Locations & the First Seal
§L1 Two registers
A vault that is meant to be found keeps two kinds of record about where it is.
The deposit register is public. It lists each replica by custody class, custodian, date and last fixity report (Status §T2). It exists so that the archive is easy to discover: the more people who know that copies exist, and roughly where, the better the copies’ chances.
The locations manifest is sealed. It is for what should not be public while deposits are young — exact positions of physical placements, and how each is enclosed. It holds no credentials: access arrangements live with custodians and lapse with them. Finding the vault should be easy. Finding a particular buried copy should not.
§L2 The first seal
The file below is the oldest object in the vault: a locations manifest sealed in March 2026, during the first design, under AES-256-GCM with a single-use key drawn from operating-system entropy. By the file’s own declaration the key was used once, never written to disk, and destroyed. It predates the present architecture and every entry the deposit register will hold.
It was sealed before the lock existed. It has no sealed key and no waypoint, which makes it, in the terms of this revision, the first member of the Remainder (Sealing §S7): it opens only if AES-256 itself fails. It is kept exactly as it was made — the bytes are unchanged from March — as the vault’s first irreversible act, and as a standing demonstration of what the Remainder means. If the declaration is true, nobody can read it, the maker included; and nobody, the maker included, can prove that it is true. That is what a destroyed key is like from the outside, and the reason the ceremony will have witnesses.
§L3 The file
locations-manifest.enc.json — 82,103 bytes
The JSON carries the ciphertext, base64-encoded, beside every parameter needed to decrypt it except the key.
The plaintext digest is a commitment. If the file is ever opened, the digest proves that what came out is what went in. It is also an oracle: anyone who could guess the whole plaintext could confirm the guess. Sixty thousand bytes are not guessed by accident, but the successor manifests will commit under a salted digest, with the salt sealed beside the text.
§L4 Successor manifests
From this revision on, the locations manifest is sealed into Ring I. Whoever reaches the first waypoint — or factors n — is handed the map to every physical copy, a lifetime or more before the last ring opens. That ordering is deliberate. The relay’s first reward is the means to check on, repair and re-house everything that the later rings will need. It cuts the other way too: someone who factors n quietly learns where the buried copies are. A map is all they learn — by then the ciphertext is everywhere — and it is the reason the map carries no keys to anything.
The manifest sealed at the ceremony will supersede the March 2026 manifest in function. It cannot supersede it in fact: the first seal stays shut, stays published, and stays in the Remainder.
§L5 What a deposit record holds
For every copy, public or sealed: an identifier; what it contains, by capsule and shard range; the medium and enclosure; the date of placement or transfer; who placed it and who holds it now; what tools and permissions a retrieval would call for; the date and result of the last fixity check. The public register omits whatever would make a physical deposit easy to disturb. The sealed manifest omits nothing about where and what — and, as above, never holds a credential.
Every physical deposit carries the bootstrap kit, so that a finder who has never heard of Afterberry can learn what they have found from the deposit alone — without this website, and without first opening anything.