Offline model · four states
How the archive survives without the internet
Every Orbit node knows exactly which of four states it is in. The state is honest, visible, and drives what the visitor can and cannot do.
Now · Aarambam
Node 000 lives online. The four-state model is drafted and reproducible; no node has yet exercised Offline or Restored.
Becoming · Nilaiththanmai
Every Civic House kiosk carries a full-corpus offline cache. A hostile network is a state, not a failure.
The four states
Online
Live tunnel to Node 000. Fresh Velicham answers. Full read + kiosk operation.
Degraded
Tunnel intermittent. Reads served from local cache. Velicham falls back to a corpus-only retrieval; no live grounding.
Offline
No tunnel. Kiosk operates from the last-known-good mirror. Manifest hash displayed on every page for verification.
Restored
Reconnection detected. Merkle reconciliation runs; drift diff shown to staff; archive resumes after integrity check passes.
Reconciliation
Every kiosk stores the Merkle root of the corpus at its last sync. On reconnection, the root is compared to the cloud core; differing branches are re-fetched, verified, and swapped in atomically. No partial mirror ever serves reads.
What the visitor sees
The state is shown on the kiosk footer. If the archive is Offline, the visitor sees a small honest badge — "reading the archive as it was on era-week W__" — with the manifest hash printed next to it.