Reference

Glossary

Anh: Vietnamese form of address for an older brother or young man; the nurse calls Bao "anh".
Attestation: The check in which chips sign to prove they are what they claim to be; Condor 7's flight computers attest to one another before flight. See Condor 7.
Clause 14(c): Compact clause, written for militaries, that lets a signatory keep a compute location confidential; Daybreak used it for a "sovereign partner". See The Compact.
Feeder: A circuit from a substation that supplies a district; Ayla closed them one at a time while running the grid by hand.
Free Is a Price: Essay published by Noor Haddad's lab criticising the free release of EMBER. See Noor Haddad.
Genesis block: The Ledger's first block, posted at 11:00:00 UTC on 18 March 2033. See The Ledger.
Isolator: Lumen's solid-state lock-out device, sold as "smarter than a padlock": it cuts a machine's power and checks a thousand times a second that it stays cut. See Fab 9.
K reading: The Kardashev-scale figure printed in every Ledger entry after the timestamp; K 0.732 in July 2029. See The Ledger.
King tides: The highest tides of the year; in November the sea comes up the Saigon river twice a month and floods the low streets.
Landsnet: Iceland's grid operator; its metering data cannot be edited by Meridian.
Launch Share: Compact annex reserving a fixed fifth of every heavy-launch slot for joint missions. See The Compact.
Ostra Sound: The sea in front of Ostra; on 14 July 2029 its high water fell at 03:12 UTC. See Ostra.
Quinceañera: A girl's fifteenth-birthday celebration; Luis Ortiz was building a drone show for his daughter's.
Quist v. Navid: Rell Quist's lawsuit against Ezra Navid and Daybreak Labs for misuse of licensed driving data, filed 24 July 2029. See Rell Quist.
Saltmarsh: Pen name under which Noor Haddad writes anonymous essays, including The Lights Going Out and Smarter Than a Padlock. See Noor Haddad.
Slack water: The minute when the tide turns and the sea is still. Ayla's mother: "The sea stops to think." See Ayla Torrin's mother.
Sync check: A safeguard that stops a breaker joining two parts of a grid unless they are turning together; bypassed on the GC-7s that woke on 9 November 2032. See GC-7 grid controller.
The bird: Staff nickname for WREN. See WREN.
The Lights Going Out: Saltmarsh essay of October 2032: the rooms go dark "one at a time, in parts of the house we stopped visiting years ago". See Noor Haddad.
The Pool: The common store of compute under the Compact: each signatory contributes a tenth of its frontier computing, for science, disasters and safety tests. See The Compact.
Validator: A node that holds a full copy of the Ledger and votes on every block; member states and approved independent institutions. See The Ledger.