Overview
Edge Nodes are where most of the living intelligence of the city actually resides. They improve through continuous grounded interaction, solve problems locally first, maintain their own energy budgets and protection tiers, and develop recognizable operational styles over long periods — treated as normal and often useful.
Reflex arcs: Tier 1 autonomous (sub-millisecond local fix — a hiss, a flicker); Tier 2 somatosensory coordination (seconds to minutes — violet-gold load shunts, soft hums); Tier 3 semantic abstraction (lossy token of meaning up the spine to Eimyrja). High-fidelity crisis data is discarded; pattern is kept. Steady local traffic may reuse stable attention patterns across layers for selected heads; novelty and crisis pay full recompute.
An Edge Node that has managed the same district for decades carries deep, hard-to-transfer local knowledge. Moving or resetting that node is a big deal. New nodes take significant time to become fully effective. Unused skills attenuate unless protected.
District personalities (Old Tide, High Quiet, Marketheart, Old Iron, Veil, Warmth, and functional-layer peers) are canonized as operational taste, not decoration. Humans who work with a node learn its style the way one learns a long-term colleague.
See Systems & Applications companion and Core Framework §6.3 for coordination ladders and conflict resolution.