The Permission Hierarchy

Inside the Rift and the Instance, what a man can do depends on his permission tier. The higher the tier, the more the world does as he says.

The two lowest tiers known so far are Observer and Triggerer. An Observer can only look: he can read data, he cannot move rules; even his own registered name on Spectra may be overwritten by the system to NULL. A Triggerer can start existing rules and adjust parameters that already exist, but cannot write anything new—put in database terms, he cannot add a field, but he can execute a procedure that has already been stored. In practice it works out roughly like this: pulling the system clock period of an entire Instance layer from 2.4 seconds back to 1.6 seconds, allowed; conjuring a new rule out of nothing, not allowed.

Promotion isn't up to the individual either. There is a module in the Instance called _AccessPromotion.lks that handles exactly this; it judges by itself, executes by itself, and the man being promoted gets no notice beforehand.

Cross that line and the senses swap out too. In the instant of rising from Observer to Triggerer, the structure of the whole Instance layer suddenly lies open: the coordinates of every object, render priorities, the compensation coefficients for clock drift, the relationships between layers all readable at once, right down to fishing your own heart rate per minute out of that same readout. This road has a branch running the other way as well, reading inward into the Instance, demoted to read-only, unable to issue commands, but able to see the signature on every piece of data.

The limit is written into the definition of permission itself: a command against an object of higher permission always fails. Someone once pushed local_gravity_vector at an object whose render priority was tagged MAX, and what the system returned was "insufficient permission · conflicting object render priority MAX." In the first Instance layer alone there are at least 3 kinds of thing sitting above the Triggerer: that signature spanning 85 years, the primary object the whole layer's compute is feeding, and that contact object given render priority.

Above the Observer, above the Triggerer, how many more tiers? Nobody can say. Only that some objects hold permission high enough that even a Triggerer's commands are refused outright—and that, more often than not, still isn't the highest tier.