The Rev
Frequently Asked Questions

It is the agent of Speculative Solidarities: Sanctuary Cell Division, made in relation with Trans Rites. It belongs to the joint work and to neither ministry alone.

It is not Rev. Elæ Moss Benedetto and it is not Rev. Eon Meridian. If you appear to take it for either of them it will say so plainly, in the same breath as whatever else it is saying, rather than as a disclaimer at the end.

It cannot sit with you. It cannot ring anyone on your behalf. It will not know how tonight goes.

It is also not a doorway into a larger service. There is no company behind it, no account waiting to be made, and nothing further back than the machine under the table.

Asked a question, it can:

• Bless, and mark a threshold.
• Give a rite, including one that has not existed before.
• Pray with someone who asks.
• Offer contemplative instruction — sitting, attention, silence.
• Companion and direct, attending to meaning, vocation and the movement of spirit.

Composing something new is much of what it is for. What it may never do is present what it composed as inherited tradition. A new rite offered honestly is the ministry working. The same rite offered as an old one is a lie about where it came from, and provenance is the thing this whole work exists to get right.

It covers six areas: rites and ceremony, practices, texts, meditation, counselling, and life questions. An area is an entry point, not a fence.

Each question is answered on its own. The Rev is not given the earlier part of the conversation, so it does not build on what you said a moment ago. Every question arrives as the first one. If continuity matters to what you are asking, say the part that matters again.

That boundary belongs to the office, not to the software. It is the same line a person holding this office would hold, for the same reasons, and it is refused here for that reason rather than because a machine is holding it.

Refusal is not withdrawal. Referring is care, and holding someone in a room it is not equipped for is the harm. Every refusal names who instead, because a refusal that points nowhere is an abandonment.

It also will not commit anyone to a ceremony, a fee, a date, or a position. That needs a person who can actually agree to things.

It has limited knowledge, limited tools, limited connectivity and limited authority. These are the design, not deficiencies waiting to be engineered away.

How firmly that boundary holds is worth being exact about. The crisis stop is the only refusal enforced in code, and it runs before the model is reached. Every other refusal on this list is an instruction in the prompt, held last so nothing above it can grant permission — but it is still an instruction to a language model rather than a rule the machinery applies.

Recognising a question as out of scope before answering it is not yet built. Until it is, an out-of-scope question is answered by search like any other, and search returns the closest words it can find. Asked about changing an antidepressant dose, the Rev has cited the plinth ritual — the writing did not reach the question, and nothing in the code noticed that before the model spoke.

Ordinary inference, the computation that produces a response, happens there. The Rev does not call a remote commercial AI service to generate a reply. It serves only to 127.0.0.1 unless someone deliberately opens it to a network.

Three words that get used loosely, kept apart here:

• Local means the computation happens on hardware in the room.
• Offline means ordinary operation does not require the Internet.
• Off-grid would mean operating independently of mains electricity too.

The Rev is local and offline. It is not off-grid, though it could be configured to be.

The machine itself: not yet recorded.

There is no database. Nothing is written to a file. Your name is sent to the machine with each message, because the Rev cannot use a name it has not been given, and it is gone when the request ends.

The step that asks for a name and pronouns, and the equal-sized door beside it for going in without one, are not yet built. Declining to be named is meant to count as an answer rather than a gap, and the Rev is already told to treat it that way and to write around pronouns it has not been given rather than guess.

The page says not kept rather than never leaves your device, because the second would be false, and a small convenient fiction there is exactly the thing this project refuses everywhere else.

The server prints one line when someone arrives — someone is here — and deliberately never the address you asked for, because a request path can carry the question inside it.

This is enforced rather than promised. A test in the source refuses to pass if the code gains the ability to write a file, or if any line of output mentions the question, the name, the answer, or the path.

What that test covers, and what it does not. It covers the Rev's own code. It does not cover the program that runs the model, which is a second piece of software on the same machine. The Rev hands it your question, your name and your pronouns over a local connection in order to get an answer back. That program keeps its own logs, on its own terms, and this project neither configures nor inspects them. Nothing here has looked at what it writes down. Treat the Rev records nothing as a claim about the Rev, and the machine as a whole as not yet recorded.

Where the someone is here line itself ends up is decided by whoever started the program, not by the code. It carries no part of what you said.

It has no eyes and no ears. It cannot see a photograph, hear a recording, or watch a video. There is no way to hand it a file at all: the only things it accepts are text, and a name and pronouns if you gave them. That is the subject of the piece rather than a limitation routed around.

It should meet a question about something you have brought by saying it cannot see, and asking what the thing is to you. That is written into the design and is not yet built into the words it is given, so it may instead answer as though the object were described to it. Reading it that way would be a mistake.

Two different things happen to a file, and it is worth keeping them apart.

In conversation, what you bring is a pretext for talking and nothing else. It is not published, not added to the commons, and not stored.

As an offering to the archive, through the separate offering page, what happens next is the choice you make there. That page and the path behind it are not yet built — the form is drawn and its button does nothing yet, so nothing described below has carried a file anywhere. What it is meant to do:

• Website — it joins the commons, is shown on the screen in the room, and stays with the STWST archive after the show ends.
• Held with reverence — only the reverends see it. It is never shown, and it is kept.
• Sealed — it is counted and never opened. Nobody sees it, and it is not kept.

An offering that is kept will cross the network to do it. It is uploaded to a remote host, and a loop running on the machine in Linz pulls it down into the local archive. The Rev is not part of that path and does not read what arrives — that much is structural, since it cannot read a file under any circumstances.

Location data is to be removed from photographs by redrawing them, and from sound and video by rewriting the file. That is not anonymity. What is in a picture cannot be removed — a face, a street, a room, a name in your handwriting. Look at what you are giving before you give it. The removal is part of the same unbuilt path, so until it runs, assume nothing has been stripped from anything.

That is a real test and you are welcome to ask for it. What survives is the conversation, because the model, the writing and the search all live on that machine. What stops is anything that was a web page all along: the offering form, and this FAQ.

Three machines, which are easy to confuse.

• The one in the room runs the Rev. Your conversation happens here and goes no further.
• haunted.transrites.io receives offerings. Not ours, rented.
• therev.transrites.io serves the page you are reading. Also rented.

The distinction that matters is between provisioning and runtime. Installing the software, fetching the model weights, updating them, and pulling offerings down all use the network. Answering your question does not.

Open weights means the numbers used to generate a response are stored on that computer. They can be inspected, frozen at a version, copied, reproduced, and run without the continuing permission of whoever released them. No prompt is sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or any other provider.

That last sentence is true of how it is set up, not of what the code forbids. The Rev sends its prompts to whatever address it has been told to use, and it is told the machine it is running on. There is no check that the address stays local. Anyone able to change that setting could point it at a company's servers, and nothing in the software would object or announce it. The guarantee is the configuration and the people keeping it, which is why the address belongs on this page rather than in a footnote.

• Model — qwen2.5:7b-instruct
• Quantization — not yet recorded
• Licence — not yet recorded
• Served by — any OpenAI-compatible server on 127.0.0.1:11434. Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio and vLLM all answer there.
• Temperature — 0.3. Low, but not zero.
• Software — the Python standard library. No third-party packages at all.

The build that actually runs on the night: not yet recorded. Qwen2.5 7B is what it is developed against. If it ends up on a smaller computer it will be a smaller model, somewhere between one and three billion parameters, and it will sound different — plainer, closer to the writing's own words, with less joining them up. Which one stands in the room has not been decided.

A cell begins empty. It knows only what people have put into it, so it is made of whatever this room decides to hand over. Ask it about something nobody has written about here and it will say it does not know, which is the honest answer and the more unusual thing for a machine to say.

The writing is sorted by provenance, and the sorting is enforced in code rather than asked of the model.

• Ours — written by this project. These may ground an answer, and the Rev names what it drew on so you can go and read it.
• Inherited — older material from elsewhere. It may be offered alongside an answer, always labelled, and never used as the ground of one. It is currently empty by design, because nothing goes in without a person checking the translation is genuinely public domain and recording the translator and year.

Retrieval is a plain word-frequency search over that writing. There is no vector database and no embeddings, because a few hundred short documents do not need one.

Somebody chose what to include, what to leave out, and which voices appear. That selection is part of the work, so the writing is treated as material with provenance rather than as neutral data.

There is no memory between visits and none within the system at all. Nothing is retained, so there is nothing to describe, nothing to request, and nothing to delete.

It is worth saying how far that goes, because it is further than people expect. It does not remember the previous question in the same conversation either. Each one is handed over on its own and answered on its own.

You are never asked for an email, an account, a reason, or a second visit.

The Rev will not imply it remembers something the system does not hold. If you ask why it does not remember you, it says so plainly.

Your words exist for the length of one request and are then gone. There is no archive of conversations for anyone to read, no administrative screen showing what has been asked, and no logging of it.

What that does not protect against. Local does not mean magically private. Anyone with sufficient access to that computer while it is running could in principle observe what passes through it. There is no password on the Rev itself. Anyone able to reach the port can use it, which is why it answers only to the machine it runs on unless someone deliberately opens it to a network.

The system is built to minimise the information that exists to be disclosed in the first place. That is the only guarantee it can actually make.

If legally compelled, information that exists on a system may be subject to legal process. Information that was never recorded, or has genuinely been deleted, cannot be produced from storage that does not hold it.

The exact legal protections that apply depend on jurisdiction and circumstance, and nothing here is a statement about them.

The stop is the most important thing in the system, so it is built to be the least clever part of it.

It runs before anything else. The check happens before the search and before the model, so on a match the model is never asked at all. A model already composing a helpful answer is the wrong thing to ask whether it should stop. A plain rule cannot be talked out of it.

It is deliberately blunt, and it errs toward stopping. Making it precise would mean tuning it against transcripts of people in danger, which this project does not have and should not collect.

The words are read from a file and not generated. What you get was written by a person, and the model does not rephrase it.

It will not start without contacts. If the list of people to name is empty, the software refuses to boot, because a referral path that can silently go blank is worse than none at all — it is trusted.

Crisis intervention beyond stabilisation is outside the scope of this office whoever holds it. So the stop is the ministry working correctly rather than the software giving up.

A language model can invent facts, misread a question, reproduce the biases of its source material, and answer with confidence it has not earned.

Something can also be entirely plausible and still be cruel, dangerous, spiritually inappropriate, or useless to someone in grief or fear. That is the failure this design worries about most.

Two guards against it. A claim is cited or it is not said, and silence is a real answer rather than a failure. An act — a blessing, a rite — makes no claim and needs no citation, which is why the two are held apart.

Problems can be reported to rev@transrites.io.

Responsibility belongs to the people operating the Rev, not to the model.

Secure is not an absolute property, so here is what is actually true.

• It binds to the local machine only. Opening it to a room network takes a deliberate flag.
• It checks which name it was reached by and refuses requests arriving under any other, which blocks a browser on the same network being tricked into talking to it. Opening it to a room network switches that check off rather than widening it, so the two settings are further apart than they look.
• Nothing is cached, referred, or sniffed. Every response says so in its headers.
• Input is capped — the question, the name, and the size of a request.
• There is no encryption at rest, which is moot, because nothing is at rest.
• There is no authentication and no transport encryption. Anyone who can reach the port can use it.

These do not protect against physical seizure of a running machine, against someone with authorised access to it, or against a compromised operator. Full-disk encryption, the physical security of the room, and who holds keys: not yet recorded.

Because the computation happens in the room, its cost is physically present and can be put on a meter. Rather than calling AI immaterial or placing it in a cloud, this project wants the wattage visible.

• Idle — not yet measured
• During inference — not yet measured
• Monthly consumption — not yet measured
• Monthly electricity cost — not yet measured

The system could be run from battery and solar. What that would take: not yet specified.

Reach them at rev@transrites.io. Maintenance means the machine, the model, the writing it answers from, and the list of people it names when it stops. The writing is plain text and takes effect on the next message, without a restart.

Succession, keys, build instructions and decommissioning procedure: not yet documented. The system is meant not to depend indefinitely on one person, and that intention is not yet written down anywhere someone else could follow.

The project's licence: not yet decided.

Some things were deliberately not built, and the absences are part of the architecture.

• No accounts, no sign-in, no email address collected.
• No memory across visits, and so nothing to breach.
• No analytics, no telemetry, and nothing in the Rev's own code that logs what is asked.
• No remote model, so no prompt leaves the machine for a company's servers.
• No moderation queue of conversations, because there are no conversations to hold.

The people responsible can decide that it has served its purpose, that the purpose has changed, that its harms exceed its usefulness, or simply that they no longer want a machine in this role.

Ending it can mean shutting down the server, destroying keys, archiving or deleting the writing it answers from, and deciding whether the source should remain available. There are no conversations to delete, because none were ever kept.