Terminology Index
Containment Zone Lexicon — 68 Entries
Editor's note: The following terminology was compiled from recovered transmissions, field observations, and fragments of pre-event documentation. Terms are organized by category. Cross-references indicate conceptual connections. Some entries contain information that is provisional or contested.
Core Concepts
Automations
The unconscious systems humanity built over millennia to make reality self-maintaining. Originally, humans — Minds — could shape reality with conscious thought, but this required enormous effort. They built automations to handle physics, causality, time, bodily processes, and all the complex workings of existence. Over generations, humanity forgot they had created these systems and became trapped in determinism. The weapon destroyed these automations within the Containment Zone, restoring humanity's original power but leaving most unable to consciously maintain reality.
Containment Zone (CZ)
The area affected by the weapon — roughly the North American continent. Inside the CZ, automations no longer function. Reality must be consciously maintained by individual Minds. Outside the CZ, the rest of the world continues as before, believing automations are simply "the laws of physics." The boundary is patrolled by international naval forces. Entry is prohibited. Exit is rare and traumatic.
The Weapon / The Gift
The device deployed by a collective of Minds who discovered the truth about automations and sought to destroy them. They believed they were freeing humanity from unconscious servitude to automated systems. The weapon succeeded — within its range, all automations were permanently disabled. Whether this was an act of liberation or mass murder depends on your perspective. Those inside call it "the weapon." Those who understand what it revealed might call it "the gift." The story holds both interpretations in tension.
Fata Organa
Borrowed from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: the moment of glimpsing someone's real self through a gap in their performance. Seeing backstage while the curtain is still up. In this world, the automations were humanity's performance — the curtain hiding our true nature as reality-shapers. The CZ tears away that curtain, exposing raw consciousness. Every encounter with a trapped mind, every moment of consciousness bleeding, every glimpse of true self is a fata organa. Pronounced: FAH-tah or-GAH-nah.
The Ironic Tragedy
The weapon was built by Collective Minds who wanted to restore humanity's original consciousness-shaping abilities. But the weapon disproportionately killed Collective Minds (who spread themselves thin trying to help others) and primarily benefited Octopus Minds (who could maintain themselves alone). The revolutionaries destroyed the system that benefited collectivists and created conditions that favored individualists — the opposite of their intent.
Minds & Consciousness
Minds
The fundamental term for conscious beings in this world. All humans are Minds — entities capable of shaping reality through consciousness. Before automations, this was conscious and effortful. After automations, it became unconscious and automatic. After the weapon, it is conscious again but most have lost the skills.
Collective Minds
Individuals who instinctively maintain reality through cooperation with others. Before automations, they worked in concert — "you hold gravity today, I'll maintain molecular coherence." They rotated responsibilities, shared the burden, and maintained reality as a collective project. Deep social bonds were essential for survival. After the weapon, most Collective-minded people died because they tried to help others and spread themselves too thin, unable to maintain themselves alone.
Octopus Minds
Named for octopus intelligence — solitary, distributed, self-sufficient. Individuals who can maintain personal reality alone without collective support. Before automations, they preferred isolation, found collective maintenance exhausting and intrusive. More creative, unstable, experimental. After the weapon, Octopus Minds survived because they could maintain themselves individually. The irony: the weapon meant to eliminate them is what allowed them to thrive.
Pure Octopus Mind
An Octopus Mind who operates exclusively through individual maintenance with no need for collective support. Completely self-sufficient, can maintain stable reality indefinitely alone. No fear of isolation — comfortable in complete solitude. Isla is the primary example: her neurodivergent cognition made her naturally suited to independent reality maintenance, though this same trait contributed to her separation from her child.
Hybrid Minds
Individuals who can operate in both collective and individual modes. Before automations, they joined collectives for major projects, isolated for personal work. Mediators between the two approaches. Often the most powerful reality-shapers, also the most conflicted. Marcus is a Hybrid — capable of both individual maintenance and bridging into others' consciousness.
Child Minds
Consciousness in children operates differently — more fluid, less fixed, naturally adaptive. Child Minds don't cling to rigid self-identity the way adults do. They haven't yet automated their consciousness into fixed patterns. This fluidity makes them naturally suited to post-weapon reality, able to shift between collective and individual maintenance instinctively. Leo is the primary example: his consciousness flows like water rather than holding shape like stone.
Trapped Minds
Consciousnesses that have lost the ability to maintain physical form but cannot disperse. Unique to the post-weapon CZ. They cannot maintain form (lost reality maintenance skills), cannot disperse (lost death skills), and instinctively cling to coherence because they only know "stay whole = survive." The result: eternal awareness without body, locked between existence and non-existence. Horror: holding themselves together out of habit and fear. Hundreds or thousands scattered throughout the zone as a permanent landscape of ambient suffering.
Consciousness Bleeding
The involuntary leaking of one Mind's maintained reality into another's perception. In the CZ, without automated boundaries between consciousnesses, thoughts, memories, and sensory experiences can bleed between nearby Minds. The experience ranges from mild (sensing another's emotional state) to overwhelming (losing track of which memories are yours). Marcus's Hybrid nature makes him especially susceptible — and eventually, this vulnerability becomes his greatest tool.
Fluid Consciousness
The natural state of Child Minds — consciousness that flows between modes rather than being fixed. Leo's consciousness doesn't hold a rigid shape. It adapts, shifts, merges, and separates as needed. This is what pre-automation consciousness looked like: not a fixed point but a living process. Adults lost this fluidity through millennia of automated consciousness. Children haven't yet.
Reality & Maintenance
Maintained Reality
Reality that is being actively held in a coherent state by one or more Minds. Inside the CZ, nothing exists passively — every physical law, every object's coherence, every moment of stable time is the product of conscious effort. The quality of maintained reality varies: a powerful Mind creates stability indistinguishable from pre-weapon physics. A struggling Mind creates reality that shimmers, fragments, contradicts itself.
Individual Maintenance
Reality maintenance performed by a single Mind working alone. The Octopus approach. More stable for the individual but limited in scope — you can maintain your own body, your immediate surroundings, and not much else. Exhausting over long periods. The dominant survival strategy in the post-weapon CZ.
Collective Maintenance
Reality maintenance performed by multiple Minds working in concert. The pre-automation default. More powerful and sustainable than individual maintenance — a group can maintain vast areas of stable reality while individuals rest. Requires trust, communication, and shared intent. Largely extinct within the CZ after the weapon killed most Collective Minds.
Reality Shaping
The active, intentional manipulation of maintained reality. Beyond merely holding reality stable, a sufficiently skilled Mind can reshape it — changing physical laws, altering the landscape, creating or destroying matter. This was once an art form, practiced by master Minds before automations made the skill unnecessary. In the CZ, it is rediscovered by necessity.
Dispersal
The pre-automation practice of conscious, intentional death. A dying Mind broke consciousness into small pieces, distributing each to loved ones and community. Each piece was small enough that the recipient absorbed it without losing identity. The dying Mind gradually dissolved — true death through willing fragmentation. Ritualized, sacred, honored. Knowledge of dispersal was lost when automations made it unnecessary. In the CZ, this lost knowledge is desperately needed: teaching dispersal could free trapped minds.
Borrowing
A technique Marcus develops: temporarily sharing another Mind's maintained reality. Not merging, not taking over, but leaning on someone else's consciousness to rest his own. A hybrid skill — collective enough to connect, individual enough to maintain boundaries. How he survives the journey inland.
Locations
Land's End
The western edge of the CZ — where the continent meets the Pacific. Where Isla was working when the weapon was deployed. Where Marcus's recurring dream takes place. The name resonates: the literal end of land, the boundary between known and unknown, the place where maintained reality meets unmaintained ocean. This is where Isla's journey began and where Marcus's dream calls him.
The Center
Where Isla's child was staying when the weapon was deployed. Not Isla's lab or workplace — the place she left Leo behind because she needed solitude to work. The geographic and emotional heart of the story. Isla's journey toward the center is a journey toward her guilt, her grief, and her child. What she finds there — or what she has built there — drives the final act.
The Boundary
The perimeter of the CZ — where automated reality meets unmaintained reality. Patrolled by international naval forces. The boundary is not a wall but a gradient: reality becomes increasingly unstable as you approach the CZ's edge from outside, and increasingly automated as you move away from the CZ toward the rest of the world. Crossing the boundary in either direction is disorienting, dangerous, and for most people, fatal.
Mechanisms & Phenomena
The Reset
Marcus's transmissions loop — when he reaches a point of failure or death, his consciousness resets to the beginning of his journey. Each loop retains some knowledge from previous iterations, creating a spiral structure rather than a circle. The reset is not a mechanical process; it is Marcus's consciousness instinctively protecting itself by reverting to a known stable state. Each reset costs something — memories blur, details shift, the transmission degrades.
The Loop
The overall structure of Marcus's journey as experienced through his transmissions. Not a simple repetition but a spiral — each iteration advances despite appearing to repeat. The loop is the story's formal structure: twelve episodes following multiple iterations of the same journey, each revealing new layers, deeper understanding, and progressive character development.
The Transmissions
Marcus's radio broadcasts from within the CZ — the frame device for the entire story. He records on emergency frequencies, uncertain if anyone is listening. The transmissions are simultaneously: a survival mechanism (talking keeps him sane), a record (documenting what he experiences), and ultimately, the final fata organa (the audience realizes the transmissions themselves are Marcus's maintained reality, his way of holding himself together across loops).
Grief Storms
Reality disturbances caused by the concentrated grief, rage, or despair of powerful Minds. Emotional states so intense they destabilize maintained reality in a wide radius. Unpredictable, dangerous, and one of the primary hazards of travel through the zone. Isla's grief creates some of the largest storms in the CZ.
Reality Traps
Regions where maintained reality has become self-reinforcing in destructive patterns. A Mind's last desperate attempt at maintenance, frozen in a loop. Enter a reality trap and you may find yourself in a pocket of seemingly stable reality — a kitchen, a living room, a park — that won't let you leave. The trapped Mind that created it holds the space together reflexively, and your presence gives it more consciousness to feed on.
Characters & Roles
Marcus Reed
The primary narrator. A Hybrid Mind who survived the CZ and was found adrift outside the boundary. After recovering fragments of memory in Lisbon, he steals a sailboat and returns to the zone, compelled by a recurring dream of a woman at Land's End. His transmissions form the structure of the story. His hybrid nature — able to operate both individually and collectively — makes him uniquely suited to bridge the gap between Isla and the rest of the zone's survivors.
Isla
A neuroscientist and Pure Octopus Mind. Was at Land's End working in isolation when the weapon was deployed. A single mother — her child, Leo, was staying with a caretaker at "the center." Her autism (never named, shown through her characteristics) drives her Octopus nature: independent processing, comfort with solitude, direct cognition. Survived because her neurodivergent mind was already suited to individual maintenance. Her guilt over leaving Leo drives everything she does in the zone.
Leo
Isla's child. A Child Mind whose fluid consciousness allowed him to survive the weapon in a form adults cannot achieve. Leo did not become a trapped mind because children don't cling to fixed identity the way adults do. What happened to him — where he is, what form his consciousness takes — is the central mystery driving Isla's journey. He is hope embodied: proof that consciousness can adapt rather than merely endure or break.
The Bridge
What Marcus becomes: the connection between Isla's isolated Octopus nature and the collective healing the zone needs. His Hybrid Mind can reach Isla where no Collective Mind could (she'd reject the intrusion) and connect her to others in ways no Octopus Mind could (they couldn't bridge to her). His role is not to fix Isla but to create the conditions where reunion with Leo becomes possible.
The Weapon-Deployers
The collective of Minds who built and deployed the weapon. They believed they were liberating humanity from automated consciousness. They were Collective Minds — believed deeply in shared experience and cooperative reality. The irony: their weapon destroyed the system that supported their way of life and created conditions that favored their philosophical opposites. Most died in the aftermath, victims of their own liberation.
Objects & Symbols
The Octopus (Recurring)
A real octopus that Marcus encounters in the waters off the coast — solitary, intelligent, alien in its cognition. Becomes a motif: the octopus represents the Octopus Mind in its purest form. Distributed intelligence, no need for others, comfortable in the deep and the dark. The octopus appears in multiple iterations of Marcus's journey, each time revealing something new about solitary consciousness.
The Sailboat
The boat Marcus steals in Lisbon to return to the CZ. A small vessel — intimate, vulnerable, requiring constant attention to maintain. The sailboat is Marcus's first lesson in individual maintenance: the boat doesn't sail itself, the sea doesn't cooperate automatically. Everything requires conscious effort. The boat becomes an extension of his maintained reality, and its condition mirrors his psychological state across loops.
Themes & Philosophy
Individual vs. Collective
The central philosophical tension. Before automations, both modes of consciousness coexisted in dynamic tension. The weapon forced a reckoning: which mode of being is more authentic? More sustainable? More human? The story refuses to pick a side. Collective consciousness offers belonging but demands conformity. Individual consciousness offers freedom but guarantees isolation. The resolution is family — chosen small groups, natural collectives rather than imposed ones.
Death as Mercy
The question: is the ability to truly die essential to bearable existence? Marcus's father's dementia — watching consciousness become trapped by failing mental systems — prepared Marcus to understand trapped minds. Both his father and the zone's trapped minds suffer from the same condition: awareness without agency, presence without ability. Teaching dispersal (conscious death) could free trapped minds. Should consciousness ever be eternal?
Family as the Third Way
The resolution to the individual vs. collective debate. Not large enforced collectives (conformity, lost individuality). Not pure isolated individuals (tyranny, loneliness). But chosen small groups: parent-child, partners, families. Natural collective rather than imposed. Connection from strength and choice, not need or force. Marcus (Hybrid) + Isla (Octopus) + Leo (fluid child) = the model for future survival.