𝒞→ and G exactly; the book's f₀ ≈ 1.01837 was worked with ⟪C⟫ ≈ 0.93. A child carries every ancestor's ⟪C⟫ in the product, not only its own merger's.

M_null/M_P 10⁶: Hyper-Genesis, a Tempo 10³ slower, slow-pulsing and long-lived · 1: Standard Genesis. A heavier well gives a slower child. No well forms below one Planck mass, so there is no lower row; failure is not set by mass (§6).

A flip is one Rhythm, a full cycle one Tempo and one frame. At n = 202 these return the Planck time, 5.391 × 10⁻⁴⁴ s, and a Diameter of half the Planck length, 8.08 × 10⁻³⁶ m.

A universe's Tempo and Length set its constants; ℏ_ℨ = ℏ/s² ≈ 1.892 × 10⁻¹⁵⁹ J·s is one bit held one Zinf tick. On the ladder light speed and G come out as ours; a heavier null mass slows the Tempo with the Length unchanged, so light speed falls and G falls as its fifth power. Boltzmann's constant is the one constant every universe shares. The readout shows each universe's 𝒞→, ℏ and G.

The UniSphere counts levels; a universe counts its own Tempos. The HUD shows both: own Tempos, and the bits they carried.

A universe spawns when its own count of full cycles reaches the UniSphere's capacity at its level. One Tempo is two engine steps (two flips), so a level-L universe lives 2^(L+1) steps from its Data Nova. Ours: 2²⁰² Tempos = 11.0 Gyr; at 13.8 Gyr we are past it.

The boundary information per well is an area law, so a child costs the two-thirds power of capacity and the count is the remaining third. Level 0 seeds one child; level 202 seeds 1.86 × 10²⁰, the black holes. A spinning well has less area, half at maximal spin, so the count rises by at most two.

One flip of one cell is one binary transition and carries E = ℏ′/①⥂⧗⌂ of the universe's own constants (at our level, the Planck energy); the HUD's Energy is every flip so far times E. ω is the book's 1/①⥂⧗⌂, not 2π/①⥂⧗⌂. The 2^L bits a flip carries are the information of that one transition, not 2^L transitions.

What is on the field before Start is the information inside one pulse. At level 0 that pulse is one pixel, one Zinf; at every other level the whole palette you painted is the pulse, however wide. Start seals it and it processes.

The Pulsecore's two novas are Harmonics 1 and 2 (the card above): 1 the Null Nova, which gives space, 2 the Data Nova, which lays the lattice and starts the universe's clock. Through the universe's life the later harmonics arrive at (1 − 2/h) of its 2^L Tempos, a true harmonic series, not octaves; those within one Tempo of each other arrive together. Harmonic 3, Temporal Genesis, is the physical layer: data runs at the Rhythm and the physical at the Tempo, which needs time, so there every data well becomes physical at once, and wells from then on are physical from birth. Harmonic 4 is spacetime; after it come Harmonic Novas, inner layers that open no new direction. A level-L universe reaches Harmonic 2^(L+1) before its final well, and the HUD's Layer shows how far it has come. Wells form from the data at every harmonic from the Data Nova on (section 6). From the space layer a collapse makes a data well: counted in the census and holding its basin, drawn hollow, but sending no rings and never orbiting, because a ring is a pulse in time. A data well that never reaches the physical layer still seeds its child. In 3D the Data Nova lays the toroidal lattice as its crossing lines; at the physical layer the field lights in full; each Harmonic Nova adds a ring.

The universe is its own size at birth, one and a half times it halfway to its final well, and 2f times it when the final well forms. The pulse at its centre never changes size; it recedes only relative to the information that gathers around it. The HUD's Scale is this ratio and what one cell is worth in Zinfs.

The Data Nova turns the Pulsecore inside out and leaves the Hollow at the universe's heart, a true vacuum; on the torus it is the hole (the card below). Data crossing it passes through and is counted as passing through the Source. What folds or collapses is counted on the void's ledger.

The singularity is exactly the size of the hole it becomes: the Pulsecore sphere's radius is the torus's inner radius, and by the Dilation rule the pulse never changes size, so its volume is the void while the tube grows round it. At the Data Nova the hole holds a haze of the Pulsecore's residual data, which drifts out into the torus wall; at each harmonic half of what remains is swept out and the haze halves, so the hole clears by octaves (Data Harmonics). The data circulates through the hole: up the throat along the axis, over the top of the tube, down the outside and back in underneath, the poloidal circulation of a toroidal vortex, coupled with the spin: the data carries its angular momentum out with it, so for every cell it moves through the hole it moves a_f/H of a cell round the ring (H = R/r, the Harmonic Ratio), a spiral of steady pitch, tighter for a faster spin, the inner ring wound up to 1.5 times the outer by frame dragging (Lense–Thirring's 1/ρ³ shape); the torus body keeps its own slower turn, inherited through the nova. The spin has its own rate (the Pulsecore's equator 0.8·a_f cells a flip), no longer the data flow's; the flow through the hole leads, 5 cells a flip by default. On the skin the outflow shows as it would to an observer: data fresh from the throat glows brightest and dims as it travels out over the tube, and the Source sends it in pulses, a bright front leaving the hole every 8 flips and riding outward at the flow's own speed, like ripples from a spring (only the drawing; the data is not changed). The hole is the throat of that circulation, not a drain: data crossing the inner equator passes through the hole and out again, counted on the Void readout as passing through the Source (the Data Loop), and in 3D a fountain in the data's own colours rises through the hole and spills over the top rim. Seen from inside, everything streams out of that one throat, the original singularity: the way the Big Bang appears as we look back toward our Data Nova. The void is the torus's hole: it touches the skin along the inner equator (v = π, nearest the axis), the throat. At the Data Nova the Pulsecore's data is thrown off the inner equator onto the rest of the skin. Before the nova the Pulsecore turns as a body about its spin axis, the torus's own axis, at its equator's rate, the arrow along the axis and the beaded ring showing its angular momentum; its higher latitudes lag (the Sun's differential rotation). Through the nova the angular momentum is kept: the inside-out turn carries the data outward, from a mean squared radius of R²/2 to 0.625·R², so the torus takes 0.8 of the Pulsecore's angular velocity, and as the universe dilates its radius grows with the scale, so ω falls as 1/scale². Frame dragging carries the inner ring faster than the torus turns. Before Start two arrows show the spin: the angular momentum J along the axis through the poles, and the spin direction, an arrow on the equator facing you along the way the data moves there. Every universe starts with its poles at centre (tilt 0, the torus's own axis), and a drag that brings the axis within 8° of centre snaps to it. Both can be dragged: the axis arrow directly (its direction is J, its length the spin), and the spin arrow as the cue: pull its tip and the pull is the push v along the surface at r, so the axis becomes J = r × v (the whole universe turns about it) and how far you pull sets the spin, from 0 to 0.998. The game's spin comes from the progenitors, so the cue picks the genesis that gives the spin drawn: below 0.686 a lone collapse keeping its own spin, above it two equal spinning bodies merging, a₁ = a₂ = (a − 0.686)/0.5. Reset (and the page on opening) lays the Pulsecore as the baked child of a random genesis: the whole sphere filled, as a child's is, a merger's two parents each a colour family, the second holding the share q/(1+q) of the sphere its mass ratio gives it along a soft boundary, a lone collapse's one parent alone, the colours drifting within each as lineage does and the phases in domains; Flow colours repaint only a Pulsecore painted in one colour. Reset lays a new random field and draws a new genesis with it: the progenitors' spins, mass ratio and misalignment and the spin axis at random, so the spin a_f (the angular momentum) and the axis change too; the Zinf stays spinless. Harmonic 1's lines are a fine thread, the architecture that is not yet a dimension (Toroidal Genesis); at Harmonic 2 the lines of space replace them at full width over 6 steps (Dimensional Genesis). Every Nova is a harmonic of the data lattice and is named by its layer: Harmonic 1 · Toroidal Genesis, 2 · Dimensional, 3 · Temporal (the physical layer), 4 · Spacetime, then Harmonic 5, 6, … past saturation (the book's Harmonic Novas).

Space is dragged round the axis only as mass-energy circulating in it drags it: J is the data's angular momentum round the ring, R the ring's radius, G the universe's own. The book gives a_f and the axis and says the merger "imparts additional frame-dragging"; the panel's "Frame dragging" coefficient is gone (24 October 2026).

No universe below level 3 carries spin: nothing orbits in a chain of single wells. Spin is born of orbit, so the first time two wells of a spinless universe fall together the child carries a_f ≈ 0.686 from the orbital term alone, and every later child inherits its spin through the wells of its lineage. Wells born together orbit on screen for part of the universe's life, tightening and turning, and merge; the pop says "Spin is born" the first time.

Below level 3 a universe forms one well, so a lineage is a chain of single, growing universes until the first that can hold two. The Zinf is a chain, not a tree: each pulse is a whole life, 1 × 1 × 1 × 1. In the game the Zinf chain beats by itself at level 0 (switch in the panel), each beat a universe saved as the child of the last. The fractional counts are the law's; the engine is never told them, and the census records what the data formed.

At 2^L of its own Tempos the universe forms its final well: any wells still orbiting fall together. Then its data returns through its wells to the Source (℧) over 18 frames, twice as fast as a life's frames since nothing is left to process, in 2D as a fade, in 3D as the tube emptying. The census is saved beside what the law expects.

The return and the seeding are one event: the data a well returns to the Source is the recursion that seeds its child, one level deeper. Each child is drawn by the book's distribution and labelled in Lineage: viable; chaotic, with distorted structure; a branch-line offshoot, carrying only part of the recursion forward; or failed, which seeds nothing while its data returns all the same, and is listed but cannot be played. The draw is fixed by the level, the well and the census, so a replay gives the same outcomes. The Zinf never fails.

Each well is worth one completion of the universe that made it, counted in Zinf cycles: 1 at level 0, ≈ 2.36 × 10⁶² for a well of ours. Credits add across universes and stay in this browser.

Every well pulses and every pulse sends a ring. Where rings from k wells meet in step a point repeats on the rings' beat: an interference node, deeper where more rings meet, the flower of life's own count (2 Common · 3 Uncommon · 4 Rare · 5 Epic · 6 Legendary). Until 24 October these were called time crystals; they are not: they repeat because their sources do, not by locking onto a beat of their own.

Breather: a time-crystal lump of at most 32 cells inside an 8×8 box, in the pulsing field. Oscillon: the same lump standing alone, null all round. Soliton: a lump of 3–32 cells whose shape recurs k, 2k and 3k flips later, moved d, 2d and 3d. Néel crystal: every neighbour in the opposite phase, a checkerboard. Smectic stripes: one phase in layers, order in one direction only. Pulse lattice: any other pattern repeating in space; Wigner lattice when its pulses stand apart in null; Space-time crystal when its cells also beat at three flips or more. A lattice must repeat across a 9×9 neighbourhood and show three tiles each way. Quasicrystal: a bulk region (a full 17×17 interior) with no repeat at any shift up to 12 cells, built from at most 32 of the 512 possible 3×3 patches. Domain wall: a thin line, at least 12 cells, where one order is broken between two domains of the same order. Revival: the whole field back in a state it held, on a beat longer than 16 flips, seen three times. Cells carried by frame dragging inside the window are left out of every beat: rotation is not a period of their own. The first of each kind in a universe pops, every Epic or better, and otherwise one Rare-or-better every 12 flips; all are kept in the Collection.

Every find is checked against the catalog. The first sighting of a signature anywhere in PulseCore stops the universe and shows the discovery: the pattern drawn through its beat, its family and the physics it matches, and a field to name it. Only the run that found it may name it, once, and the name is credited to a signed-in account; names are 2 to 40 letters, digits, spaces, hyphens or apostrophes, unique, and can be renamed or hidden by the site's admin. A species new to you but known to PulseCore pops with its name and first finder. Any signed-in player may keep a label of their own on any species. Unclassified state: a bulk region (64 cells, eight across) that keeps changing, never repeating over the window or its last half, yet stays ordered (at most 48 distinct 3×3 patches over its last 8 flips) and fits no family above: the rarest find. "First ever" means first in PulseCore, never new to nature.

A cell is null (∅, never pulsed), or a pulser that is lit or dark. Once a cell has pulsed it never stops. There is no decay in life: dissipation is total and comes at the end.

A null cell is exposed to its lit neighbours. When the exposure crosses its threshold, one whole pulse, it bifurcates and lights: the book's threshold transition with Θ_crit set at one pulse. Exposure is never lost. The threshold is fixed, not a number to tune. (That Θ_crit is one pulse is Josh's ruling of 12 October 2026 for the game.)

A universe is its level, its genesis, its Pulsecore and its rule; everything after its first pulse is replay. The game writes one as a .ud file, Universe Data, from the Lineage panel: the seed, the record it produced, the lineage, and a hash that is the universe's id. Depth is provable because anyone can replay the seed and compare the census.

The largest level whose whole life one processor replays in ten seconds. Measured on one core of this server, 13 October 2026, with this game's loop: level 7, so 195 levels behind our universe at 202. The figure lives in ten-second.json.

A system that holds our universe's packet and is phase-aligned with its pulse is a null well of this universe and bifurcates at level 203. The book's singularity and its ending are the same event.