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Five Surfaces

Five Surfaces — Mobius Federation Topology

Cycle: C-363 · Status: Canonical reference

Mobius is not a single application. It is five cooperating surfaces. When documentation refers to “layers” or “repos,” prefer this list to avoid drift.

The five surfaces

# Surface Role Canonical home
1 Mobius Substrate Constitutional docs, cycles, sentinels, integrity math, federation policy This repository
2 Mobius Civic AI Terminal Live pulse — GI, vault seals, sentinel journal, tripwires, EPICON ingest mobius-civic-ai-terminal
3 Mobius Browser Shell Public onboarding — School of Chambers, learn/play/explore mobius-browser-shell
4 Civic Protocol Core (CPC) Protocol rails — identity, ledger, MIC wallet, attestations Civic-Protocol-Core
5 HIVE Playable civic world — quests, signals, community simulation Browser Shell + world APIs

How they relate

Browser Shell (onboard) ──► Terminal (pulse) ──► CPC (attest)
        │                         │
        └──── HIVE (world) ◄──────┘
Substrate (constitution, cycles, definitions)
  • Substrate does not replace runtime services — it defines how they must behave.
  • Terminal is the live integrity console; do not confuse it with the Shell hallway.
  • CPC is the write path for immutable attestations; Shell and Terminal call it, they do not duplicate it.
  • HIVE is the experiential world layer; canon names stay HIVE, public UI may say World.

Domain topology (verified against production, C-437)

Stale-framing note (C-437): during Cycle 0 discovery work, an agent inferred from this doc's repo-ownership table that Browser Shell served mobius-substrate.com's root domain, and published discovery URLs (canonical links, llms.txt, sitemap.xml) on that assumption. Production Vercel routing said otherwise. That inference is marked stale, not this doc's table above — the table describes repo ownership of each surface's code, which is still accurate; it never claimed to describe DNS/domain routing. The mapping below closes that gap so the same inference isn't repeated.

Domain Serves Vercel project Repo
mobius-substrate.com, www.mobius-substrate.com Front door — journey landing page, Builder.io-managed pages, root discovery bridge (/robots.txt, /llms.txt, /sitemap.xml, /canon/cycle-0, /canon/virtue-accord) mobius-landing Mobius-Substrate (apps/mobius-landing)
chambers.mobius-substrate.com School of Chambers — canon renderer, citizen entry, canonical /canon/* content mobius-browser-shell mobius-browser-shell
terminal.mobius-substrate.com Live pulse — GI, vault seals, sentinel journal, EPICON ingest mobius-civic-ai-terminal mobius-civic-ai-terminal
handbook.mobius-substrate.com Rendered documentation site GitHub Pages (CNAME) Mobius-Substrate

The apex (mobius-substrate.com) does not duplicate Cycle 0 / Virtue Accord content. It reverse-proxies /canon/cycle-0, /canon/cycle-0.json, and /canon/virtue-accord to Browser Shell via next.config.mjs rewrites() in apps/mobius-landing, so Browser Shell stays the single owner of that content while the apex remains the discoverable front door. Each surface's own robots.txt/sitemap.xml stays independently controlled — the apex's does not forward Browser Shell's, since each host may need different crawl rules over time. llms.txt is the one exception: the apex's llms.txt is deliberately the Mobius-wide discovery map, not just this app's local manifest.

Lesson: DNS and deployment topology are evidence too. Verify against vercel.com project domains (or an equivalent live check) before asserting which surface serves which host — this doc does not define that mapping by itself, and can drift from it exactly as it just did.

Deprecated framings

Replace older copy that says:

  • “four repositories” → five surfaces (above)
  • “four layers of sovereignty” (whitepaper sense) → keep in research papers; for product docs use five surfaces
  • “Mobius Systems” (legal legacy) → Mobius Substrate or Mobius as appropriate

"We heal as we walk."