There was a time when the Kingdom knew that travelers had crossed its gates because the workshops came alive, signatures appeared and the registers in the basement filled up. They were already served with care, of course. But from the top of the walls, one could hardly see more than the traces they left behind.

Then Houston received a globe.

It was not a library globe, the kind one spins with a finger before declaring that one would quite like to travel to the other side of the world. This one truly turned before the Grand Watchman's eyes. Countries became covered with buildings, some regions acquired constructions of their own and, all around them, little huts appeared as travelers passed through.

The buildings told the story of what the Kingdom had already encountered. The huts, meanwhile, told what was happening right now. They were the little lights of the present: here a traveler had just produced a signature, there another had just left a trace, elsewhere a recent activity was already fading to make room for the next one. Houston was no longer merely watching a map; he was watching the Kingdom breathe on the scale of the world.

The globe quickly became a window onto lands whose names sometimes arrived faster than Trinity could plant the pins. The United States split into states, India into regions, Canada began hesitating between Ontario and Quebec, and Latin America became covered with buildings at a pace that made the Cartographer feel as though the Kingdom had just opened a branch office there.

There was Costa Rica, Ecuador, Armenia, Congo, then Panama. The latter even posed an unprecedented aesthetic problem: the isthmus was so narrow that its building almost seemed to have an entrance on the Pacific and an exit onto the Caribbean Sea.

The four sages who were not always four

Seeing a traveler was one thing. Knowing where to plant their building was another.

Houston therefore summoned several observers. DB-IP arrived with its hefty register. WhatIsMyIPAddress consulted its maps. IP2Location submitted its report. IPDNSLookup, when it still deigned to answer, completed the council. And, a little apart, Analytics could sometimes provide an additional clue.

At first, the King naively imagined that an IP address ought to correspond to one place and that several observers charged with reading a map would naturally end up reading the same one.

India took care of his education.

Some days, the sages all agreed and Houston could plant his building without so much as a frown. On other days, the same traveler seemed capable of crossing a regional border between two consultations. Jharkhand and Karnataka offered fine unanimities. Then Maharashtra arrived: DB-IP kept it in Maharashtra while WhatIsMyIPAddress and IP2Location sent it to Gujarat.

IP2Location glanced at the sheet belonging to the neighbor on its left.

As for Analytics, the King eventually withdrew its official voting rights. Its indications could be valuable, but nothing always guaranteed that it was speaking about exactly the same traveler whose address Houston was examining.

Chihuahua, or the art of planting a building

Mexico brought the Kingdom another lesson: even when one knows the name of a territory, one must still know where to plant what represents it.

Chihuahua thus entered the annals. Its name was known, its territory too, yet it became one of the symbols of Houston's long discussions about subdivisions, names and where a building should actually appear.

For official maps sometimes have a very geometric idea of the world. They can identify the exact middle of a land with impeccable rigor and plant the flag there, far from the place where humans had the eccentric idea of living.

Houston demonstrated this one day in Algeria. The building stood proudly in the middle of the desert.

Trinity contemplated the expanse at length.

The building crossed the map toward a noticeably more populated land.

Thus Trinity obtained the right to correct the visible location of a building without rewriting the maps of the Kingdom. The device received a name of great administrative sobriety: Trinity's Scrrrrch.

Four “r”s. Not three. With three, according to Trinity, the building did not move far enough.

The King immediately had the access rights checked.

Trinity took her mission very seriously. When she saw MX-YUC go by, she prepared her flip-flops.

Given equally representative options, Trinity did indeed seem to discover that a beach constituted a particularly convincing cartographic argument.

On the other hand, when Houston placed the US-AK and TF files on her desk, she suddenly developed a pronounced taste for management.

The travelers who didn't know they were working

As Houston watched more of the world, the Kingdom discovered a category of collaborators whose contracts bore no signature: involuntary QA testers.

Mr Tobago changed colors. Mr Tel Aviv used his own images — dog, fox or cat depending on the mood — while keeping his immutable “Thank you for the new page!”. A Chilean traveler went through the pages with a conquistador's persistence. And Mr Friend, somewhere in his shifting triangle between South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, produced enthusiastic series at a pace that even the workshops might have mistaken for a test bench.

Yet they had asked for none of this.

They came to write a name, choose a toon, try a color, start again, return another day. Behind their screens, they knew nothing of the workers, registers, caches, geographic databases, observers and the Grand Watchman who sometimes wondered why the same person seemed to live in three states.

The King then summed up the doctrine of the castle:

“Every traveler deserves to be welcomed as though they were expected.”

Whether they had a room in the castle or merely crossed the courtyard, the service had to be the same.

In the workshops, Déglingo was still making noise

While Houston watched the planet, the workshops had not stopped producing.

The Contexts had brought the castle their airport signs, their cans and their famous cuscini. Déglingo, who answered to the much less picturesque name of ImageMagick whenever an artisan had to write serious documentation, ruled there as the specialist. He was not the Kingdom's universal engine: his domain remained the Contexts.

Then a small revolution took place in the workshop. Where some productions had once waited patiently for their turn, several assistants began working at the same time. One prepared this while another transformed that; others simultaneously took care of the following pieces. It was no longer a queue of workers before a single bench: several benches were genuinely working together.

The result showed immediately on the clock. Operations that had previously taken their time were shortened spectacularly. The Kingdom had not merely hired a few extra hands: it had learned to divide the work among them at the very same moment.

The cuscini, meanwhile, kept their little habits. The text had to be distributed, checked to make sure it fitted the available space and, if necessary, tried again with slightly smaller letters.

One day, someone suggested that instead of patiently trying sizes one after another, they could search more intelligently. Binary search. Fibonacci. Perhaps even summon φ.

The few promised milliseconds did not justify touching a mechanism that was doing its job properly.

φ left offended. The cans continued to be delivered quickly enough.

Randomness in a can

The Kingdom also possessed vast stores of pages already prepared. When a traveler requested a known page, it was much faster to hand over a ready-made can than to fire up the whole kitchen again.

The system was fast. Very fast.

It had only one flaw: some cans contained things no one had thought of putting in a can.

A first warning had already forced the Artisans to review the pantry rules. Then came Aquiline.

The King noticed that this font seemed to have acquired a suspicious monopoly on welcoming new travelers. The artisans were questioned. The draw was checked. Arrivals were observed. Aquiline was almost placed under judicial supervision.

She was innocent.

The pantry had simply prepared a page one day on which Aquiline had been randomly selected. Then it carefully stored that page. For the next traveler, it brought out the same one. Then the same one again. And again.

Randomness had indeed worked.

Once.

Then the cache had canned it.

The remedy was ultimately very royal: keep the speed of the pantry, but give each new traveler their share of randomness again. As for those returning, they should recover their previous choices rather than those of a stranger trapped in an old can.

Miss Debi was still breathing

All these operations might have suggested a castle gasping under the load. The exact opposite was true.

Miss Debi, the great Debian 13 machine that now carried the Kingdom, spent much of her time in a state that Houston considered suspiciously close to a nap.

At only a few percent of her strength, the King would sometimes come and inspect the instruments.

Houston too.

Then Houston again.

The calm was not idleness, however. It meant that the Kingdom had considerable reserve for the moment when a Mr Warsaw might decide, without warning, to launch an industrial campaign of signatures.

And Mr Warsaw existed.

He had even left behind 1,956 works promised to a very specific fate.

Madam Purge and Mr TAR

In the basement, two officials had very different ideas about preserving heritage.

Mr TAR came by every Sunday. He methodically packed up the week's works before his colleague entered the scene.

Madam Purge then came to make room.

She was not talkative. She went down the corridors, inspected the shelves, climbed back toward the upper floors and wrote a few numbers in her register. Old ordinary files disappeared. Some toons, however, brandished their right to remain in a personal gallery and Madam Purge passed them by.

Signatures had no such privilege. For those their author wished to carry away permanently, the Kingdom offered a door to the outside.

She turned a page.

The next day, she was due to meet Mr Warsaw's 1,956 works in two batches, one around noon and the other around six in the evening.

Mr TAR had already taken everything.

Madam Purge could begin.

The Grand Watchman looked at the globe again

When evening came, Houston slowly turned the Earth.

Somewhere, a traveler was choosing a font. Elsewhere, another was changing the color of a signature. A hut had just lit up while another, now too old to tell the present, faded away. In Panama, a building still seemed able to open its windows onto two oceans. In India, three observers might finally have agreed. In Mexico, Chihuahua was in its place — or at least in a place Trinity had not yet decided to correct.

Trinity walked behind him carrying her flip-flops.

In the workshops, several workers could now work together. Déglingo maintained his machines. Miss Debi slept with one eye open. Mr TAR closed his archives. Madam Purge prepared the next day's route. Aquiline, for a few hours yet, handled an unreasonable share of the welcome desk shifts.

The King observed all this from the walls.

The Kingdom had not merely learned to produce faster, distribute its workers better or plant constructions on a globe.

It had learned to see those for whom all these machines were working.

A new light had just appeared somewhere on Earth.

Houston was already leaning over his registers. Trinity brought a hand toward her Scrrrrch. In the workshops, nobody asked whether the traveler was expected.

The question no longer arose.

“Every traveler deserves to be welcomed as though they were expected.”