About
A city built by
whoever walks up.
The City That Remembers is a cyberpunk city projected on a wall at Moscone West for Cloudflare Connect 2026. At the bottom of a shaft of capsule homes there's a small clinic: the Splice Booth. Stand in front of it and it reads your body, then tries splices on you until you find one you like.
Keep it and you go up on the billboard. Type the code from the wall into your phone and your citizen moves in, with their own lit window on the walls of the well. By the end of the conference the walls are full of people who were there.
The city changes while it fills up. It's still being built on the first day, fully lit on the second, hung with lanterns on the third, and it ends with fireworks when the last session finishes. Between visitors the camera wanders the streets, and the wall announces what's on next at the conference.
- 01
What the camera sees
A depth camera by the wall finds the people standing in front of it. A computer in the room turns that into a body outline and a stick figure, about fifteen times a second. That's all the booth uses.
- 02
What leaves the room
Camera images never leave that computer and aren't saved. Nobody's face is recognised. The wall only sends the splice you kept, the name you type on your phone, pictures of the city it draws itself, and a count of how many people walked past.
- 03
What the site counts
The wall and this site count visits, taps and how fast pages load, so we can see what works. There are no cookies and no IP addresses. Once you move in, the counts from your phone carry your citizen's number. They never carry your name.
- 04
The clip
When you keep a splice, the wall records itself for eight seconds: the city, the billboard and your glowing outline on it. That recording is your clip.
- 05
Nights out
Your phone can send your citizen to the noodle bar, up to 3 times a day. When nobody is at the booth the wall cuts there, shows them on a stool for a while and keeps a postcard: a frame of the city with your citizen in it.
- 06
Your citizen's life
Once you move in, OpenAI writes who your citizen is: a job, a habit, a diary, gossip about the neighbours, and the hourly Gazette. It only gets their name, splice and window, and what happens on the wall. Their diary is public on their page. Their texts to you, and anything you text back, show only on your phone. OpenAI reads your messages to write the replies, and a moderation model checks everything first.
- 07
Well FM
The wall has a radio station. Its DJ, Vesper, is written and voiced by OpenAI, and talks between the music about what happens in the city. If you send a dedication from your phone, she reads it out on the wall and at /radio with your citizen's name and window. A moderation model checks it first.
- 08
The Well Cup
Sometimes the wall turns into a drone race. Scan the code and your phone becomes the controller: it only sends which way you're steering and whether you're holding the throttle. Citizens fly under their own name; anyone else picks one for the race. Results from races on the wall are kept, Vesper reads them on Well FM, and they can make the Gazette.
- 09
The street
The strip along the bottom of the site shows everyone reading it right now. Strangers are grey figures with no name. If you've moved in, you walk as your citizen, with their name, until you pick Walk in disguise. Nothing about it is saved.
- 10
Knocking
On a citizen's page you can knock on their window and ask them something. OpenAI writes the answer in their voice, a moderation model checks what you asked and what they said, and their window blinks on the wall. They never learn who knocked, and the words aren't kept.
- 11
Notifications
If you turn them on, your browser gives us an address to send your citizen's texts to. We keep it until you turn them off or leave.
- 12
Leaving
Open the page on your phone and press Leave the city. Your name and window go, along with your citizen's diary, texts, the gossip about them and anything Well FM aired about it, and your postcards come off the site. The clip stays, without your name.
Credits
Made by Sunil Pai for Cloudflare Connect 2026. The city is built from Synty's POLYGON Cyber City. It runs on Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects, and the clips and postcards live in R2.
The music is generated in your browser as it plays. The street, crowd and restaurant sounds are public domain recordings from Freesound, by mhtaylor67, janbezouska, squareal and moxobna.