Where Case lives

Since the tap in Act I, Case has existed twice. Once in the world, running hill repeats in week-six rain. And once inside Traversal, in a form this act has not yet looked at directly.

Finn’s spike ended with the sentence the data exists, and it lives somewhere we have not visited yet. This is the visit.

Two kinds of stuff

Traversal keeps two profoundly different kinds of thing. The registrations, name, date of birth, bib, estimated finish, are structured dataConcept · lights on your mapstructured dataData with a consistent, predictable shape: every record has the same labelled parts, which is what makes searching and comparing it fast and safe.: every entry has the same labelled parts, which is exactly what made the payload readable back in Act I. The photographers’ test shots piling up from the course crew are unstructured dataConcept · lights on your mapunstructured dataData without a fixed internal shape: images, audio, free text. It holds enormous meaning and cannot be queried by its parts the way structured data can.: six thousand JPEGs have no columns. Meaning, yes. Shape, no. Most companies are exactly this pair, a filing cabinet and an attic, and confusing the two is where several billion dollars of bad projects have gone to die.

The filing cabinet

The structured kind lives in a databaseConcept · lights on your mapdatabaseSoftware whose whole job is storing data and answering questions about it: reliably, quickly, for many askers at once, without losing anything in a crash. Strictly the word names both the organised collection and the software minding it, and conversation uses it for either., software with one job done fanatically well: keep data, answer questions about it, survive anything. Traversal’s main one is a relational databaseConcept · lights on your maprelational databaseA database organising data into tables of rows and columns, with defined relationships between the tables. The dominant kind for fifty years, and the home of most of the world’s structured records., the fifty-year-old design that organises everything as tables pointing at tables, and the reason a design from the disco era still runs the world is that it earned it.

Somewhere in that cabinet is a drawer called registrations, and in it, filed between two strangers, is the entry from Act I. Name, date of birth, the slightly embarrassing email, and the optimistic 4:20:00.

Case has a street address in the world and an address inside Traversal too. The next scene reads it exactly.