The Home for Bewildered Beasts of Legend¶

A cluttered but warmly lit office. Whiteboards covered in post-its, a tangle of cables, a dog asleep under the desk. Someone has written WHERE IS THE ASSET REGISTER in red marker and circled it three times.

The Home is a charity in Ankh-Morpork with 200,000 members and donors, a network of chapters across the Disc, and a basement nobody asks about. Its case histories, its donor ledger and the testimony its field workers bring back from half the Disc live on a rented foreign tenant, obtained through a software grant that made the finance team cry with relief and configured by whoever was available at the time. The listing in Milan prompted the same drawing that Purple Lantern made of its stack, and the Home’s came out worse: a US tenant under the mail, the files, the chat and the logins, a server in the comms room under the residents, and a tangle of things nobody had approved underneath all of it.

So the stack moved, layer by layer, and the scraps dropped along the way are gathered here, with one layer still on the road and saying so. The Home does not exist, and neither do Fabulist Systems, Golem Trust Computing or Cogsworth Systems, which keep their seats in the city. The providers the Home moved to do exist, and Ankh-Morpork stands where Europe stands, on the far side of the list from the people who wrote it.