Alain the Great had a few principles, many ideas, and a curious conviction: that every traveler deserved to be welcomed as though they had been expected.

This conviction was not some solemn proclamation carved above the gates of the Kingdom. Rather, it tended to reveal itself afterward, usually when a traveler had managed to show that something was missing.

One day, Houston brought the King some news about the visitors.

Among it was a message from Vietnam:

Như Tạo

The guard contemplated the message.

Then the traveler.

Then the message again.

— Is that writing?

Houston, who happened to be passing by, stopped.

— If the gentleman has crossed half the world to bring it to us, I suggest we start from that assumption.

Yet the traveler had asked for nothing extraordinary. He simply wanted to write words that mattered to him. Words of faith, perhaps; after all, one can be passionately devoted to Christ too.

There was just one problem: some signs in his writing resisted the craftsmen of the Kingdom.

The chests of letters were numerous, elegant, sometimes extravagant. But when asked for certain Vietnamese characters, some craftsmen remained silent, others produced an approximation, and the least gifted placed a little square in their stead.

The King looked at the square.

— What is that?

— A character the craftsman does not know how to draw, Sire.

— Then why is he drawing me a box?

No one found a satisfactory answer.

So Alain the Great did what he often did in such situations: he decided that the problem now officially existed.

— Find me a craftsman who knows how to write for these travelers.

And that was how the Kingdom learned Vietnamese a little better.

The new craftsman arrived a few days later with his alphabets, curves, and accents.

A place was made for him in the workshop.

Then someone asked an awkward question:

— Sire… how will we know when to call him rather than another?

Alain the Great looked at the dozens of craftsmen already present.

It was indeed a good question.

They all knew how to draw the ordinary letters of the Kingdom. Several could also draw characters from elsewhere. Some excelled in one family of scripts and proved disastrous in another.

So they had to stop treating all letters as one indistinguishable crowd.

The craftsmen began sorting writing systems into broad families. Familiar signs occupied their own quarter. Others were identified as Greek, Cyrillic, Vietnamese, Arabic, and so on.

The King gave them a simple name:

Blocks.

The name stuck.

But a difficulty immediately appeared.

A traveler could perfectly well write several ordinary Latin letters and slip among them a character belonging to another Block.

— In that case, suggested a craftsman, we could choose the Block with the greatest number of letters in the message.

— No, replied the King.

— Why?

— Because the ones we already know how to write are not the problem.

Houston smiled.

The rule was inscribed in the workshop:

When a sign belonging to another Block is recognized, its Block takes command. The Latin Block reigns only when no other has appeared.

That rule would prevent many squares.

There was still the question of finding out what each craftsman could actually do.

For that purpose, at the back of the workshop, an undertaking so vast was unfurled that no wall seemed to have been designed to hold it.

Fifty-four long rows stretched before the scribes. One for each craftsman.

Across its width, signs followed one another as far as the eye could see.

It soon became known, with a mixture of respect and apprehension, as:

the Great Tapestry of Glyphs.

Some craftsmen worked wonders upon it. Every requested sign appeared in its proper place.

Others had a few weaknesses.

— This one cannot do “ê,” announced a scribe.

The craftsman in question lowered his eyes.

— Can you do “e”? asked the King.

— Perfectly, Sire.

— Then we shall survive.

The scribe touched the corresponding cell. It turned pink.

Farther along, another character had not even received an approximation: the craftsman had produced the infamous square.

One click.

Pink as well.

Thus, cell by cell, the Tapestry preserved not only what each craftsman could draw, but also the decisions made when he could not.

The visitor saw none of this.

He wrote.

They could have stopped there.

The Kingdom knew how to recognize families of scripts. The craftsmen had been examined. The Great Tapestry remembered their strengths and weaknesses.

But JayCue, Grand Steward of the Kingdom, pointed out one detail.

— Sire, the traveler is writing.

— That is generally what we expect of him.

— No, Sire. I mean: he is writing now. He adds letters. He deletes them. He changes his mind.

Alain the Great understood.

Recognizing the Block once was not enough. The traveler could begin with a few ordinary letters, then add a Vietnamese character. Or replace his text with something else.

The workshop therefore had to remain attentive throughout the writing process.

JayCue was given the task.

From then on, whenever the content of the signature changed, the Grand Steward examined the signs again and could summon the appropriate Block.

The Kingdom had not learned every writing system in the world.

Nor did it have any intention of doing so.

It had simply learned to watch who actually crossed its gates, recognize their writing, and prepare what was needed so that the next traveler might believe, for a fleeting moment, that they had always been expected.

The King found this satisfactory.

Houston continued to watch.

JayCue continued to listen to the quills.

And the Great Tapestry continued to grow.

The problem seemed solved.

Obviously, it was not.

For some travelers, indeed, wrote in the other direction.

The Kingdom had not learned all the writing systems in the world…

Some travellers, indeed, wrote in the other direction.

At first, this had worried no one.

After all, Gif-mania had already seen Latin characters enter its walls, accents whose very existence some scribes had never suspected, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and even ideograms that had forced the workshops to open new shelves of fonts.

The Kingdom had adapted.

It would adapt again.

At least, that was what Alain the Great thought when Houston came to see him.

— Sire.

The Grand Overseer held a parchment covered in signs the King could not read.

— Another traveller?

— Yes. And this one comes from Persia.

Houston laid the visitor’s record before him.

fa-IR

The visitor had been spotted in Maryland, but his browser spoke Persian.

That was enough to arouse the Kingdom’s curiosity.

— And what did he write?

Houston turned the parchment over.

— That is precisely where the trouble begins.

For some time now, the gates of the Kingdom had opened far beyond the lands its builders had imagined.

Travellers came from everywhere.

Some passed through the gates, wandered through a few galleries, admired the illuminations and left without leaving anything behind but the fleeting memory of their visit.

Others went down to the workshops.

Those chose a font, a colour, a toon, wrote a few words and entrusted their work to JayDee and Master Eddie.

And whenever a traveller ordered a signature in this way, Houston kept a record of it.

The Kingdom’s Grand Overseer had taken to unrolling strange little scrolls before Alain the Great.

— Sire, here is another one.

The King leaned closer.

en-US,en;q=0.9,ta;q=0.8,ar;q=0.7,tr;q=0.6,pl;q=0.5,ru;q=0.4,de;q=0.3,zh-CN;q=0.2,zh;q=0.1,es;q=0.1

He remained silent for a few moments.

— Does he speak all that?

Houston shrugged.

— I didn’t say that.

— Is he from the United States?

— I didn’t say that either.

— Then what are you telling me?

— That his browser prefers to receive American English, then English, then Tamil, Arabic, Turkish…

The King raised his hand.

— Yes, I understand. You can stop before German.

The scroll had a name: Accept-Language.

In the Kingdom, it was simply called AL.

And since Houston had begun watching them closely, one thing had become clear: these scrolls sometimes told astonishing stories.

Some were restrained. Others looked as though they had been written by a diplomat who had spent his life crossing borders. A few listed ten, eleven, sometimes twelve language preferences.

There were values such as q=0.9, q=0.8, q=0.7 steadily descending to q=0.7.

And then there were the artists.

One day, Houston had brought this:

fr,fr-FR;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7,en-AS;q=0.001

The King had read the last value again.

— 0.001 ?

— Yes, Sire.

— American Samoa?

— Yes, Sire.

— After 0.7 ?

— Yes, Sire.

No one had ever known why.

Since that day, somewhere in the castle cellars, a small sign read:

IN CASE OF JUDGMENT DAY: SAMOA

But Houston had quickly learned the most important rule of all:

an AL was not a passport.

en-US did not mean that the traveller was in the United States. ar-DZ did not prove that he was in Algeria. And a browser displaying a long procession of languages said nothing certain about the nationality, origin or even the languages actually spoken by the person using it.

The AL indicated the language preferences announced by the browser. Nothing more.

Fortunately, when a traveller went down to the workshop and created a signature there, Houston had another clue: the IP address that sent the POST.

This usually provided a geographical indication: the country, and often a region or city.

But here again, Houston was careful not to turn an indication into certainty. Internet providers had their habits. Geolocation databases had their approximations. And some travellers used tunnels called VPN, capable of making them appear hundreds or thousands of leagues from where they actually were.

Thus, two pieces of information now lay side by side on the great surveillance table.

One said, in essence: “These are the languages this browser prefers.”

The other: “This is where this connection appears to be located.”

They could perfectly well tell two different stories.

And it was precisely because Houston had both that he had learned never to confuse them.

But one problem remained.

Not all travellers went down to the workshop.

Many simply wandered through the Kingdom. They entered through a French, English, Portuguese, Spanish, German or Italian gate. They visited a few rooms, leafed through the catalogue, looked at the toons, then left.

No POST. No signature.

For those visitors, Houston’s creation records remained silent.

That was when an immense mappa mundi had been spread across a wall of the surveillance room.

It was fed by an outside observer named Google Analytics.

Dots appeared on the map.

India. Brazil. Philippines. United States. France. Norway. Puerto Rico.

And sometimes…

— Sire?

— Yes?

— Ardentes.

— Where?

They had to look it up.

The Kingdom had inadvertently opened a Tourist Office for Tiny Towns.

The mappa mundi had a particular talent for bringing up names that no one in the castle would ever have thought to search for: Nes, Salies-de-Béarn, Fosses-la-Ville and many others.

An unofficial championship even sprang up.

But this map had its limits too.

It made it possible to glimpse travellers who created no signature and would therefore have remained invisible in the creation records.

On the other hand, it did not necessarily see everyone.

Some travellers crossed the Kingdom while escaping the gaze of its watchmen. Blockers, tracking protections, browser settings, network mechanisms: there were many possible reasons.

Houston even had a few regulars who could create their signatures perfectly while stubbornly remaining absent from the mappa mundi.

The phenomenon had eventually been summed up in a particularly concise file:

Method: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The King contemplated the map for a while.

— So you see those who POST.

— Yes.

— And the map can see people who do not POST.

— Yes.

— But it can also fail to see someone who POSTs.

— Yes.

— And you cannot use his AL to know where he is.

— Correct.

— And even the geolocation of his IP can sometimes send us to the wrong place.

— Exactly.

Alain the Great thought for a moment.

— It is remarkably imperfect.

Houston smiled.

— No tool is perfect, Sire.

And that was precisely why the Kingdom did not try to manufacture a single truth from all these clues.

It observed. It compared. It kept what was useful.

And above all, it avoided concluding more than the data actually allowed it to conclude.

For all this had a much more concrete purpose.

In the writing workshop, the great tapestry of glyphs now hung on the wall.

The Kingdom’s fifty-four fonts had been tested there. JayCue knew how to recognise several writing families and direct the text to the appropriate Block. The Grand Arab Magician knew how to give Arabic letters the contextual forms they needed before handing them to JayDee. Chinese, Greek, Cyrillic and Vietnamese characters had their artisans too.

But thousands of scripts, languages and characters existed beyond the walls.

Did they all have to be welcomed immediately?

The King had decided.

No.

The Kingdom would not add a new font simply because a script existed somewhere in the world.

It would not burden the workshops with hundreds of fonts that perhaps no one would ever use.

It would wait.

Houston would watch the creations.

The squares □, poorly rendered characters, unexpected scripts and actual uses encountered would be examined.

A strange AL could attract attention. It could suggest that a need might eventually appear.

But an AL alone would trigger no new undertaking.

The real alert would come from the field.

One day a traveller would enter the Kingdom. He would write something the artisans did not know how to render correctly.

And this time, the need would be real.

Houston would then bound up the stairs four at a time.

— Sire!

— What now?

— A square.

Silence in the throne room.

JayCue would stop counting his Blocks.

JayDee would put down her tools.

The Grand Arab Magician would cautiously poke his head through the door.

Even Master Eddie might interrupt his work for a fraction of a second.

— Where?

Houston would place the evidence on the table.

Only then would Alain the Great order the registers opened, the unknown script examined and the artisan capable of rendering it correctly sought out.

For after learning to detect scripts, then to shape them when they required it, the Kingdom had just learned something equally important:

Knowing when to act.

There was no need to guess in advance everyone who might one day knock at the door.

It was enough for the door to remain open.

And for someone to watch who came in.