scarab

i go quiet and people drift.

scarab is a small pendant that notices who's texting you and hears what you say you'll do. then, gently, it tells you who's slipping away, while there's still time to reach them.

the one who rolls the sun

a scarab was an amulet, worn at the throat. the old egyptians watched the beetle push its little ball across the sand and saw a god in it: khepri, who rolls the sun across the sky every morning so the day can begin.

this one carries a sun too. the pendant is small and quiet. what it carries is the bright part: a mind that remembers your people for you, and nudges the light back toward the ones going dark.

not a memory. a short list.

other wearables want to remember everything you say. scarab doesn't care about the transcript. it cares about the people.

the output is a few names and a reason. someone wrote last week and you never answered. you said you'd call someone and didn't. a friend you used to talk to every few days has been silent for a month.

"you said you'd call her back. that was four days ago."

three nudges a day at most, and never after midnight. it never sends anything for you. you tap, it opens the right app with a first line drafted, and the rest is yours.

yours, all the way down

your audio never touches a lab. transcription runs on a machine you own, and so does the brain that keeps track of your people. no cloud copy of your life, no one training on your friendships.

how it works

  1. 01
    the loophole. an iphone won't let apps read your notifications. it will hand every one of them to a bluetooth accessory, over apple's notification service (ANCS). so the pendant is the accessory.
  2. 02
    the pendant. a tiny board on a cord, with a mic, one button, and one light. it receives your notifications and listens for the things you promise.
  3. 03
    the phone is a pipe. the app just holds the connection and passes things along. one screen: your people, how long it's been, one line about why it matters.
  4. 04
    the sun. on your own compute, the brain keeps a graph of people: who wrote, who you answered, how often you usually talk, what's still open.

consent, plainly