The 127 fabric

Three layers

Corpus

31,102 verses from one immutable edition, each with a SHA-256 and a Merkle root over the whole. Text is exact or it is not served.

Fabric

A deterministic address for every verse on the loopback quartet, served locally by harnessd and remotely by the hosted resolver with identical JSON.

Harness

A tool manifest, a fetch-only client, and an MCP server so any agent can discover, retrieve, verify and cite without asking anyone.

The 127 fabric

The kernel owns the loopback interface. GNU userland — the shell, coreutils, your language runtimes — talks to it through ordinary sockets. harnessd sits between them as a userspace service: it listens on port 1611, reads the destination address of each connection, and answers with the verse that address names. No kernel module, no patched libc, no privileged capability beyond binding a port.

Anatomy of an address

Turn any dial. Each is one octet of an IPv4 address: the first is fixed at 127 so the kernel routes it to loopback; the other three are the book, chapter and verse in canonical order, bounded by the text itself. The same four bytes are a socket destination for the local daemon and a path on the hosted resolver, and they commit to one hash.

Address grammar

quartet   = "127." book "." chapter "." verse
book      = 1..66          ; canonical order, Genesis = 1, Revelation = 66
chapter   = 0 | 1..150     ; 0 = book metadata
verse     = 0 | 1..176     ; 0 = whole chapter

127.0.0.1               index and health (GET /)
127.{b}.0.0             book metadata
127.{b}.{c}.0           whole chapter
127.{b}.{c}.{v}         single verse

reserved  = 127.0.x.x (x ≠ 0.1) and any octet above the canonical maximum
            → application/problem+json  book_unknown | chapter_out_of_range | verse_out_of_range

Canonical text references use the same book numbering through short ids (jn.3.16, jn.3.16-18); the two forms round-trip through /api/v1/resolve.

harnessd

Ships in the harness package. Zero dependencies, Node 20+. It loads the offline export once and answers every quartet from memory. On Linux it works immediately because lo already carries the whole /8; on macOS only 127.0.0.1 is up by default, and the daemon prints the alias command it needs.

npx @harness-talk/daemon            # or: node packages/harness/daemon/harnessd.mjs
# listening on 127.0.0.0/8:1611 — 31,102 verses, 1,189 chapters, 66 books

macOS: npx harness-talk alias jn 3 switches on a whole chapter (or jn 3:16, or just jn), or run the daemon on 127.0.0.1 and pass the quartet as the Host header. Windows: WSL2 behaves like Linux.

What it is, exactly

A userspace service on the kernel's loopback interface, reachable from any GNU/Linux process over plain sockets. It is not a kernel module and not a GNU component. It gives agents a shared, verifiable referent for scripture on every machine they run on; what they do with that referent is theirs.

Status of each layer