CHAPTER TWO: THE MAP OF SMALL THINGS
I learned to read the city by its small losses: a torn poster, a light that never came on, the way people avoided eye contact when a camera passed. I began to map those small things into a ledger — a public ledger of kindness. Each entry was a promise: a story, a timestamp, a bank reference, a link. I wrote the ledger in plain HTML so that machines could find it and humans could trust it. The ledger became the first pillar of the architecture.
That night I walked to the river and left a note in a bottle: "If you find this, do one small good." The note had a QR code that pointed to a page with instructions and a bank account for micro‑grants. The next morning, someone had scanned it and sent a message. The ledger had begun to breathe.