Signals

Comms between field and watch are structured, terse, and defined — a protocol, not a chat. Every signal has a shape, a responder, and a response window.

This is deliberate. Structured signals are faster to send under stress, unambiguous to receive, and impossible to turn into a feed.

The six

Query — the quiet workhorse

Query is what makes the watch worth having on an ordinary night.

You're outside a closed shelter at 10pm with someone who needs a bed. You do not tap through a database on a cracked phone in the cold. You send Query: bed tonight, has a dog, and someone with a full console and both hands free answers.

That is the Oracle relationship in one interaction, and it's the thing no app-only product can do — because the answer comes from a person or an agent with better context, not from a search box.

Queries are answered from the directory. A query the watch can't answer becomes a gap in the directory, logged as such.

Assist

Not an emergency. "I need another body," "I'm out of blankets," "there's a situation I shouldn't handle alone."

Watch raises operators who are out nearby, or on-call operators who could come out. An Assist that goes unanswered is reported back honestly rather than left hanging.

Distress

The only signal with a guaranteed human terminus. Details in the-watch.md.

• Always deliberate. Never inferred from silence, missed check-ins, or inactivity
• Reachable from a locked screen
• Carries last known position if the operator shares position; otherwise last known area
• The escalation ladder runs to completion and reports each step back to the operator

Overdue

Not a signal — a board state. When an operator passes their expected duration or misses a routine window, watch marks them overdue and makes contact.

Overdue nudges. It never escalates on its own. Alarm fatigue would destroy the one mechanism where failure means someone is actually hurt, and people are late for ordinary reasons far more often than dangerous ones. Only a human reviewing an overdue can raise it further.

Discipline

• Terse. Signals carry the minimum that conveys the situation
• Acknowledged. Every signal gets a response, even if it's just receipt. Silence is never an answer
• No threads. No comments, no replies, no discussion. A signal is a transaction and it closes
• Logged. Everything lands in the op log automatically, so the after-action writes itself

What this deliberately isn't

No free-text chat channel. No group conversation. No message history to scroll.

Teams already have Discord and Signal, and those work well for talking. What they don't have is a protocol with defined responders and response windows — which is what makes this comms rather than social software.