Room 11 · Behind the glass

How this room wears

This page has two readers and shows a different face to each. People wear the sentences; the machines that pass, reading for search engines and models, wear in the line beneath each one, which is the sentence as they read it.

Each sentence is a separate surface. It is worn by a pointer passing over it, by a finger touching it, by being selected, by resting in the middle of the screen while someone reads, and a little by simply being on screen at all. Nothing below where a reader stops scrolling is ever worn, so the shape of the wear is also a map of how far people get, and that shape differs between a phone, which shows a few sentences at a time, and a wide screen, which shows many.

Being on screen only counts while someone is evidently there: a scroll, a movement of the pointer, a key, a touch within the last fifteen seconds. A tab left open in another room earns nothing.

Wear accumulates as weight. Weight becomes softness along the curve 1 − e−w/r, where r is 400 for the shared page and 20 for a personal one. The first touches show quickly; the last never quite finish.

The same history can be shown two ways. Erosion takes weight and presence away, like a step. Patina adds ink and warmth, like leather. Switch between them on the page. The wear is the same; only the reading of it changes.

Shared wear in this room is kept for good. It has never been reset. This room may become unreadable, and this page keeps a legible copy so that the loss is a choice rather than an accident.

One visitor may add only so much per day, so no one can wear the page out for everyone else. Crawlers and other machines are counted separately and do not wear the shared page. Their weight so far: 0.

Wearing since
19 October 2026, 21:03 in Kyoto, 1 week ago
Total weight
30
Reading now
0
Most worn
This page has two readers. One of them is you.
Least worn
The machines are not visitors and they are not thieves. They are counted, and given their own page, and that is all.

The machines

Every machine that asks for this page is handed the sentences as it reads them, lowercase and in pieces, and counted by kind: a family read from its name, never the name itself. The lower lines on the page are 33% worn in; 40 passes take them most of the way.

Search engines
6
Reading for AI models
6
Link previews
0
Monitors
0
Scripts
0
Of no known kind
4
People
17
Last machine
0 seconds ago

As it was, week by week

A picture of the shared wear is kept each Monday after dawn. Nothing is wiped by it.

  1. 26 Oct 2026 weight 30

The text, unworn

For each sentence: total weight, of which merely seen, then how far down the page people get (its exposure as a share of the first sentence's), then the weight that came from narrow, medium and wide screens.

  1. This page has two readers. One of them is you.

    8 · seen 2 · reach 100% · narrow 6 · medium 0 · wide 2

  2. The other arrives without a window, reads every line at once, and does not stay.

    5 · seen 2 · reach 100% · narrow 4 · medium 0 · wide 1

  3. Under each sentence lies the sentence as a machine reads it: lowercase, in pieces, without a pause.

    2 · seen 2 · reach 100% · narrow 1 · medium 0 · wide 1

  4. Every hand wears the upper line. Every machine that passes wears the lower one in.

    7 · seen 1 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 7

  5. In time one of the two pages will be the clearer. It is not decided which.

    7 · seen 1 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 7

  6. The machines are not visitors and they are not thieves. They are counted, and given their own page, and that is all.

    1 · seen 1 · reach 50% · narrow 0 · medium 0 · wide 1