Telegraph

## One key

The whole piece has one control: a key. Hold it with the mouse, a finger, or Space when it has focus. Down is a tone and a block on the trace; up is silence. Press it and you hold the line, and other visitors' keys do nothing until you have been quiet for two seconds.

## Decoding a hand

People key at their own speed, so the decoder doesn't assume one. It takes the shorter key-downs of the message as dots and the middle one as its unit. A press under two units is a dot and a longer one a dash. A gap of two units ends a letter, and five end a word. That's a little shorter than the textbook three and seven, because hands rush.

The sender's page stamps each key-down and key-up with its own clock, and the room passes those stamps on unchanged. So everyone decodes the message as it was keyed, not as the network delivered it.

## The wire

The wire is a Cloudflare Durable Object, like the rooms behind Majority Shell and The One Red. It doesn't keep any messages: it passes key-down and key-up on to everyone else and remembers who holds the line. A key held down for three seconds lets go on its own.