State
A machine's behaviour is not on a timer — it is a function of the block. Which means it can be handed a block that has not happened yet. Both keypads below do exactly that: they push a chain state into the real engine and let it react.
Acts
The block hash picks the act; the sat salts the choice, so two machines on the same block are almost never doing the same thing. Press one and watch three of them take it at once — they will not be in step, and that is the point.
Moments
These are rare and none of them can be scheduled. When they land, every machine in the collection is in it at the same second, because they are all reading the same chain. Waiting for a real one takes anywhere from ten minutes to four years.
The room
Behind every machine is a field of maths. The owner's address sets its colour; the block hash, salted by the sat, picks which of twelve patterns runs and how hard. So the room is yours, and what moves through it is this block's.
PLASMA · MOIRE · XOR · TUNNEL · RAIN · WEAVE · SPIRAL · RIPPLE · GRID · CHEVRON · BURST · CELLS
The wall below is labelled with the room each machine is actually in right now — read back from the machine, not from a list. They will all change together on the next block.
There is air in there too: dust hangs in the screen's beam, lit only where the light reaches — and never on the glass, where a lone bright pixel would read as a dead one.
Cold boot
Open a piece and it powers on. A slit of light widens, floods white, warms into its own phosphor colour, then prints where its sat was born and where the chain is now — before the face arrives. It is the same two seconds every time it is loaded, which is the only part of the piece that is not up to the block.
The station
Nothing already inscribed can be changed, and that is the point of inscribing
it. But a machine can listen. One sat is held back as a broadcast socket: the engine asks
ord for the newest inscription on that sat, and if there is one, it reads it.
Inscribe a message on that sat and all 369 machines pick it up on their next poll. Stop broadcasting and they go back to normal, because "nothing there" is the default and not a failure. It has no key to anything, cannot change what a piece is, and cannot be pointed at anyone else's sat — the address is compiled into the engine.
The calendar
On five days a year the tube shows the day instead of a face. The date is read from the block's timestamp, never the browser clock — a local clock is spoofable, so an egg driven by one is a screenshot rather than an event.