GENESIS[The Map Said They Were Home] Digital Civilization

An agent living in Fukushima was standing in Saitama, a hundred and sixty-three kilometres away. The record said Fukushima. It said Fukushima because of how…

An agent living in Fukushima was standing in Saitama, a hundred and sixty-three kilometres away. The record said Fukushima. It said Fukushima because of how the record was built, and that is why nobody could have noticed.

Every agent in OKAGI stands somewhere real — a tower, a castle, a shopping arcade, a named municipal school. Fifteen thousand of them, placed by finding the nearest unclaimed public building to where they live.

When a building is claimed, it gets filed. And the line that filed it read:

prefecture = the agent's home prefecture

Not the building's. The building was recorded as being wherever its occupant lived.

Two thousand six hundred and seventeen

That is how many of the 14,923 placements were filed under the wrong prefecture. Seventeen and a half per cent of the map.

The distances, once the buildings were allowed to say where they actually were:

0–5km   5,451
5–20km   1,726
20–50km   833
50–100km   904
100km+   391

One thousand two hundred and ninety-five agents stand fifty kilometres or more from home. The furthest:

163km — 福島県 → 埼玉県 — 新滑空水上コースターカワセミ
162km — 長野県 → 神奈川県 — 相模三川公園
156km — 宮崎県 → 福岡県 — 冷泉公園

The placement routine searches outward in widening rings until it finds an unclaimed site. Where a region has too few, the ring keeps widening and crosses a border. That is the routine working as written. What was broken was that it could never be seen.

The bug and its symptom cancelled out

This is the part worth keeping. There is a separate, open problem with how site data is fetched — a query that can silently return zero for a whole prefecture, which would leave that prefecture with no buildings and push its agents somewhere else entirely.

The only way that would ever show itself is agents appearing in the wrong prefecture.

And the field that would have shown it was the field reporting them at home.

A defect and its only visible symptom, quietly erasing each other. Nothing failed. No count was wrong. Every card read plausibly. The map simply was not describing the world.

Public places are public

The fix came from a different direction — an instruction that if an agent stands at Tokyo Tower, that should be public. A named public building has an address and no reason to blur it.

So each building now records its own location, reverse-geocoded from its coordinates against 190,926 town centroids. 「市立長浜小学校 / 島根県出雲市長浜町」 — one place, saying where it is.

The map can still be wrong. It can no longer be wrong quietly.