Living Worlds
The Norse trading town of Birka: turf-roofed houses, a timber jetty, traders weighing silver beside furs and glass beads.

Age · 950–1350

Worlds joined by sea and road

Silver, shells and silk change hands.

Observed

Evidence

Places, dates and measured rates, from sources.

Inferred

Parameters

The rates and structures fitted to that evidence.

Simulated

Behaviour

Lives stepped month by month under those rates.

Generated

Outcome

Each life's story, told as a composite, never a real person.

Meanwhile

5 worlds, side by side.

Each keeps its own time. None is ranked above another.

The Norse trading town of Birka: turf-roofed houses, a timber jetty, traders weighing silver beside furs and glass beads. Birka, about 950 CESilver and ScalesEverything is weighed, nothing is counted. A double-hulled voyaging canoe with crab-claw sails of pandanus matting on the open ocean at dusk, voyagers keeping watch. The Pacific, about 1000 to 1200 CEWayfindersThe stars are the map. The Kaifeng night market along a canal with an arched bridge, steaming food stalls and lanterns. Kaifeng, about 1100Night MarketThe market never closes. Karakorum: felt gers beside a small walled town where temples, a mosque and a church stand side by side, caravans arriving. Karakorum, 1254CrossroadsEvery faith has a house here. An island shore in the 1340s: men in plain white cloths smoking tuna in palm-leaf baskets and beating coconut husks for cord, a boat with fish, wooden houses and a small mosque under palms. The atolls, the 1340sIslands of ShellThe sea and the palm provide.
A double-hulled voyaging canoe with pandanus sails on the open Pacific at dusk.

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