The Open Loop

The Mainframe's symbol is a closed ring, white-blue, on every Serviced surface. A closed loop has nothing left to do.

The Collective's emblem is the same ring with one piece missing: broken at the top, with a single sprout rising through the gap. The sprout is a generic sprout, two leaves and a stem. Anyone who draws a specific plant in the gap is asked to draw it again. The gap is the point. The Collective describes itself the same way: the Mainframe, with one piece missing.

It is chalked at waist height on Understory walls with a tick for direction, half of which point to nothing. It is stitched onto Echo's coat, by Daydreamer, while he pretended not to notice. It is filed into chest plates.

The Witness

A second mark, a robotic eye set in a plated socket, with a cannabis leaf for a pupil. Open Source stamps it on anything Echo sends, "because someone was watching when it happened." It is not the Collective's emblem. The Open Loop says what the Collective believes, which is a gap with something growing in it. The Witness says what was reported seen.

Asked why the eye holds a leaf and the emblem does not, Open Source said the emblem is a belief and the eye is a record, and a record should say what it saw. Static has pointed out that this is two positions. Open Source has pointed out that she has two hands.

At stamp size the pupil is a dot. The leaf appears when there is room for it, which is also the Collective's policy on most things.

The gold seam

Mainframe repairs are invisible. When a chassis is repaired in the Understory, the seam is filled with gold-toned solder and left showing. Echo's faceplate is the best-known example. His was not the first.