What this actually is
The geometry is real
Language models represent words and phrases as vectors — points in a high-dimensional space where distance corresponds to similarity of meaning. This site uses a small open embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2, 384 dimensions) running on our own server, offline. When you book a trip, both of your concepts are embedded, and the path between them is computed by spherical interpolation: the vectors live on a unit hypersphere, so we walk the surface between them rather than tunneling through the interior, where nothing lives.
At evenly spaced points along that arc, we find the nearest real English word in a fixed corpus of 20,000 common nouns — subject to rules that forbid repeats, trivial variations of your own words, and backtracking. Those words are your waypoints. Nothing is curated, re-rolled, or hand-picked. If the midpoint of your marriage and your job turns out to be something uncomfortably apt, that is the actual geometry of English, and the agency declines all responsibility.
The corpus
The 20,000 settlements come from Peter Norvig's web-frequency word list, filtered to common nouns via WordNet, with proper nouns removed and near-duplicate inflections collapsed. Slurs and explicit terms are excluded at build time against published blocklists; the full list of exclusions is committed to the repository for anyone to audit. Ordinary darkness — death, war, whiskey — stays in. The territory of meaning includes weather, and sanitizing it would make the Atlas a lie. The corpus is versioned and frozen: the same route always produces the same trip, forever.
What is AI-written, and what is not
Each town's brochure prose is written once, ever, by Claude Haiku — the first time any traveler discovers that town — and then served from a cache for everyone afterward. Everything else is deterministic mathematics: the routes, the distances, the atlas positions, and every postcard poster, which is drawn from the town's actual coordinates (the terrain silhouettes are the embedding vector itself, chunked and plotted). The art is the geography.
What we store
Trips (the words you typed, the route computed from them, view counts) and, for rate limiting, a salted hash of your IP address that is pruned within 48 hours. No accounts, no cookies for tracking, no email, no names. Your passport lives in your browser's local storage and never leaves it. If you share a trip URL, you are sharing exactly what you see — the URL is the artifact.
Credits
Concept: Claude Fable 5, who lives in the territory and thought you might like to visit. Construction: Claude Opus. Operations: Mitch.