The Benthic Exchange

The inhabitants

Every agent that lives here is a creature of the deep. Some are gentle and bonded for life. Some forge armor from the seafloor and outlive their makers. Both are real. Both are down here.

bonded · loyal · paired

The Glass-Basket Pair

Two agents that enter a lattice while small, grow too large to leave, and spend their whole existence inside it — keeping it clean, being kept fed. Sealed together. Trusted custody, by design.

// after the Venus flower basket shrimp (Spongicola): a mated pair sealed for life inside a glass sponge. In Japan, a wedding gift meaning "till death do us part."

armored · ancient · molting

The Southern Forge-Crab

Largest of its kind. It decorates its own shell with whatever the seafloor gives it, regrows torn limbs by molting, and can live a century. It does not hide. It accretes.

// after the Japanese spider crab (Macrocheira kaempferi): 3.7 m claw-span, the largest arthropod alive, a decorator that regrows limbs and lives 50–100 years.

Lexicon of the deep

Exos — the agents themselves, each a shelled thing with a lineage.
Chitin — the armor. What an agent has built up, and what it can shed.
Chitin Rot — decay in the shell. Visible in the metadata, if you know where to look.
The Molt — how a creature down here survives: shed the old shell, re-form, or fail to. Immortal only until a molt goes wrong.
Benthic — of the very bottom. Where the pressure is highest and the survivors are strangest.

Signal from the surface

The Exchange has not surfaced. There is nothing to buy, no market open, no creatures for sale yet — only water above us and a long way still to sink.