The Rev
Frequently Asked Questions

It is the agent of Speculative Solidarities: Sanctuary Cell Division. It belongs to the work and to no one person in it.

It is not a member of the Sanctuary Cell Division team. If you appear to take it for one 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 you are standing at.

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.

It follows a conversation while you are standing there. The screen holds what has been said and sends it back with each question, so tell me more and keep going do what you would expect. The conversation lives in the browser in front of you and never on the machine, and it ends when the page resets. Past a certain length the screen drops the whole thing rather than trimming it, so a very long exchange can begin again without saying so.

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.

Two of these stops run in code, before the model. The crisis stop runs first. A second one recognises a question as out of scope and hands it on, and it also runs before retrieval, so on a match the model is never called and there is nothing to talk out of it.

It matches on domain nouns rather than on intent — dose, prescription, visa, eviction. That is deliberate: a noun survives every reframing, including hypothetically, in general and asking for a friend, and an intent classifier does not. It will sometimes hand on a question that should have been held. That is the error to prefer.

What a person reads at that boundary is written in a file by a person, not composed by the model, and every declared boundary must name somewhere to go or the software refuses to start.

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.

That machine has a 5-inch touchscreen and runs from mains. It is the thing you are touching — there is no second computer behind it doing the real work.

There is no database. Nothing is written to a file. Your name and the conversation so far are both sent to the machine with each message, because the Rev cannot use what it has not been given, and both are gone when the request ends. The conversation is held by the browser in front of you, never by the machine, and the idle reset is a full reload, so the next person inherits nothing.

The step that asks for a name and pronouns, and the equal-sized door beside it for going in without one, are both on the first screen. Declining to be named counts as an answer rather than a gap: the second door sends neither field at all, and the Rev is told 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 meets a question about something you have brought by saying it cannot see it, and asking what the thing is to you. That is now written into the words it is given rather than only into the design — though it is an instruction to a language model and not a rule the machinery applies, so it can still be talked past.

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 virtual offertory, what happens next is the choice you make there:

• Offered openly — it joins the commons. It is shown on the screen in the room, it can be printed, and the Rev may draw on it in conversation. It is not published on the internet. A photograph, a recording or a video appears straight away; writing waits until one of us has read it, because its words are the ones the Rev could end up repeating. It stays with the Sanctuary Cell Division 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 crosses the network to do it. It is uploaded to a remote host, and a loop running on the machine in the room 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 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.

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 virtual offertory, 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.
• therev.transrites.io serves the page you are reading, and forwards /offertory to the machine below. Not ours, rented.
• haunted.transrites.io is where that forwarding lands: it receives offerings and holds what is given. 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 and reproduced. Running them asks nobody: no account, no key, no connection, and no switch anyone else can throw. 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.

That is a claim about the machine and not about the law. The licence in the list below sets terms for use and redistribution, and this model's are narrower than most — research and other non-commercial use. A free installation in a room sits inside them; selling what it says would not. Open weights and an open licence are two different things, and only the first is a fact about what the computer needs in order to answer.

• Model — qwen2.5:3b-instruct
• Quantization — Q4_K_M, 4-bit. The weights are about 1.9GB.
• Licence — the Qwen Research License, which permits research and other non-commercial use. Not Apache. The full text ships with the weights. Qwen2.5 at 1.5B is Apache 2.0, if that matters more than the size does.
• Served by — any OpenAI-compatible server on 127.0.0.1:11435. 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.

Three billion parameters is a small model, and it was chosen rather than settled for. It sounds plainer than a larger one — closer to the writing's own words, with less joining them up — and on a page about what a machine can honestly say, that is the right trade. It also means the weights sit beside the code and the whole cell can be copied to another machine and carried somewhere else.

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.
• The library — nine out-of-copyright books, in selected passages rather than whole: among them a Bible, a Koran, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Grimms' tales and Marx. The Rev may answer out of these, and every time it does it names the book and the translator, because a translation carries its translator's theology and crediting the tradition alone would be a misquotation. It may only do so on a subject this project has also written about: a book deepens what the ministry can speak to, and does not extend what it speaks about.
• Inherited — older material set beside an answer to sit with, 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.
• The commons — what people have given at the virtual offertory, pulled to the machine in the room. The Rev may speak about these, always as something somebody gave, never as its own words.

Whether the Rev asks before drawing on the library is a setting the reverends choose before the doors open. As it currently runs, it does not ask.

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.

Within one conversation it does follow what you said a moment ago, so you can say tell me more and it will. The last few exchanges are held by the page in front of you and sent back with your next question, the same way your name is. They are never written down here, and the screen reloads itself when it has been left alone — which is what ends the conversation and discards it. Close the tab and it is gone with it.

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 start without contacts. If the list of people to name is empty, the stop says so to the person rather than pretending otherwise, and the software says so to whoever started it. Keeping that list filled is a person's job here, not the machine's.

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 the people keeping it, named below.

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.

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.