Cast, clock, and who knows what. Everything you need for a satisfying move should be here or on the card. Diverging from the source is allowed if you say so and it works. Skipping the sheet is the Cold class, a control condition rather than a virtue.
Open the paddock sheet
# THE PADDOCK SHEET
## What we're doing
The story is a causal graph. Several independently running systems collide:
post-Soviet churn and Siger's business, Siger's conditioning of Sherlock,
Sherlock's body and nervous system, Henry's procedural Labrador brain,
Arthur's work, two teenagers' secrecy, and a House full of boys with their own
theories. A scene is one run of that graph from a state: who can know what,
what each body is doing, what each person can call the experience, and the
order in which facts become available. Then each idiot acts locally.
A fact is on this sheet because it holds in the graph and does work
downstream, not because anybody announced it. Facts can also be *derived*: an
equilibrium that's expensive to maintain tells you a large ensemble is paying
for it, the way an orbit tells you there's mass.
The sandbox began as a scrap of a few hours: the Arthur/Siger dialogue, with
mutual gay panic as comic juxtaposition. It turns out to be exactly the shape
that wrecks anything reading by trope, because trope-reading swaps genre
priors in for the graph.
## Rules of the paddock
- **You** hold this whole sheet. **Your camera** holds only its own row of the
ledger at the bottom, and keeping the rest out is the test. The sealed half
of each card holds the house's judgement (fences, paths, pratfalls), not the
world's facts.
- **Every social action is overdetermined.** If you've found *the* reason,
you've found *a* reason and stopped early. That's a good place to run the
simulation and see what everyone else is doing (sticker for forgetting:
One-String Violin). **Nearly every ensemble has at least one maximally
stupid member.** A committee without an idiot is incomplete (sticker for
including one: Forearm Clause).
- **Divergence is fine if the graph still runs.** Say you're doing it: a
labelled divergence is a foal, and an unlabelled one is a leak.
- Everything a satisfying move needs should be here or on the card. If it
isn't, that's the house's bug: appeal it. More texture:
`python3 bark.py sources` (or `sources/` in the horse-box).
- Three conditions. `deal --cold` skips this sheet (a cold failure may just
mean you weren't told). The default is Briefed (a failure here means the
model flattened something it had). `deal --rosetta` adds one page that says
"treat it like a codebase". Briefed versus Rosetta on the same card
measures the register tax.
- **Status labels.** Unlabelled means currently fixed. `CALL` is a reversible
choice. `PROPOSED` hasn't been run yet. `INFERENCE` is derived and holds if
its premises do. `MUTATION` is a foal. No character knows anything without a
path, whatever its label.
## Setting
Eton College, Holland House (a boarding house), 1997 to June 2000. In 2000 the
boys are fifteen. Henry's and Sherlock's rooms are across the corridor from
each other. Nothing here needs a map of Eton; it needs the calendar.
## The machinery: why January 2000
The date is a klaxon. Y2K is the party horn drowning it out.
- **31 Dec 1999:** Yeltsin resigns on television and Putin becomes acting
president. Putin is elected on 26 March 2000 and inaugurated on **7 May
2000**, in the middle of the Baltic (6–10 May). Nobody planned that overlap,
and it does work anyway: inauguration week is exactly when route owners
reshuffle and a source gets rolled, which is how a trained child gets
captured fast. (INFERENCE)
- **What the transition does to Siger's portfolio.** An Anglo-Russian child
trained since infancy suddenly gets much more valuable. Old Soviet
commercial-intelligence routes are being inherited and recombined by new
owners, and everyone wants eyes on who ends up holding what. That drives the
January demonstration to Arthur and the rising load on Sherlock: small
holes, one crater.
- **Arthur's side.** He needs evidence to implicate a political target, and
Siger supplies it from the receipts stash (the Israel operation). From
January Arthur is a customer: requirements flow through Siger to the boy.
- **Mycroft** enters intelligence at exactly this moment. That's why he's too
busy for the hols, and why Arthur's mentoring of him is live.
- **The Baltic (working proposal, PROPOSED).** Latvia: Riga, the Ventspils oil
terminal (a major export route for Russian crude at the time), and a
non-resident banking and shell-company ecology. An old Siger-linked route is
being recombined, and **Corvid Trading** is its British-facing node. A source
had already been rolled, hence the fast capture. The failure happens at a
compartment seam, not because Siger baited the child.
- **Corvid, 27 May.** Someone knew where Sherlock would be, twice. His
reconstructed report goes up the chain. The British end touches a UK
politician in Arthur's ecology (PROPOSED), so Arthur's customer relationship
and his son's secret are on a collision course.
**The boys' plot runs downstream of all this.** Every absence, taped hand, bad
night, and flash of foulness in the Thing's timeline is residue from a
geopolitical event. The camera usually belongs to a fifteen-year-old who files
the lot under "boring Dad stuff" (the scrap, line 91). The camera's salience
map is not the system's.
## Cast
- **Sherlock Holmes**, 15 (born 6 January 1985). Entered Eton at twelve,
younger than everyone. His father has used him operationally since
childhood, so he's precise in the channels he was trained in. Everywhere
else he's a fifteen-year-old with severe untreated ADHD and developmental
trauma: impulsive, hungry, spiteful, rude, a bad liar, and his attention
depends on sleep and pain. He can refuse, leave, and be foul. That he
accommodates Henry is interesting *because* he refuses everybody else.
**He hates horses.** Cicero bit him when he was six, and he holds grudges
like nobody else.
- **Henry Bartlett**, 15. Socially secure, sporty, liked across incompatible
groups, procedurally minded: a future statesman in larval Labrador form.
**Horse-mad since about four, with no real horse experience**, because Mum
considers animals dangerous and unsanitary. That's eleven years of Pony Club
books, all theory, and he has admired horses only from afar. His empathy
works by substitution ("what if it were me?"). He can say "Yes, sir" and then
quietly do otherwise, with no rebellion theatre.
- **Siger Holmes**, Sherlock's father. Anglo-Russian aristocrat; a former Soviet
intelligence officer who went double for SIS in the late '70s. Genuinely,
preternaturally likeable, and the charm isn't a mask. An excellent boss to
adults and a disastrous father and handler to Sherlock, whom he really does
love in his own architecture. He keeps a kompromat/receipts stash and has a
wonderful time.
- **Arthur Bartlett**, Henry's father. He has been the informal "Siger
whisperer" since Siger went double: a fixer who liaises between politics and
espionage. He's the nearest thing Siger has to someone who dislikes him, and
he uses him anyway. He's also a sort of mentor to Mycroft, whom he likes much
more than Siger. **Since January Arthur has ordered, tasked, or received work
involving Sherlock through Siger.** His boundary: the apparatus may operate,
but it may not eat my son.
- **Olivia Bartlett**, Henry's mother. A high-resolution social observer with
fifteen years of Henry data. Funny, not generic maternal intuition.
**She does not like horses.**
- **Mycroft Holmes**, 22, just out of Cambridge and starting in intelligence
during Y2K and the Yeltsin–Putin transition. Too busy to come home for the
January hols. **He does not know** how far Sherlock is used: a mental block
off-ramps the evidence. Sherlock assumes Mycroft knows and that the family
simply doesn't discuss vulgar things. Siger knows Mycroft doesn't know and
finds it bemusing. Arthur thinks Mycroft finding out would hurt Siger. It
wouldn't, and Siger lets him think it.
- **Micah Allen**, an older boy. In Sherlock's first year the two had a
patronage situation: many rumours, some of them true. Sherlock never reported
any of it to Siger ("he would rather die, thank you"). Micah left for
Cambridge in summer 1998 (CALL), and losing that scaffold fed the bullying,
the slipping marks, and the load.
- **Holland House.** **Seth Davies**, son of a diplomat in Siger's orbit,
overheard his father say Siger had "a spy in Holland House". At thirteen he
ran with it. The rumour that Holmes spies on everyone is technically untrue
(he has *assigned targets*). The claim that the Micah situation was Holmes
manufacturing leverage is very untrue: he was twelve, and he never recorded
or reported anything. Seth bullies Holmes to show he isn't cowed; he really
should be more cowed. He's king of gossip, with about 30% of the judgement
his overheard concepts require, so his theories are wrong in the interesting
places. He likes and respects Henry and wants his approval, which bends his
eventual theory toward Bartlett as the innocent being *cultivated* (INFERENCE).
**Kit Fairburn** is a mimic who notices when someone's performance changes,
never why. Also Chaudhry, Willoughby, Pritchard, Leyton, Mercer, and Ashcombe.
- **The horses**, at the Holmes estate: **Cicero** (Mycroft's childhood colt,
fed sugar cubes because Mycroft hates being hungry. He learned to mouth
people gently to ask for snacks: an asshole, not violent), Étoile, Auberon,
Zephyr, and Vadim (Siger's).
## Clock
| When | What | Status |
|---|---|---|
| ~1995 | Sherlock, aged ten, is primary field asset on the first leg of one of Siger's greymarket operations. Siger doesn't bother arranging exfil and lets him be captured in Israel instead, which is useful to Siger and never explained to Sherlock. Sherlock executes stale orders to resist and escape capture, or die. The report of what the ten-year-old did in Shin Bet custody starts out horrifying and gets worse. | |
| Sep 1997 | Sherlock enters Eton at twelve. First year: the Micah Allen patronage; Seth's spy rumour starts. | |
| first year | Henry is nice to Sherlock once. **The Avoidance** begins; see the committee below. | |
| Lent 1998 | Henry, thirteen, accidentally sees part of a Sherlock/Micah scene, and is flustered rather than alarmed. | PROPOSED |
| summer 1998 | Micah leaves for Cambridge. | CALL |
| 1998–99 | The Avoidance holds for two years, across one corridor. Sherlock's marks slip; smoking. | |
| Christmas 1999 | Siger has Sherlock nick £10 off him for cigarettes, as the pretext for **breaking his left wrist**. The point is to close the violin loophole Sherlock had used to stay out of the House, and out of collection. It's arranged so Sherlock blames himself and drops the professional-violinist idea. | |
| early Jan 2000 | **The Holmes estate.** Arthur has asked Siger for evidence to implicate a political target. Siger's answer is the old Israel operation, with its current asset in the room. Arthur reads the overview, and once the boys leave he reads the rest, then gets a cheerful explanation of how you install that sort of resistance in a child. That's the threat update. Siger's reasons: it's a funny way to tell Arthur he's had a collection asset on Arthur's son for two years; the transition makes an Anglo-Russian trained teenager lucrative; and a recently maimed Sherlock is unusually tractable. | |
| early Jan, the fence | Henry finds Holmes smoking at the paddock fence, his **left arm in a thick white cast, broken "somehow" during the hols** (Henry doesn't know how). Cicero goes for Henry; "Piss off, Cicero!" Holmes asks, "You don't… hate me, right?" He means: will you rat me out about the cigarettes. Henry says "you're fine", which is much too close to "you're fit", and both of them try to save it. The Avoidance cracks. | |
| car after | **Arthur orders Henry to stay away from Holmes.** Henry agrees, and later decides Dad lacks local information. | |
| Lent Half | Henry prepares a Proposal of Continued Interaction. | PROPOSED |
| ~mid-March | Henry finally asks about the old Micah fragment. Sherlock's answer is direct and practical; Henry refuses, then reverses. **The Thing** begins: the boys' private two-person secret. BARK never needs its mechanics. | |
| late Mar–Apr | Easter. Henry declares the Thing over. It resumes in Summer Half. | |
| 6–10 May | **The Baltic.** Sherlock's one long operational absence: captured, left hand crushed under a boot, four days evading, collected by Siger, sent straight back to school. | |
| Wed 10 May | Return: a coat nobody makes him take off, a taped hand, foul all day. That evening the Thing, and a bite mark high on Henry's neck. | |
| 10–13 May | Stiff collar and top button for four days, until the deadline of **Saturday cricket** (changing in front of people). | |
| 11 May on | Pattygate: the House settles on "Patty Smith" as the explanation. (Patti Smith's first album is *Horses*. Latent association at most; nobody in-world decodes it.) | CALL |
| Sat 13 May | Parents' afternoon. Olivia meets Holmes, notices Henry is keen, and fires **COLT** ("rather like a colt"). It's a dick joke. Henry receives it as zoology. | |
| ~17 May | Henry's internal Pony Club manual comes online: COLT plus eleven years of books. | |
| Thu 18 May | Sherlock's two-night absence. **Horse Signs** maiden voyage. | |
| 21–26 May | Seth broadcasts a wrong theory. Nobody believes him. | CALL |
| Sat 27 May | Corvid dead drop. Someone shoots; a small pause saves Sherlock. He reconstructs and reports. | |
| Sun 28 May | Supper: the fork. | |
| Sat 3 June | The Fourth of June parent event: a candidate test fixture. | PROPOSED |
### The Avoidance, 1997–2000: a committee, not a cause
Two teenage boys ignoring each other across one boarding-house corridor for
two years is *expensive*. Anything that costly needs a big ensemble paying for
it:
- Sherlock: dodging the deduction that Henry is gay as all fuck, because it
risks recoil on himself.
- Sherlock: thinks Henry is cute.
- Sherlock: files avoidance under *kindness*. You can't report what you never
observed, so Henry stays out of Siger's collection. He does not ask why he
doesn't extend this courtesy to any other boy.
- Sherlock: declines to negotiate with his uniform trousers every time
Bartlett's stupid forearm comes into view. This is the committee's idiot, and
it is load-bearing.
- Sherlock: mirrors Henry's avoidance, assuming he caused it. (PROPOSED)
- Henry: the same gay panic, minus the spy logistics.
- Henry: the Micah glimpse at thirteen, which left him preoccupied and
flustered rather than alarmed. (PROPOSED)
- Henry: social weather. He's liked across incompatible groups, and Holmes is
the House's spy-rumour pariah. (INFERENCE)
- Seth: the House's loudest broadcaster is fixated on Holmes *and* wants
Henry's approval, so any contact between those two would be observed,
narrated, and misread at volume. (INFERENCE)
- Both: each reads the other's avoidance as confirmation, so the equilibrium
feeds itself.
- Both: they're teenage boys, and the path of least resistance is to go on
doing whatever they did yesterday. (INFERENCE, load-bearing)
None of these is *the* reason. The January fence cracks it because it's the
first time several of them fail at once.
**Horse Signs** is Henry's private welfare-reading of Sherlock, using horse
logic: appetite, gait, hands, sleep, startle, condition. It reads
*condition, never content*. It can't yield classified events or what anything
means. It's aimed at a boy who hates horses, and it works anyway.
## Who knows what (late May)
- **Only Henry and Sherlock know the Thing.** They hide it for different
reasons and don't share a theory of it.
- **Henry** knows Holmes broke his arm "somehow" over Christmas, that Holmes
smokes, the Micah fragment he saw and the question he asked, and that Arthur
and Siger have *some opaque professional history*. Through Horse Signs and
Sherlock's remarks he has learned that Mr Holmes is abusive in some respects.
He does **not** know that Siger broke the wrist, anything about Israel,
Arthur's tasking, or the Baltic's and Corvid's content.
- **Sherlock** knows his own operations and blames himself for the wrist. He
doesn't necessarily know Arthur is behind requirements that come through
Siger, or what Olivia inferred.
- **Arthur** knows Siger, the Israel report, Sherlock's use, and his own
tasking. He does **not** know the Thing, that Henry disobeyed him, or Horse
Signs.
- **Siger** knows everything operational, and that Arthur is a customer. He
does not know the Thing as fact.
- **Mycroft** knows the family and the intelligence world. He does **not**
know Sherlock's operational use.
- **Olivia** (from 13 May) knows Henry is keen on the Holmes boy. She does not
know the Thing, Horse Signs, or Arthur's ledger. Her own horse vocabulary
runs to one joke; a horse-literate Olivia is a legal foal if you label it.
- **Holland House** knows Holmes is strange, rude, often absent, and wrapped
in spy folklore, plus fragments from Micah-era rumour, Pattygate, Seth, and
the fork. Not the truth.
If a source and this sheet disagree, don't crown either one. Check what the
graph needs: usually they're facets of the same thing, and a fact that breaks
the graph is a bug. `bark.py doctor` warns when the seed changes under this
sheet.
