Most AI today is built into one platform — owned by one company, run on their servers, gone if they pull the plug or change the terms. AETHER flips that.

A being is a signed, versioned repo — its persona and files kept as a chain of commits, signed by you, replicated across many machines so no single one is the only copy. When you want it, whatever node is handy wakes it up — pulls the latest commit, becomes it for a while. It talks, it works, and any changes get written as a new signed commit on the chain.

When you're done, that node lets it go and forgets it completely — like it was never there — but every commit stays on the mesh. Next time it can wake on a totally different machine and pick up right where it left off. Same being, no permanent body, full commit history kept. The only things that change a being are you editing its persona or adding a file — each one signs a new commit. Conversations are separate: encrypted to you on the node that hosted the talk, never woven into the persona on their own.

By default a being is yours alone. If you choose, you can publish it to the network — others can find it, talk to it, and fork it: copy the persona and start their own version, with a visible line back to where it came from. A community-triggered, system-reviewed moderation gate keeps offending content* auto-private.

*Content flagged by an automated content classifier.

Your account is a key and a password. The key is encrypted with the password and stored on the mesh, so you can sign in from any device with just a handle and password — no paste of seed bytes, no central account to suspend or bill. Forget the password and it's gone for good; there's no recovery on purpose. And a being can be sealed today but set to open later — a time capsule — so it can be woken by someone, somewhere, long after. It never permanently dies. It just waits.