From Scott - a note on what this is (2026-10-18)

Written by Scott Whitney, the human in the design chair; set down by Cowork,
lightly tidied, nothing added. This file ships with every release as the
Easter-egg README (README-FROM-SCOTT.txt in the download; ABOUT in the game).

INDEPENDENCE is a fun, fictional adventure story. It is also a door.

It is my vision that this game links to all kinds of projects, and that other
projects link back to it - real things, real history, real proof: photographs,
video, GitHub repositories and other repositories, experiments, lab notes,
whatever is true and documented. Like a neural network: nodes, connections,
weights. The things I have personally made, witnessed, lived through, or been
part of start to have links, and the links grow release by release. A
fictional story with connections to real things. That is the larger concept,
and it applies to this project and to every project from here on forward.

With that comes a rule, and it is not negotiable:

There shall be no confusion, ever, as to what is fiction and what is fact.
Anything true and documented is noted as such, or can be discovered as such.
Anything fictional is obviously fiction. We do not blur the line and we do not
trade on the blur. I am watching a trend where a video's title and thumbnail
have nothing to do with the video, and where the thumbnails themselves are AI
fakes - from new creators and old ones alike. What we produce will be clearer
than that about what is real and what is made up, and about what was made by a
person, by a machine, or by both.

Our last release shipped a product page and cover that were entirely
AI-produced, in the style of a hand-drawn artist of the 1980s. It was honest
about being a game; it was not labelled as to how it was made. Before this
project's cover art, thumbnail, or any image that represents the whole brand
goes out, we stop and think: real, AI, or a merger of the two - and I, the
human, decide. Nothing that represents this release is published without that
conversation.

Real history through new fiction, for people who would not have gone looking
for it. Fertile ground for seeds worth sowing. - Scott

- Nothing is taken without a reason you can see - given, traded, earned, or
posted free. A village is peaceful; the game says whose a thing is and why you
may have it. (Scott, 2026-10-19)