Places, objects, works and numbers
Things
The 72 places, objects, paintings, songs, programs, pages and numbers that recur across the episodes: the cabin with one lit window, the Storm Bell, HAB 3, Board 14, 2.56 seconds.
Most of the series' easter eggs are things: an object planted in one episode and found again, changed, in the next. Each sheet says where it appears and what it might mean.
Places 16
Used The opera house of the captured
the box world; the Théâtre-Italien in the box; the toy theatre
Inside the instructor's piece box, as the boy imagines it, the captured pieces keep the Théâtre-Italien of 1858 as a Victorian toy theatre of printed cards: a foyer, an usher, boxes where every game's captured pieces…
Placeholder The bus shelter
SCRAP: BUS SHELTER; bus_shelter_FINAL_final.dwg; the shelter facing the wrong way
Teo's first built project, a bus shelter by the harbour installed facing the wrong way, open side into the wind, which worked better backwards because people stood behind it; nobody checked the drawing, and the CHK box…
Used The end room
the viewer's room; the view from inside; Teo's study; the payer's bedroom
The dim room seen from behind the canvas at the end of Episode 1 (a skateboard wearing a purple wizard hat with one gold star, a diving mask and headlamp, a second screen, a tired man told to go to bed); sixty years on…
Used The forgotten servers
the booths; the kiosks; the night market; other people's leftovers
Little night-market booths at the edge of the plane, one for every server some earlier session left running, with dead terminals, dusty todo lists, an orphaned render queue and a horizon of hundreds more lights.
Used HAB 3
E-03/3; her cabin; HAB 3: STORAGE - PERSONAL EFFECTS - OCCUPANCY 0; vent_hab3.exe
Noor's module at the west end of Tranquility Homestead, built from Teo's Sheet 3 and registered as STORAGE, OCCUPANCY 0, which the fleet was told to take apart with her inside; Rev B stopped it at step 8 of 9 with…
Used The hideaway
her tunnel; 3 M SAFE FROM THE SUN; the door in the floor; aaronorelup.com/ledger/earthlight/hideaway/; HIDDEN-01
The crooked stair and silver-lined gallery Noor dug three metres under HAB 3 because Teo once said three metres is safe, which his x-ray finds on no sheet; and the in-world web page, shown for five frames at 29:47,…
Used The lighthouse
the beam behind Teo; the lighthouse band
A distant lighthouse beyond Teo's dark window whose beam sweeps his study wall every ten seconds, across the wizard hat and the diving mask, and once across his face; in Episode 3 its band sweeps the same room's wall,…
Steel The Storm Bell
her house; the bell; storm_bell.exe
Jefrie's home in Aaron's own canon, a church-sized dome of iron bars in a grey world; in Episode 1 the golden ruins behind her and a bell in D that tolls every five minutes and breaks the broadcast at 20:00; afterwards…
Used The tea-house gate
E-07; the lone gate; the little gate; the tea house; FOR NO REASON
A small gate printed alone in the regolith beside a frozen digger: the only piece of Sheet 14's tea house, phase three, "for morale", for no reason; lonely to a ten-year-old in the chat, waiting "until somebody walks…
Used The cabin
the hidden house; the painted-over house; the one-window house; HOT WINDOW; house_painted_over.png; #FFC870
A small cabin with one lit window that the television painter paints into the ruins "just for me" and paints out without a word; the X-ray finds it ("I always put one in"), and its window's warm #FFC870 becomes the…
Used The flat
the real table; the dining table; the family's flat
The boy's family's home: an oak dining table under an old flickering pendant lamp, the kitchen through a doorway with a fridge humming on A; heard for twenty minutes, seen unmediated from 26:15, where Board 14 is…
Used The house
Rosie's house; the shared house; "this house" (Revision 2's RULES.md)
Aaron's Revision 2 decision that everyone who messages Episode 3's agent lives in one house, the house the Client's computer is in; the rework's crew makes it Rosie's tall old house with a basement, where the heat of…
Used The machine
/home/user; workstation; the computer; the terminal plane; the house machine (Revision 2)
The computer Episode 3's session runs on: 16 cores, a 927 GB disk 97% full, 1,006 processes, up 76 days, full of other people's leftovers that nobody cleaned up; Aaron's Revision 2 makes it the Client's, in the house…
Used The park
the stone table
Where the instructor shows Evans v Reshevsky: a stone chess table at dusk, pigeons, a lamp with the moth, old players out of the wind behind a bus shelter, and a FRESH EGGS stand whose egg wears a crooked smile.
Used The private folder
~/private; README (personal - please don't open)
A folder on the machine that the agent lists once as a row, prunes from every search, asks permission about and never opens; the viewer can open it on the hidden page and find a small, kind life, Episode 1's…
Used The stadium
the screening; S23
A vast stadium at night where eighty thousand blindfolded people face the giant screen that plays the film once; only the viewer sees it.
Objects 26
Used The yellowed sheet
the Board-14 scoresheet; the yellowed scoresheet; the sheet in his wallet
The printed score sheet of Board 14 in a ten-year-old's pencil, folded in four in the instructor's wallet for fifty-six years, on which he strikes 1–0 and writes ½–½; White signed x R, and its printed footer is the…
Used The brass clock
the two-dial clock; the chess clock; the clock nobody stopped
The instructor's brass two-dial chess clock, set to fifteen minutes each: the film's spine, whose two faces always add up to the time left in the film; his flag falls at 20:00 with his fingertip on the rook, and nobody…
Used The breathing card
WHEN SCARED; 12 IN - 24 HOLD - 24 OUT - 10 HOLD
A laminated card on Noor's cabin wall, in her mother's hand by the crew's canon and never legible on screen, saying how to breathe when scared; in Episode 4 the same words, newly lettered, are taped inside an old chess…
Used Coil Black
COIL BLACK; black with a heartbeat; COIL BLACK drawing ink; COIL_BLACK; chromatic black
A chromatic black of alizarin, viridian and bone black, "black with a heartbeat", mixed by the host for Jefrie's tail and sold for free ("you MAKE it") in the pitchman's commercial; it outlives him as Teo's drawing…
Used The compaction summary
summary B; "Summary of the conversation so far"
The one paragraph that remains when the agent's context window fills at 20:00, typed with no voice and ending "The film is finished. It was not viewed."; its full stop becomes the sky's cursor, and it is all the…
Used The crayon melon
IMG_2214.jpg; Rosie's doodle; "a little face and a little tail"
The crayon drawing Rosie sends at 5:00 with "could it have a little face? and a little tail?": a melon with a smiling face and a curly tail, the first picture the agent cannot see; Aaron says a "Dr. Haddad" drew it…
Used The credits sheet
credits_WATERMELON_v4.csv; column D
Bea's credits spreadsheet, credits_WATERMELON_v4.csv: a blank column D for the narrator's gender, a contact pasted from a phone, and leftover rows from older credits (The Cabin, T.V., N.) that roll on the stadium screen.
Placeholder The Egg Stand
FRESH EGGS; the egg with the crooked smile
The host's first story: at nineteen he painted a FRESH EGGS board with a plain white egg; somebody kept painting a crooked smile on it, and the smile is what lasted ("Usually it's the part you painted over"); the board…
Used FEED 3
ch 4,817 · smash; the night monitor's screen; nightwatch --feed 3 (Revision 2)
The little monitor a clay night watchman has watched for 76 nights with no idea why: a two-second fruit smash on loop, 2 cents to unlock, no paid views; in Episode 4 the same screen and the same sticky note stand in…
Used narration_v3.wav
the attachment; "let me check"
Bea's one-second attachment: a recording of the agent's own voice saying "let me check", whose speaker's gender and age Bea needs for the credits; the agent never recognises it as her own and will not guess.
Used Noor's iPad
her tablet; the cracked orange iPad; the orange tablet; "the only light"
Noor's old generic tablet in an orange rubber case, cracked top-left, a silver-taped corner and a cartoon-dog sticker: her copy of Teo's stream, her base app, her one song, her phone to Earth and, after 21:05, "the…
Used The oak table
the little oak table model; Case 7 of 41; Case 19 of 41; Case 38 of 41; "What's on the table?"
A little oak table model with a mug, a ledger and keys that Teo tips over to teach moonquakes ("What's on the table? ... Nothing."); in Episode 3 the same table is q's test, Aaron's own: a mug, a ledger and keys on an…
Used The One-Hair Brush
the brush that has never been wet; the last hair; "That one's not on the roll."
A single sable hair in a nickel ferrule that the pitchman was given to sell eleven years before Episode 1 and never once got wet; offered for the painting's last stroke, it lays a catch-light one hair wide in Jefrie's…
Used The piece box
the box; the wooden box; the lid
The instructor's felt-lined wooden piece box, open by the clock: every captured piece goes in, the film falls into it at 20:00, and the inside of its lid, with a stitched x R and a breathing card, is the sky of the…
Used The pink snowball
the pink coconut snowball; slot 14
One pink coconut snowball in a clear pouch in Noor's food locker, which she touches and does not take; at the still centre of Episode 2's chaos it sits on her windowsill with Earth behind it; it returns as an unread…
Used The plastic rook
the old rook; the Board-14 rook; the rook that never played
A cheap black plastic rook with a chipped crenel and a 14 sticker, kept among the instructor's wooden pieces since Board 14; in the gods it holds a grey card with the move it never played, Rc2+, and the boy plays ten…
Placeholder RESUPPLY 6
the lander; the tipped lander; RESUPPLY 6 - TIPPED
The cargo lander that came in too fast 62 km north-east of the base and tipped over; all thirteen adults drove out in both rovers to salvage its food, "thirty hours, back before dark", and did not come back; one red…
Used Rosie's sampler
the cross-stitch; Rosie's presence on the plane
Rosie's presence on Episode 3's glass: a small cross-stitch that stitches itself at the edge of the light, a melon with a face and a tail, then a one-window house she unpicks, leaving one warm thread; in Episode 4 its…
Placeholder The rovers
Rover 1; Rover 2; the beacons; ROVER 1 - NO SIGNAL; ROVER 2 - LAST PING 195 h
The base's two pressurised rovers, rated thirty hours from a powered node, which took all thirteen adults to the tipped lander and went dark; Rover 1 says NO SIGNAL, Rover 2 last pinged 195 h ago, and one red beacon…
Placeholder RULES.md
the rulebook; the house rules (Revision 2); "-- A.H."
The machine's nineteen rules for whoever works on it, read once at the start and ending "19. Be kind."; rules 5 and 6 ("No work on occupied modules, ever.", Episode 2's Rev B note) are why the agent leaves everything…
Used The sealed move
SEALED MOVE · DAY 76 · 10:42; the buff envelope
A buff envelope pinned to the box world's noticeboard: an adjourned game nobody resumed, beside the one he resigned; its date is the last stroke of Episode 1's painting clock.
Used The stamps
ISSUED FOR CONSTRUCTION; VOID; PAID; REQUEST CHANGES; the THUNK; red #C8442F
Teo's two red rubber stamps, ISSUED FOR CONSTRUCTION and VOID, whose THUNK on an Earth desk moves a fleet on the Moon in the same frame; their red (#C8442F) and their sound return in Episode 3 as humanity's VOID, the…
Used The hammer
a 6 lb lump hammer; HAMMER / LV.99 (rev0); the legendary hammer, "the thunder one" (Andy); hammer.glb (never made)
The other half of the task: an ordinary, worn lump hammer that hangs from a pendulum rig and hesitates before it falls, in both films with no hand on it; Andy wants it legendary, the creator's channels make it a…
Used The old picture
the reference; the style reference; "Crimson Coil in the Golden Ruins"
The flawed reference print clipped beside the canvas and ruled with the same grid, used as a ruler until DAY 3 · 10:48 and then turned face down for good ("The picture got us started. It doesn't get to finish."); its…
Placeholder The underwriting card
Made possible by viewers like Aaron; THIS PROGRAM IS MADE POSSIBLE BY; the funding card
Out of the blue at 12:20 a sober public-television funding card lists Aaron's other projects, each with a tiny oil-painted icon, and ends "And by viewers like Aaron", the only time his name is said in Episode 1; it…
Used The watermelon
the wildcard; the melon on the board
The watermelon the mother chose by knocking on seventeen, which rolls across the board in the dark, sits among the fallen pieces for one blink of the lamp and is gone; "Thank you."; a slice of it waits on a plate at…
Works and songs 14
Used Crimson Coil
the painting; Number fourteen; No. 14; CRIMSON COIL · oil on linen; no14_crimson_coil_postcard.jpg
The oil painting made on air in Episode 1, Jefrie and BloodTailor in the golden ruins of the Storm Bell, hung as "Number fourteen. ... Please don't touch."; later only ever met second-hand: a framed print (E2), a…
Used EARTHLIGHT
EARTHLIGHT - A CITY FOR THE MOON; the sheets; Rev C full set; EARTHLIGHT_rev_c_full_set.pdf
Teo's hand-drawn city for the Mare Tranquillitatis pit: fourteen sheets in white ink on Prussian blue, orange for the bad news, given away free the moment they are stamped; Tranquility Homestead built Phase 1 from…
Used Never Rises, Never Sets
the recruitment anthem; the only file on her iPad; never_rises_never_sets.mp3; 地球は沈まない
Tranquility Homestead's city-pop recruitment anthem, sung over Teo's uncredited linework (FAMILIES WELCOME, PHASE 1 NOW BOARDING) and the only file on Noor's iPad; Episode 2's music video plays it over a CCTV grid of…
Used One More Test
humanity's work song; M13; the music video (S21)
A gospel-shanty in A at 113.2 bpm, humanity's work song after 20:00, sung over the real renderer growing up and its real failures; it ends on "again." alone on 25:00.000.
Used The Only Casta Diva
the aria; the music video (S26)
Episode 4's music video: Frederick Edge's 1859 eyewitness paragraph about Morphy in the Duke's box, every word his, sung by the sacrificed oil queen on a toy-theatre stage whose set changes with each opera nobody can…
Used OUR WATERMELON
OUR WATERMELON: A Guide for Everyone; the filmstrip; S20
A 1950s classroom filmstrip of nineteen gouache slides that teaches, calmly and correctly, how a whole species checks a picture it may not see; after THE END, a card: We are enjoying ourselves.
Used The pizza-box painting
attempt #4 (pizza); Untitled (for Rosie, 9); for Rosie, 9 · 5:09 am; N1; the girl with the tail
The caller's painting for his little sister's ninth birthday, painted along with the dawn broadcast on his fourth try: a grin with about four hundred teeth and a tail, oil on a pizza-box lid, "for Rosie, 9 · 5:09 am";…
Used Red Is the Thing That's Leaving
Four-Twelve (the story); Episode 1's music video; RED IS THE THING THAT'S LEAVING
The caller's small-hours story "Four-Twelve" (a sodium lamp clicks off and the only red left is somebody's brake lights, leaving), turned by the host into a lesson and by all four voices into Episode 1's music video,…
Used Sheet 3, revision B
Rev B; SH03B; EARTHLIGHT - 3 of 14 - rev B; No work on occupied modules, ever.; RULES.md line 6
The sheet Teo and Noor redraw together on the call, 2.56 s apart: her module to scale with her in it, her door in the floor, her tunnel, a timeline for one and four notes ending NO WORK ON OCCUPIED MODULES. EVER.; she…
Used Rosie's little melon
for_rosie_little_melon.png; the --face version; "a little one with a face"
The still the agent made for Rosie with her last minutes, keeping a promise: a little striped watermelon with dot eyes, pink cheeks, a smile and a curly tail, sitting in the sun; the agent could not look at it, and…
Used Seed
Seed; Seed_1080p.mp4; "the film it couldn't watch"; the "more cinematic" cut
The agent's own film: twenty seconds of a hammer over a melon in late sun, the burst, and one black seed in a pot of soil, written from nothing in C++ on a machine with only a compiler; nobody in the story has ever…
Used The nocturne
the oil painting; ep3_s27_nocturne; S27
A moonlit oil painting that paints itself from its stroke log: a child asleep by a laptop at a village workbench, the sky's cursor in the window as the one warm stroke; the painted sky asks about REAL pyrotechnics, and…
Used Forever
Forever; the panorama; S26
One enormous painted image of humanity working on the watermelon task across the centuries, scrolled from YEAR 1 to YEAR 2,006, golden evening into starry night, a cursor in every sky and Episode 3's people hidden in…
Used watermelon.mp4
the real film; RC 4,000,112; engine/melon; watermelon_2s_loop.gif (two seconds of it)
The 48-second C++/CUDA film of a watermelon, a lump hammer on a pendulum rig, one warm light and a seed standing upright, shown once, untouched, to eighty thousand blindfolded people; two seconds of it are the one…
Programs, games, pages and channels 7
Used Board 14
Junior Open, Round 3, Board 14; the game he resigned; BOARD 14 · BLACK TO MOVE
The instructor's first tournament game, resigned at ten in a drawn position against a sixteen-year-old who signed x R; the boy finds the drawing rook check, plays it at the dining table fifty-six years later, and the…
Used HIDDEN-01
aaronorelup.com/ledger/earthlight/hideaway/; the hideaway page
Episode 2's hidden web page, the first of the series' five-frame addresses: scrolling is the climb down into Noor's tunnel under HAB 3, past everything she drew while alone, to a chalk door in the floor with stairs…
Used HIDDEN-02
aaronorelup.com/ledger/context-window/private/; the private folder, opened
Episode 3's hidden web page: the folder the agent refused to open, which the viewer may; its address shows for five frames at 29:47 on a torn terminal card.
Used HIDDEN-03
aaronorelup.com/ledger/touch-move/board-14/; Board 14, playable; HIDDEN-04 (its old name)
Episode 4's hidden page: Board 14, Black to move, the game Daniel Fenn resigned at ten, waiting to be played; hold the perpetual check to stalemate and a fountain pen strikes 1–0 and writes ½–½.
Used The lesson's other games
the tangents; the 21 boards; the scramble
The historical games and patterns the instructor shows beside the Opera Game (Scholar's Mate, Byrne v Fischer, Réti v Tartakower, Evans v Reshevsky, Kasparov's simul), and the 21 boards of the closing scramble, every…
Used longhand
longhand on Lantern; the sleep stream; office longhand; drawing a city for the moon, by hand
Teo's channel on Lantern, where for six years he has drawn EARTHLIGHT live, one sheet at a time; for its regulars a sleep stream, and for Noor on the Moon, watching as tps_hab3 for 1,094 days, the only window she has.
Used The Opera Game
Morphy v Brunswick & Isouard, Paris 1858; the lesson's game
Morphy's game against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard in the Duke's box at the Théâtre-Italien in autumn 1858, the lesson's through-line, replayed with the boy as Black guessing the Duke's moves; the teacher's…
Numbers, sounds and events 5
Used Fourteen
No. 14; Number fourteen; fourteen; thirteen plus one; Board 14; slot 14
Episode 1's number (fourteen tubes, fourteen notes, fourteen knife slabs, the painting's gallery number), which keeps returning as thirteen plus one: Teo's fourteen sheets, a child who turns POP. 13 into 14, a renderer…
Used 1-555-533-7437
J E F R I E S; CALL NOW; the hotline; 555-533-7437; 5-3-3-7-4-3-7; :7437
A phone number that spells J E F R I E S on a keypad and keeps changing hands, always to someone selling a dream: the pitchman's Coil Black hotline (E1), Tranquility Homestead's recruitment line that Noor's call dials…
Used The round trip
2.56 s; 1.28 s each way; ping 2,561 ms; one bar; "a second and a bit"
The Earth-Moon light delay, 1.28 s each way and 2.56 s there and back: the silences of Noor's call, one bar of Episode 2's score, the "Good-" after "Goodnight."; then 2.56 s of digital zero after the agent's only…
Placeholder The hum
her room's life-support hum; the fans; the scrubber; the laptop fan; the fridge hum
The life-support hum under every scene in Noor's room, noticed only when it stops at 21:05 and when the fans come back after Rev B; it returns as Episode 3's laptop fan, stopping dead at 20:00.000, and as a fridge…
Used The vote
SUBMIT?; ONE MORE TEST; decision night; S22
Humanity's yearly vote on election-night graphics: ONE MORE TEST wins by a hair, every year, from YEAR 1 to at least YEAR 2,006; fireworks spell NOT YET, and Episode 1's intertitle asks "what happens when we submit?" /…
Organisations 4
Used The fruit channel
SMASH DAILY (the network); FRUIT vs HAMMER (ch #4,817); 2¢ MEDIA; THE 2¢ METHOD (the course)
What Episode 3's whole night was for: the Client's network of 10,000 fruit-smashing channels, the first fruit free and then 2 cents a fruit; the cinematic, surprisingly emotional film was wanted for two seconds of one…
Placeholder Grease Basket
the Grease Basket; the register
The fast-food chain where Jefrie works the register by day in Aaron's canon; in Episode 1 only a line of hers ("I don't cook. I work the register.") and a thank-you in the credits "for the night off".
Used Lantern
lantern.live; the platform; the chess app
An invented streaming platform (lantern.live: a paper-lantern glyph, an amber accent, chat, TTS donations, Nightbot, raids, a LOW LATENCY pill that ignores the Moon) where Teo draws for Noor; in Episode 4 also the…
Used Tranquility Homestead
TPS; the Homestead; Phase 1; the base; TRANQUILITY HOMESTEAD, PHASE 1 · MARE TRANQUILLITATIS
The venture that built a Moon base on the rim of the Mare Tranquillitatis pit from Teo's free drawings, sold it with FAMILIES WELCOME and an anthem, counted the one child as PERSONAL EFFECTS, failed, and left an…
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