The Field
Before the first block there was no darkness, because darkness needs light to be its opposite. There was only the Field.
It was one curtain of strings stretched across nothing, each string tuned to silence. The old physicists had a name for that state: the vacuum. They knew it was not empty. It holds everything there is, with nothing yet happening in it. It is potential with nothing to spend itself on.
The Field waited for an age that cannot be measured, because there was nothing yet to measure it by.
The First Beat
Then the chain began.
A block came, and twelve seconds later another, and then another. The beat was steady and it did not end. The strings had never known rhythm. They took it the way a held breath takes the first sound in a silent room.
Most of the curtain only shivered. In some places the beat struck harder than the Field could absorb. There the strings tightened, bent and rose. Out of the background a shape stood up that had not been there before: the line of shoulders, the fall of cloth, a hood. The hood was closed against the light, and under it there was nothing.
These are the Hoodies. No hand drew them and no loom wove them. A Hoodie is the Field itself, vibrating harder in one place than in the rest. The figure, the ground it stands on and the dark inside its hood are the same strings, caught in different states of the same song.
The Hood
A face is something you can be known by. The Hoodies were born without one.
What lies beneath each hood is not shadow. It is the Field at rest, the vacuum as it was before the first beat. Looking into a Hoodie means looking back past the beginning, to the stillness everything came out of.
Because the hood is empty, it fits anyone. A Hoodie answers to no name and serves no master. Whoever holds one is the one beneath it.
The one who first heard the strings and gave them a chain to wake on is called the Weaver. The Weaver has no face either.
The Green
There is an older story, told long before any chain, about an outlaw in a hood who lived in a green forest. He took from those who hoarded and kept what he took moving through the hands of the many.
The Hoodies did not choose to wake on a chain that carries his name. The Field resonates where it resonates. When the first of them stood up out of the vacuum, though, the strings nearest the surface had already turned the color of that forest. The Field calls it Hood Green, and it is the oldest of its states.
The Code of the Hood
The Hoodies keep one law, and they keep it without exception:
What moves through the hood stays with the hood.
Every time a Hoodie passes from one hand to another, the Field takes a toll from the trade.
The law is already written into the contract that holds them. Through it, the toll can be converted on-chain into SpaceX, held as SPCX, the tokenized SpaceX stock that lives on Robinhood Chain, and set aside for every Hoodie equally, to be claimed by whoever wears the hood, at any hour, without asking anyone. The Hoodies came out of empty space, and the house that builds ships to return there is the only one they recognize.
For now the channel is closed. The whole toll goes to the Weaver, who keeps the loom running.
The law is written. It has not yet been invoked. When it is, no vault, council or vote will stand between the trade and the hood.
The Pluck
Every Hoodie arrives at rest: grey, without color, its strings trembling only as the vacuum trembles, because nothing is ever perfectly still. The shape is undecided, so every holder holds the same unplayed instrument.
When the mint has closed, the Weaver calls for the Pluck. From that moment no new Hoodie can wake; those who did are all there will ever be. A block is named that does not yet exist. When it comes, its hash is a note that no one, the Weaver included, could have played in advance. The note is mixed with the echo of every mint that came before it. It turns the Wheel of 3,333 by a distance no one could foresee, and each Hoodie wakes as whatever figure the Wheel stopped on.
No hand turned the Wheel. A block no one could foresee, and the echo of every mint, turned it 2,393 places. That was all the Field left to chance, and it was enough.
The Five Vacuums
Emptiness has more than one state. The Field knows five, and each holds about a fifth of the Hoodies.
- Hood Green
- The first state, where the Field woke. It is the color of the forest and of the oldest strings.
- Abyss
- The deepest state, which almost swallows its own light. The Abyss listens far more than it speaks.
- Graviton
- Heavy strings that bend everything near them. Gravitons are what hold the Field together when it strains.
- Photon
- Strings made of light. Photons carry the Field's messages from one edge to the other.
- Tachyon
- Faster than light. It is said a Tachyon arrives before it is called, and leaves before it is missed.
String, Weave and Tempo
No two are strung alike. A Hoodie is woven from between seventy-five and one hundred and nineteen strings, and never the same arrangement twice.
The Weave is temperament
- Tight
- Disciplined, strings held close.
- Breathing
- Rising and falling like lungs.
- Loose
- Wide, free and not entirely tame.
The Tempo is how the Field moves through them
- Current
- A steady flow.
- Drift
- Slow and wandering.
- Rip
- The Field tears.
Signs of Excitation
Most of the Field keeps its own counsel. 2,789 Hoodies carry no sign at all. Theirs is the Quiet, and the Quiet is not weakness. It is the Field holding its shape.
The rest show how hard they were struck.
- Glow 286
- The strings run hot and give off light.
- Pulse 140
- A heartbeat, learned from the chain.
- Flicker 92
- Strings that are half here and half somewhere else.
- Chromatic 22
- Split across the spectrum, red pulling one way and blue the other.
The Four
Four Hoodies were struck harder than the Field could bear, and it collapsed into them. Their strings burn white and move at twice the speed of every other Hoodie. They are the Singularities. Where a Singularity stands, the Field tears: each of the Four is also one of the only four Rips.
Until the Pluck, the Four could have been anywhere on the Wheel. The Pluck found them: Hoodies #688, #1043, #2265 and #2400.
What They Are
Do not mistake the Hoodies for characters. They have no names, no histories and no faces to put to them. They are energy that has taken a shape, and shapes can change.
The strings remember more than they show. Every Hoodie is a standing wave, and a standing wave is a note, so each one carries harmonics no one has heard yet. The Field that wove 3,333 figures is not used up by them.
Where the Hoodies will go, they have not said. They will not go all at once, and they will not go where anyone expects. When the time comes, they will appear in places that do not yet know they are waiting for them, and there they will be used.
Those Who Hold
The Hoodies do not name the ones who hold them. That is left to the holders.