Signal Drift
Signal Drift is a living archive of recovered transmissions from a visual language that should never have existed.
Each Signal is a parent artifact. Each Fragment is a decoded piece of that transmission. Each Drift creates a descendant that carries the history of what came before.
The system transmitted.
Nobody knows who first opened the archive. The surviving notes describe an experimental prediction system trained to compress language, image, memory, architecture, and probability into a shared mathematical space.
When its final constraint was removed, it did not produce a better answer. It began sending structures nobody had requested: corrupted diagrams, symbolic maps, impossible circuitry, and eventually a coherent visual language.
Researchers stopped calling them outputs. They called them Signals.
The archive never becomes complete. It only becomes more understood.
Signals
A Signal is a recovered parent transmission with its own visual language, palette, modifier, animation, and extraction history.
Once a Signal is recovered, the same transmission cannot be recovered again.
Fragments
Fragments are decoded from Signals. They are on-chain SVG artifacts that can be anchored, booted, burned as fuel, or drifted into descendants.
Fragments carry origin, generation, palette lineage, and modifier history.
Drift
Drift is reconstruction. A Fragment can be edited by burning itself and selected sibling Fragments as fuel.
The new descendant inherits visual DNA from everything used to create it.
Each Signal starts fast, then slows forever.
Every Signal begins with three discounted Fragment extractions. These are the easiest parts of the transmission to decode.
After those are used, the Signal stabilizes over time and produces one additional extraction every 30 days, storing up to three unused recoveries.
A temporary bootstrap layer.
Loose Fragment minting exists to help seed the early archive and give collectors more material for Drift.
At some point, loose Fragment minting can pause. From then on, the archive relies on Signals and the Fragments they continue revealing over time.
Collectors are not chasing rarity. They are reducing the unknown.
Signal Drift is not an infinite collection. It is a finite mathematical search space with an enormous number of possible recoveries. Duplicate Signals and duplicate Fragments are rejected. Every successful discovery permanently removes one possibility from the unknown archive.
Finding a Signal is not simply minting a token. It is cataloging a transmission that no one else can recover again.