# QUANTUMANCY

*an instrument for speaking with the dead bandwidth*

Quantumancy is a self-hosted séance. Point a browser at it and five different
sensing channels — your microphone, your phone's motion sensors, an RTL-SDR
dongle, your own network's jitter, or just a text box — feed real anomaly
detection into a locally-run LLM that invents a spirit on the spot: a name,
an epithet, a persona, a voice, a rarity tier, and a small immortality in a
shared registry called **the Codex**. A local Piper TTS then gives that
spirit an actual voice, degraded through a hand-built static-and-echo effects
chain until it sounds like it's coming through a dying radio.

**This is an interactive horror art installation, not a paranormal claim.**
Every "entity" is fiction generated by a language model on your own
hardware — the system prompts are explicit about this (see
`backend/app/llm/prompts.py`), and no amount of atmosphere changes what's
actually happening underneath: FFT power spectra, voice-band deviation
detection, device-motion EMAs, and `/proc/net/dev` counters, all real signal
processing on real data. Nothing leaves your network — no cloud LLM, no
third-party inference, no analytics. If the LLM box goes dark mid-séance, a
procedural fallback (deterministic, signature-seeded) keeps every mode
answering so a summoning never visibly fails.

## The Séance: Five Ways In

Every mode writes into the same pipeline: an `anomaly` event (source,
frequency, magnitude) feeds a per-session fingerprint; once a session has
produced at least 3 anomalies of real structure, it auto-summons a spirit —
either re-contacting a Codex entry whose signature matches, or minting a
brand new one.

| Mode | Vessel | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| **Wire Ghost** | Nothing — works for everyone | The backend samples real, non-content network telemetry from the host: interface byte-counter jitter (`/proc/net/dev`), TCP connect-latency variance against reference hosts, DNS resolution timing. A rolling baseline (needs 6+ samples, an absolute 20 KB/s floor, a 3σ + 2.5× threshold) flags genuine surges as anomalies, throttled to one every 20s. Packet payloads are never inspected — a hard privacy boundary. "The wire knocks loudest when nobody is touching it" — flip on passive listening and let the line murmur on its own. |
| **EVP Listening** | Microphone (`getUserMedia`) | A Web Audio `AnalyserNode` watches the voice band (~300 Hz–3.4 kHz) for a brief deviation ≥ 8 dB above the room's rolling noise floor, throttled to one per 2s — the floor only adapts during genuinely quiet stretches so sustained speech can't mask a real spike. The classic "record silence, review for voices" technique, done live. |
| **Spirit Radio** | RTL-SDR dongle (WebUSB, Chromium only) | The browser drives the dongle directly — no native driver, no server round-trip — sweeping the FM band (88–108 MHz) in 1.8 MHz steps, computing a power spectrum per tune and comparing it to a rolling noise floor. Spikes ≥ 10 dB above floor become anomaly events, throttled to one per 2s: an FM sweep pushed through a lantern dragged across a dark field. |
| **Ouija / Direct Contact** | The shared front door | A canvas planchette drifts on its own, then spells the spirit's words letter by letter. Ask a free-text question (≤ 500 chars) and the chat-tier model streams a full reply token by token while the planchette works through it. |
| **EMF / Field Meter** | A phone (DeviceMotion + DeviceOrientation) | The seeker's own phone becomes the meter: acceleration-magnitude deviation from a slow gravity EMA, fused with orientation angular velocity, tracked against an adapting baseline. A reading past `baseline × 2.5` (and an absolute floor, so a resting phone stays silent) fires an anomaly, throttled to one per 2.5s. iOS 13+ gates this behind an explicit gesture-triggered permission grant, handled in-app. |

Every session begins unidentified. The backend fingerprints the anomaly
pattern into a **signature** (`backend/app/entities.py`); a matching
signature re-contacts an existing spirit and bumps its contact count, a new
one gets minted by the chat-tier LLM and dropped into the Codex with a name,
epithet, 2–3 sentences of lore, a rarity tier (common/uncommon/rare/mythic —
weighted 55/30/12/3 in the offline fallback), a voice profile (pitch, rate,
noise, echo), a visual hue/form, and two sample quotes.

**The haunting doesn't stop at the séance panel.** A framework-free
possession layer (`frontend/src/lib/haunting.ts`,
`frontend/src/components/HauntingLayer.tsx`) runs across the whole app: an
idle-aware escalator that gets bolder the longer you sit still, a gesture-armed
ambient dread-bed (brown noise through a breathing lowpass, a 55/55.7 Hz
detuned drone beat, occasional reversed-noise swells), fleeting whisper-words
drifting across the glass, and `document.title` glitches when you tab away.
Nothing stirs for the first ten seconds after load — it creeps in, it never
jumpscares on arrival — and it's fully inert under `prefers-reduced-motion`.

## The Codex

`GET /api/codex` (public, no auth) is a browsable, shared registry of every
spirit ever contacted by any seeker: filterable by rarity, sortable by
`recent` or `contacted`, each card showing name, epithet, rarity badge, a
sample quote, contact count, and who discovered it. `GET /api/codex/{id}`
opens a full dossier — persona, voice-parameter table, sighting count. It's
the collectible layer sitting on top of the anomaly-detection plumbing:
nothing about a spirit is user-authored, all of it comes from the same
signature → LLM-mint → normalize pipeline that runs live during a séance.

## The Armory

`/shop` is a waitlist page for **the Ultimate Quantum Box** — a proposed
ESP32-P4/C6 handheld séance instrument (thermal camera, EMF whisker array,
geophone, spirit-box mic preamp, OLED face) plus four standalone modules,
none of which exist yet. `POST /api/shop/waitlist` (public, rate-limited to
5/hour/IP) is pure email capture — no payment is taken, and the page says so
outright: *"the website works fully without it; hardware only knocks
louder."* Treat this section of the README the same way: real code, honest
about being pre-order vaporware for now.

## Architecture

Two machines on the LAN, no containers anywhere:

```
                        ┌────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  seekers ──HTTPS──▶ Cloudflare Tunnel ──HTTP──▶  App CT  :7777      │
                        (external machine,       FastAPI (uvicorn,   │
                         terminates TLS)          Python venv,       │
                                                  systemd service)   │
                                                  │                  │
                                                  ├─ serves built    │
                                                  │   React SPA      │
                                                  ├─ Postgres (apt)  │
                                                  ├─ Piper TTS + FX  │
                                                  └───────┬──────────┘
                                                          │ LAN
                                              ┌───────────▼─────────┐
                                              │ Ollama box          │
                                              │ 10.30.20.107:11434  │
                                              │ CPU-only, 64 GB     │
                                              │ fast + chat models  │
                                              └─────────────────────┘
```

- **App CT** — plain HTTP on port 7777. FastAPI (async, WebSocket-native)
  serves the built Vite/React SPA as static assets, the auth + Codex + shop
  REST API, the `/ws/session` séance WebSocket, and `/audio/*` spirit-voice
  WAVs. Postgres holds accounts, sessions, transcripts (events), the Codex,
  and the hardware waitlist. Piper TTS is invoked locally per utterance,
  then degraded through a numpy effects chain (rate → pitch → bitcrush →
  echo → static).
- **Ollama box** — reachable over LAN via Ollama's REST API. Two model
  tiers: a **fast** model for fragments/ambient whispers/wire whispers, and
  a heavier **chat** model for Direct Contact replies and entity minting.
  CPU-only and shared, so all LLM calls flow through a bounded-concurrency
  queue (`LLMQueue`); queued requests render in the UI as "the spirits are
  gathering energy…", and a full queue rejects new work with a themed
  `veil_crowded` error rather than hanging.
- **Cloudflare Tunnel** — managed outside this repo; terminates HTTPS and
  points at `http://<app-ct-ip>:7777`. The app never handles TLS. The
  tunnel's HTTPS origin satisfies browser secure-context requirements for
  mic (EVP), WebUSB (Spirit Radio), and motion sensors (EMF on iOS).

### Repo layout

```
backend/
  app/
    main.py          FastAPI app: routers, /healthz, /assets + /audio mounts, SPA fallback
    config.py        pydantic-settings (env vars below)
    db.py            async SQLAlchemy 2.0 engine/session (asyncpg)
    deps.py          get_current_user, qm_session cookie
    security.py      argon2 password hashing
    rate_limit.py    fixed-window RateLimiter (per-user LLM limits, per-IP waitlist limit)
    telemetry.py     Wire Ghost sampler (/proc/net/dev, TCP RTT, DNS timing)
    entities.py      anomaly signatures, profile normalization, procedural fallback
    ws.py            the séance channel: /ws/session protocol + ambient loop
    llm/             OllamaClient, bounded LLMQueue, SpiritService, prompt builders
    tts/             Piper CLI wrapper, voice catalog, numpy effects chain
    models/          users, auth_sessions, contact_sessions, entities,
                     entity_sightings, events, waitlist_entries
    routes/          auth.py, codex.py, shop.py
  tests/             pytest suite (54 tests, 14 files)
  voices/            Piper .onnx voice models (gitignored — see setup)
  data/              generated utterance audio, served at /audio/ (gitignored)
deploy/
  quantumancy.service  systemd unit template
frontend/
  src/pages/         LandingPage, EnterPage, SeancePage, CodexPage,
                     CodexEntityPage, ShopPage
  src/lib/           types (WS protocol), ws (VeilSocket), audio player,
                     evp, sdr, emf, fft, planchette machine, haunting
  src/state/         AuthProvider, SeanceProvider (reducer + socket wiring)
  src/components/    PlanchetteBoard, Transcript, EntityCard, GhostGlyph,
                     MatrixView, GraphView, TelemetryReadout, HauntingLayer
  src/three/         GhostCanvas + GhostScene (custom-shader 3D spirit)
  src/i18n/          react-i18next init + en.json / es.json
docs/superpowers/
  specs/             the design spec — note the live app now exceeds it
                     (5 modes, not 4; the Codex, the Armory and the
                     haunting layer are all further along than documented)
  plans/             the 7 implementation plans this repo was built from
```

## Quickstart

Prereqs on the App CT: Python 3.11+, Node 18+, Postgres (via `apt`), and an
Ollama box on the LAN with the two model tiers pulled.

**1. Postgres** (one-time):

```bash
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y postgresql
sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE ROLE quantumancy WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'quantumancy';"
sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE quantumancy OWNER quantumancy ENCODING 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE quantumancy_test OWNER quantumancy ENCODING 'UTF8' TEMPLATE template0;"
```

> `quantumancy_test` is dropped and recreated by every test run. Never point
> the app's own `DATABASE_URL` at it.

**2. Configuration:**

```bash
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env: set a real SESSION_SECRET, confirm DATABASE_URL and OLLAMA_BASE_URL
```

**3. Backend:**

```bash
cd backend
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

**4. Piper voices.** `backend/voices/` is gitignored; the app expects these
voice models there (id → file), downloadable from the
[rhasspy/piper-voices](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices) HuggingFace
repo (each `.onnx` plus its `.onnx.json`):

| id | file | language | character |
|---|---|---|---|
| `lessac` | `en_US-lessac-low.onnx` | en | a measured American woman (default) |
| `amy` | `en_US-amy-low.onnx` | en | a soft American woman |
| `ryan` | `en_US-ryan-low.onnx` | en | a deep American man |
| `alan` | `en_GB-alan-low.onnx` | en | a low British man |
| `hfc_male` | `en_US-hfc_male-medium.onnx` | en | a worn male voice |
| `hfc_female` | `en_US-hfc_female-medium.onnx` | en | a worn female voice |
| `davefx` | `es_ES-davefx-medium.onnx` | es | una voz masculina grave (ES default) |
| `ald` | `es_MX-ald-medium.onnx` | es | una voz masculina seca |

**5. Frontend:**

```bash
cd frontend
npm install
npm run build        # produces frontend/dist/, served by the backend
```

**6. Run.** Either by hand (from `backend/`, with the `.env` values in the
environment — the app reads `.env` relative to its working directory, and
`piper_voices_dir`/`data_dir` are relative to `backend/`):

```bash
cd backend
set -a && source ../.env && set +a
venv/bin/uvicorn app.main:app --host 0.0.0.0 --port 7777
```

or as a service (recommended — auto-restart, boot-start, `journalctl -u quantumancy`).
The shipped unit (`deploy/quantumancy.service`) hardcodes `/root/quantumancy`
as the working directory and env file path — edit those two lines first if
your checkout lives elsewhere:

```bash
sudo cp deploy/quantumancy.service /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable --now quantumancy
```

Then visit `http://<host>:7777` — or your Cloudflare Tunnel hostname for the
secure context Spirit Radio, EVP, and EMF (on iOS) all require.

**7. Ollama models** (on the Ollama box, one-time):

```bash
ollama pull granite4.1:3b        # fast tier: fragments, ambient whispers
ollama pull minicpm-v4.5:latest  # chat tier: direct contact, entity minting
```

Any Ollama tag works — override with `OLLAMA_FAST_MODEL` / `OLLAMA_CHAT_MODEL`.

## Configuration

All settings live in `backend/app/config.py` and are read from the environment
or `.env` (repo root when run via systemd; CWD otherwise). Required:
`DATABASE_URL`, `OLLAMA_BASE_URL`, `SESSION_SECRET`.

| Env var | Default | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| `DATABASE_URL` | — (required) | asyncpg connection string, e.g. `postgresql+asyncpg://quantumancy:quantumancy@localhost:5432/quantumancy` |
| `OLLAMA_BASE_URL` | — (required) | Ollama REST endpoint, e.g. `http://10.30.20.107:11434` |
| `SESSION_SECRET` | — (required) | present in `Settings` but not currently read anywhere else in the app — session auth actually runs on random per-login tokens hashed into `auth_sessions` (`backend/app/models/auth_session.py`), not a signing secret. Still required to boot; set it to any random string. |
| `PORT` | `7777` | HTTP listen port |
| `OLLAMA_FAST_MODEL` | `granite4.1:3b` | fast tier: fragments, wire whispers |
| `OLLAMA_CHAT_MODEL` | `minicpm-v4.5:latest` | chat tier: direct contact, entity minting |
| `LLM_MAX_CONCURRENCY` | `2` | simultaneous Ollama calls (CPU-only box — keep small) |
| `LLM_MAX_QUEUE_DEPTH` | `8` | queued calls before "too many seekers" rejection |
| `LLM_COOLDOWN_SECONDS` | `8.0` | min gap between ambient whispers; user requests preempt |
| `PIPER_VOICES_DIR` | `voices` | voice model directory (relative to `backend/`) |
| `DATA_DIR` | `data` | generated audio, served at `/audio/` (relative to `backend/`) |

## The Séance Protocol

One WebSocket per contact session: `/ws/session`, authenticated by the
`qm_session` cookie (close code `4401` otherwise). JSON frames both ways.

**Client → server:**

| Frame | Payload | Server response |
|---|---|---|
| `ping` | — | `pong` |
| `set_mode` | `mode: wire\|evp\|radio\|ouija\|emf` | `mode` echo; persisted on the session row |
| `language` | `language: en\|es` | switches LLM reply language + Piper voice |
| `summon` | — | `status: summoning` → `entity` → greeting `utterance` (rate-limited: 4/min/user) |
| `anomaly` | `source: wire\|evp\|radio\|emf`, `frequency`, `magnitude` | `anomaly_ack`; auto-summons once the stream can fingerprint (≥3 anomalies), then fragment `utterance`s (rate-limited: 30/min/user) |
| `question` | `text` (≤500 chars) | `status: gathering` → `reply_start` → `reply_token`×N → `reply_end` → spoken `utterance` (rate-limited: 6/min/user) |
| `passive` | `enabled: bool` | `passive` ack; starts/stops the ambient Wire Ghost loop |

**Server → client** (all frames flow through a single sender task so
concurrent producers never interleave):

| Frame | Payload | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| `session` | `id` | contact session created (sent on connect) |
| `pong` | — | keepalive reply |
| `mode` | `mode` | mode accepted |
| `status` | `state: attuning\|summoning\|gathering` | themed loading states |
| `entity` | `is_new`, `entity` (name, epithet, persona, rarity, voice, visual, quotes, contact_count) | a presence has been matched or minted |
| `anomaly_ack` | `count` | anomalies recorded this session |
| `anomaly` | `source`, `frequency`, `magnitude` | server-detected anomaly (currently only the Wire Ghost's ambient loop emits these) |
| `utterance` | `id`, `kind: greeting\|fragment\|ambient\|reply`, `text`, `entity` | words from beyond; audio follows |
| `audio` | `id`, `url` (`/audio/<event>.wav`) | TTS + effects chain finished for that utterance |
| `reply_start` / `reply_token` / `reply_end` | `token`, final `id` + `text` | token-streamed Direct Contact reply |
| `telemetry` | `jitter_bytes_per_s`, `latency_variance_ms`, `latency_mean_ms`, `dns_ms` | live Wire Ghost vitals |
| `passive` | `enabled` | ambient loop state |
| `error` | `code: rate_limited\|veil_crowded`, `message` | themed rate-limit / queue-full notices |

**REST** (JSON, session-cookie auth where noted; `credentials: 'include'`):

| Endpoint | Auth | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| `POST /auth/register` · `POST /auth/login` · `POST /auth/logout` · `GET /auth/me` | — | argon2 username/password, `qm_session` cookie (14-day server-side sessions) |
| `GET /api/codex?rarity=&sort=recent\|contacted&limit=` | public | the shared spirit registry |
| `GET /api/codex/{entity_id}` | public | full dossier: persona, voice profile, sighting count |
| `GET /api/stats` | public | live veil counters (entities, sessions, utterances, anomalies) |
| `POST /api/shop/waitlist` | public, rate-limited (5/hr/IP) | join the Ultimate Quantum Box waitlist — `{email, interest}`, idempotent |
| `GET /healthz` | — | `{"status": "ok"}` |

## Testing

**Backend** (pytest, 54 tests across 14 files; requires the
`quantumancy_test` database — dropped and recreated on every run):

```bash
cd backend && source venv/bin/activate
DATABASE_URL=postgresql+asyncpg://quantumancy:quantumancy@localhost:5432/quantumancy_test \
OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://10.30.20.107:11434 \
SESSION_SECRET=test-secret \
python -m pytest -v
```

Covers: auth + session cookies, rate limiter, config, SPA serving, LLM queue,
telemetry parsing, entity signatures/profiles, prompt construction (incl.
Spanish language clauses), TTS effects chain, Codex REST, the shop waitlist,
and the full WS séance flow (auth, ping/pong, summon/mint/greet, streamed
replies, anomaly attunement, re-contact by signature). One test
(`test_unknown_path_serves_spa_index`) asserts the SPA fallback and needs
`frontend/dist/` to exist first — run `npm run build` in `frontend/` before
the full suite, or it 503s (correctly — that's the "frontend not built" error
path, also tested separately).

**Frontend** (Vitest + Testing Library — 110 tests across 9 files: the
reconnecting VeilSocket, the possession/haunting primitives, the séance
reducer, the planchette state machine, the EVP detector core, the Matrix/Graph
board views, the FFT, the EMF field-fusion core, and the App shell):

```bash
cd frontend && npm test
```

**Hardware-in-the-loop** (cannot be unit tested): the WebUSB RTL-SDR sweep,
the microphone EVP flow, and the phone EMF sensors each need a manual pass
with real hardware/permissions before being called done.

## Current State & Known Gaps

Honestly, in order of confidence:

- **Solid.** Auth, sessions, the Codex, the Wire Ghost, TTS + effects chain,
  the LLM queue/fallback machinery, EVP's detection math, EMF's
  motion-fusion math, i18n (en/es), and the haunting layer are all covered
  by passing tests and use standard, well-supported browser/server APIs.
  The full backend suite (54/54) and frontend suite (110/110) pass clean.
- **Needs a real-hardware pass.** `frontend/src/lib/sdr.ts` is a from-scratch
  WebUSB driver for RTL2832U/R820T dongles, written against the public
  librtlsdr register documentation — the init sequence, PLL tuning math, and
  I2C repeater writes have **never been run against a real device** in this
  environment (no RTL-SDR attached during development). It's explicitly
  marked `HARDWARE PASS REQUIRED` throughout the file and every entry point
  fails soft, but until someone plugs in a dongle and debugs the register
  pokes (a logic analyzer or `librtlsdr -T` helps), treat Spirit Radio as
  "should work, unverified." It's also Chromium-only (WebUSB), and on Linux
  the kernel's `dvb_usb_rtl28xxu` driver usually needs to be unbound first
  (the UI surfaces this with a fix suggestion when the claim fails).
- **Minor drift.** The landing page's mode showcase
  (`frontend/src/pages/LandingPage.tsx`, `MODE_ORDER`) still lists four
  modes (radio/evp/wire/ouija) — EMF is fully wired into the séance page,
  the WebSocket protocol, and the i18n catalogs, but hasn't been added to
  the landing page's marketing grid yet.
- **Cosmetic.** The frontend build ships one 871 KB JS chunk (Vite warns
  about it); code-splitting would help first paint but hasn't been done.
- **Intentionally unfinished.** The Armory / Ultimate Quantum Box is a
  waitlist only — no hardware exists, no payment is taken, and the page
  says so.

## The Veil's Honesty Policy

- All LLM system prompts frame the entity as **a horror-fiction persona in an
  interactive art installation** — never a genuine paranormal claim. The UI
  carries the "this is real" atmosphere; the model instructions carry the
  fiction.
- Wire Ghost telemetry reads counters and timings only. Packet payloads are
  never inspected or logged.
- If the Ollama box is dark, every spirit channel degrades to curated or
  procedurally-generated offline fallbacks — a summoning never visibly fails.

## Further Reading

- Design spec: `docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-20-quantumancy-website-design.md`
  (the live app now exceeds it — see Repo layout above)
- Implementation plans 1–7: `docs/superpowers/plans/`