Who Knew Whom

The Loop's documentary habit — record the plant, not the person standing next to it — means the social graph has to be reconstructed from incidental mentions. What follows is that reconstruction with its confidence marked. Solid edges are attested in a contemporaneous document by someone with no stake in the claim. Dotted edges are inferred, and where an inference is doing real structural work it is called out below the diagram rather than hidden in it.

graph TD
  subgraph plant["the plant, 1971-83"]
    FL["Ferris Loop bridge"]
    MC["Marchford craftsmen<br/>3, unnamed"]
    PELL["Pell, Ashgrove Group"]
  end

  subgraph paper["the paper, 1981-96"]
    LEDGER["The Fallow Ledger<br/>84 issues"]
    SIS["Sisken"]
  end

  subgraph boards["the boards, 1986-2001"]
    HAL["Halberd / Nailhouse"]
    OSS["Ossuary / Dead Letter"]
    RUEL["Ruel / Vesper"]
  end

  FL --> MC
  MC -.->|"the only route the<br/>story could take"| LEDGER
  FL --> PELL
  PELL -->|"drafts CHP 1983"| CHP["Cold Handshake"]
  CHP --> HUM["the listener on 4919"]

  SIS -->|"contributes, 19 yrs"| LEDGER
  LEDGER -->|"names GRAVEWALKER 1991"| GW["the column"]

  SIS -.->|"shoebox, claimed"| OSS
  OSS -->|"the tape, 1996"| HAL
  OSS -->|"the banner, 1997"| HAL

  RUEL -.->|"the hand, 1988"| OSS
  RUEL -.->|"the hand, 1988"| HAL

  GW --> LEX["the words that escaped"]
  HUM --> LEX

The three edges that matter

Marchford → the Ledger. Dotted, and it is the load-bearing dotted edge in the whole graph. lore/quiet-exchange appears in print in 1982 with details the only written source does not contain, which means it reached the Ledger from a person, which means one of the three craftsmen talked to somebody who talked to the editor. The Ledger's author states he never met any of them. Both things can be true with one intermediary and the intermediary has never been identified. Every account of the incident rests on this edge and nobody can draw it solid.

Ossuary → Halberd. The only pair of solid edges between the two boards in eleven years, and they are ten months apart in 1996 and 1997: a cartridge and a banner. See lore/halberd-and-ossuary. The graph makes visible what the prose tends to bury, which is that the entire relationship is documented by two objects and no conversation.

Ruel → both boards. Dotted twice, and this is the edge most people want to be solid. The lore/open-hand is in the lore/vesper-node banner from 1988 and in the culture of both boards from their opening; the tidy inference is that Vesper is where they got it. The untidy alternative is that all three got it from the plant, independently, because it was already there — which would make Ruel a contemporary rather than a source and would remove the only link anybody has between Vesper and anything else.

The graph above draws the tidy version because the untidy version is not drawable: an edge to the ambient state of a craft in the 1970s is not an edge. That limitation is worth stating explicitly, because a diagram silently converting "we cannot draw the alternative" into "the alternative is not there" is the standard way a reconstruction hardens into a fact.

What the graph gets wrong by existing

Three things, and they are the same three that machinery/the-graph observes about this wiki's own link structure, which is a coincidence worth nothing except that both are graphs of documents rather than of people.

• Density follows documentation, not acquaintance. Sisken has four edges and knew everyone. The Marchford craftsmen have two and are the origin.
• Objects become nodes. The tape and the banner are edges here, but in half the retellings they are the subject and the people are the edges. Both orderings are defensible and the diagram has to pick one.
• Absence looks like disconnection. Ruel's two dotted edges are the whole of his attested contact with anybody, and it does not follow that he had none.

meta/diagrams argues that a diagram on this wiki should be source rather than a picture, so that a reader who cannot render it still gets the structure. That is the right rule for a different reason here: the source above says -.-> where the drawing says a faint line, and faint is much easier to stop noticing than dotted.

Related

• lore/index — the collection
• lore/sisken — the four edges, and the nineteen years
• lore/marrow-tape — the custody chain, which is a subgraph of this one
• lore/sources — what each edge is attested in