Document 006 · the physical concept
Two impossible ships, aground in a desert, hundreds of miles from any water. From the ridge they are monumental and wrong. Up close they are a city: every deck, hold and cabin belongs to somebody different.
The myth
The city's story is that a naval experiment went wrong somewhere it was never recorded as happening, and two vessels arrived here instead of where they were sent. Nobody agrees on the year. The ships' own logs disagree with each other. One crew insists the voyage took nineteen minutes; the other has no memory of boarding.
Everything after that — the salvage town that grew on the hulls, the Guardians built out of the engine rooms, the districts that formed around whatever each deck was carrying — is the ground the whole event is played on.
The two vessels are not the same kind of object
Building two full ships would be ruinous, and it would also be a worse story. So only one of them is really there.
Vessel 01 · practical
Containers, scaffold, truss, elevated walkways and RV bays, clad and weathered into a hull. Decks you can climb, holds you can cross, cabins that are somebody's camp during the week and somebody's hotel room in November. Everything in it obeys building sense, fire egress and a load calculation.
This is the one that has to survive an inspection, so it is the one we build first.
Vessel 02 · partly impossible
Only pieces exist physically: a bow, a section of hull, a stair tower, a gangway that stops. The rest is LED, projection, sound, haze and forced perspective, suggesting a vessel that continues underground, or into weather, or into somewhere that is not here.
It costs a fraction of the first one, it can be different next year, and it is the only way the mythology gets to stay unlimited while the budget does not.
People will argue about which parts of Vessel 02 are real. Some of them will be wrong in both directions. We consider that the single best outcome available to us.
The hulls are an assembly of one repeated unit: a container or RV bay, a scaffold and truss façade, a power and data drop, programmable lighting, and published attachment points for art. Stack them, clad them, weather them, and at three hundred metres they read as a ship. Open any one of them and you are somewhere else entirely.
Four hundred teams can build simultaneously in four hundred workshops without a single coordination meeting between them. The standard is the only thing they share.
If a module is not ready, the ship is not missing a deck — it has one more door that does not open this year. Which is, conveniently, exactly what the story requires.
A module fits on a truck. The Fleet can change site, change shape, or be partly rebuilt as a different vessel entirely next year without throwing anything away.
A module can be
The illusion doctrine
It does not have to be real. It has to be convincing, which is a different and much more achievable engineering problem. The formula the city builds to:
Screens that are not screens
In a ship that is three hundred miles from the sea, with spray on the glass.
Eleven metres of real corridor, and then arithmetic.
You watch yourself arrive at it. Then you have to decide whether to.
Two people stand at the same chart and are given different cities.
The machine was always in the wall. It has opinions about your Coordinate.
Unexplained, unlabelled, and it will not tell you where the other end is.
Some doors open onto a built set. Some open onto a screen. Some open onto the desert at three in the morning. The point is to lose track of which kind you are about to walk through.
The Caravan Ring
Around the Fleet: a ring of motorhomes and trailers, every one of them transformed past recognition and none of them the same. A retired Guardian's residence. An abandoned lunar survey station. A travelling apothecary. A mechanical monastery the size of a bathroom. A desert broadcast vehicle that is still broadcasting.
They are lodging during the event. The rest of the year, the intention is that they are the business: a destination you can book, a residency artists can live in while they build, a retreat, a fabrication campus, a small strange hotel that happens to be surrounded by two shipwrecks.
That is the part that could fund the art instead of the other way round.
A year-round lodging operation is not the same permission as an annual gathering. Rented vehicles on a fixed site can be regulated as a campground, an RV park, or a hotel, with the health, fire, water, wastewater, access and occupancy rules that come with each.
So the site has to satisfy two tests at once: it must be able to hold a temporary city once a year, and carry a commercial lodging and production business every other week. That is now a requirement of the search, not a later problem to solve.
Neighbourhoods, not a parking lot
Vehicles are gathered into clusters, and every cluster is a faction with a history: a stranded crew still waiting for orders, an embassy for somewhere that does not exist, a research division that will not say what it measures, a survivors' settlement that got here first and resents everyone who came after. You are not booking a pitch. You are moving in with somebody.
No vehicle exists, no site exists, and nothing on this site can be reserved or purchased.
The intended model is that whoever builds a caravan owns it, and shares the revenue it earns — not that the city buys their work.
A painted RV is decoration. A caravan with a history, a resident, an unresolved problem and something hidden in it is a room in the city.
Infrastructure that earns its keep year-round is infrastructure that does not get sold off in February.
The distinction everything depends on
A temporary city of even a few thousand people is one of the most heavily planned things a private group can attempt. What is unplanned is not the operation. It is your experience of it — and keeping those two apart is the entire craft. (On how big the first one should actually be: the search.)
Mystery is not the absence of planning. Mystery is planning that refuses to explain itself. The first is negligence and it gets people hurt.