LAST LIGHT an off-grid library · runs on a Tiiny Pocket Lab
A farmhouse kitchen at night with the power out: an oil lantern on a scarred table, a bandaged hand resting beside a phone showing amber text, and a small black box next to it

Every answer names the book.
Even with the power out.

A library on a box the size of a paperback, with no internet anywhere in it. You join its network from a phone and ask in plain words.

Get it See it refuse

Asked I cut my foot on the box: six steps, each one ending in the book and the page it came from, in 10.1 seconds.

A wet country road at dusk under a heavy sky, every house dark except one farmhouse window lit warm

The power went out across Texas for days. The phone in your hand still worked. It just had nothing left to answer with.

February 2021. Everything worth knowing that week lived on somebody else's computer, and the road to it was down. This is the part nobody packs for.

What it actually does

You ask the way you would ask a person.

No keywords, no menu. The Archivist searches the shelf, reads what it finds, and writes the answer out of those passages only. Every factual sentence ends in the number of the passage it came from, and the books are listed underneath, with pages.

Asked I cut my foot
the archive says
  1. Apply direct pressure to the wound with a clean cloth or bandage to stop the bleeding [4]
  2. If the bleeding does not stop, raise the feet and lower the head to prevent shock [4]
  3. Keep the wound clean and avoid putting dirt, mud, or any harmful substances on it [6]
  4. Do not use alcohol, tincture of iodine, or Merthiolate directly in the wound [6]
  5. Use sterile dressings if available to prevent infection [1]
  6. If the cut is deep, clean, and less than 12 hours old, you may consider closing it with butterfly bandages or stitches, but only if you are certain and have the proper tools [6]
From
[1]Obtain a 3 Month Supply in 12 Weeksp 2
[4]Where There Is No Doctorpp 129-130
[6]Where There Is No Doctorpp 131-133

also read, not cited: Survival and Austere Medicine, pp 5-6 · The Foxfire Book, p 364 · Basic Knots, p 60

verbatim · 2026-09-17 · Qwen3-8B on a Tiiny Pocket Lab · 10.1 seconds · cited 3 of the 6 passages it read
Why the number is the product

A model that has read the right page and a model that is inventing sound exactly the same. The number is the difference. It points at a passage a person can open, in a book that was on the shelf before the question was asked.

The persona is the Archivist, and an archivist's whole job is provenance. It never says I know. It says the archive says.

A citation the model makes up, a [7] when only six passages were read, renders as plain text pointing at nothing. It cannot borrow authority it does not have.

The harder half

And when the shelf comes up short, it says so.

One sentence, no apology, no guess. Underneath it, everything the search actually read, so you can see the shelf was turned over and the answer was not in it.

Asked what is the capital of Mars

Nothing I retrieved covers that.

what it read: Mars · Vikidia   Mars (planet) · Vikidia   Gemini (chatbot) · Vikidia   Bard (chatbot) · Vikidia   Capital city · Vikidia   Lansing, Michigan · Vikidia

verbatim · 2026-09-16 · 1.0 second

Refusing is the feature

Every other assistant you have used would rather answer than admit the gap, because answering is what it was rewarded for. On the night the power is out, that instinct is the dangerous one.

So the rule runs the other way here. An answer that cites nothing is thrown away, even when it reads well, and the model is asked again with the complaint. It gets one more try. Then the box says the line above and shows its work.

That is also the honest answer to the obvious question. This is a library, not a doctor. It tells you which book to open and what page you are standing on.

How it works

Books on the box. Phone in your hand. The page it came from.

Worn survival manuals standing on a plank shelf in lantern light, beside coiled cord, a brass compass and a jar of matches
1

The shelf goes on the box.

109 books and an encyclopaedia, cut into passages that each remember their book, their page range and their source file. One 240 MB file when it is done.

A hand holding a phone in a dark room, the screen showing a few lines of text and an amber button, with a bandaged hand at the edge of the frame
2

You join its network and ask.

No account, no signal, no app store. The box makes its own network. The ask bar sits at the bottom of the screen, where a thumb already is.

The bottom of an answer on the LAST LIGHT screen: a FROM list naming three books with their page ranges, and a line saying the Archivist cited 3 of the 6 passages it read
3

It answers, and it shows the page.

Tap a number and the book opens where the sentence came from. Paper is the fallback, so the page prints clean, citations and all.

the end of the water answer, on the screen · 2026-09-17 · three books cited of six passages read

The shelf today

It is a shelf, not the internet. That is the whole point.

Everything it is able to say, you can open and read yourself. These are the books that are on it right now, the post-disaster collection the zimgit project put together.

6,043documents
27,746passages indexed
12,605pages of books
7,858subjects
240 MBone SQLite file
SAS Survival Handbook
Where There Is No Doctor
A Book for Midwives
Nuclear War Survival Skills
War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq
Wilderness Medicine Course
HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan
The Foxfire Book
Foxfire 2
Foxfire 3
Deadfalls and Snares
The Ten Bushcraft Books
Survival and Austere Medicine
Protection in the Nuclear Age
and 95 more
  • SAS Survival Handbook
  • Where There Is No Doctor
  • A Book for Midwives
  • Nuclear War Survival Skills
  • War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq
  • Wilderness Medicine Course
  • HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan
  • The Foxfire Book
  • Foxfire 2
  • Foxfire 3
  • Deadfalls and Snares
  • The Ten Bushcraft Books
  • Survival and Austere Medicine
  • Protection in the Nuclear Age
  • and 95 more

Behind the books sits Vikidia, 5,934 plain language encyclopaedia articles, for the word a survival manual assumes you already know. The subject index is built from the books themselves, so browsing shows you what the shelf actually contains rather than what you hoped it did.

Who keeps one

Two kinds of people own this box.

You already have a bin in the garage.

Water, batteries, a trauma kit, and a shelf of manuals you have never had to read with your hands shaking. This is those manuals, searchable in the dark, and it gives you the page so you can go and check the paper copy when the moment has passed.

Asked I fell and my arm is bleeding a lot

Apply direct pressure to the wound with a clean cloth or clothing. If the bleeding is from an artery, press the artery against a bone at a pressure point. For the arm, apply pressure above the clavicle [1] …

first lines of the answer · [1] SAS Survival Handbook, pp 407-408 · 7.4 seconds

You have never called yourself a prepper.

You had one bad week without power and decided you would rather not have another. You are not building a bunker. You would just like the answers to already be in the house the next time the phone has nothing to say.

Asked my kid has a fever

If your child has a fever, uncover them completely and remove all clothing. [2] Give them plenty of cool water to drink. [2] If possible, find and treat the cause of the fever. [2] …

first lines of the answer · [2] Where There Is No Doctor, p 123 · 11.2 seconds
Straight answers

The questions people actually ask.

Does it need the internet?

No, and it has no way to reach it. The shelf, the search and the model that writes the answer all sit on the box. You join the network the box makes and ask from a phone.

What is on the shelf right now?

109 books and 12,605 pages: the zimgit post-disaster collection, which is the SAS Survival Handbook, Where There Is No Doctor, A Book for Midwives, Nuclear War Survival Skills, War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Wilderness Medicine Course, the HHS Pandemic Influenza Plan, Foxfire 1 to 3, Deadfalls and Snares, The Ten Bushcraft Books and the rest. Alongside them, Vikidia, 5,934 plain language encyclopaedia articles.

Can I add my own books?

Yes. That is the other half of the same tool. Archiver takes a folder of PDFs, pulls the text out, and cuts it into passages that keep the book, the page range and the source file on every one. Your books then answer the same way these do.

Which model is answering?

Whatever chat model the box is holding. Today that is Qwen3-8B. The model never sees the shelf, only the handful of passages the search found, and the instruction is to cite them or say it cannot. Swap the model and the rule does not change.

Is this a medical device?

No. It is a library that cites books. It does not examine anyone, it does not know your situation, and it says so out loud when the shelf does not cover the question. Treat it the way you would treat the book it is quoting, and get real help when you can.

What does it cost?

The software is free and MIT licensed, and the source is on GitHub. The hardware is a Tiiny Pocket Lab, which you buy from Tiiny. The shelf itself is a public collection.

How big is the shelf, really?

6,043 documents and 27,746 passages, indexed, in one 240 MB SQLite file. Copy that file to another box and the library is there too.

Does anything leave the box?

No. No account, no cloud call, nothing logged anywhere else. The question, the search and the answer all happen on the device in front of you.

Get it

Install it from the farm, or build your own shelf by hand.

The farm build downloads a ready shelf on first run. The clone builds a shelf from your own books. Both run on the box in front of you, nothing from PyPI, nothing from a CDN.

From the farm 
# the farm is the catalog and installer for Tiiny apps
farm install last-light
farm start last-light

# open it at http://<the box>:8700/
# first run offers the shelf: 73 MB, 5,955 documents,
# downloaded once, checked against its hash, then it asks

The shelf that ships is the part that is free to pass on: 5,934 Vikidia articles under CC BY-SA, and 21 survival manuals in the public domain or under Creative Commons, three of them non-commercial. The attribution file travels inside the bundle. Listing on tiinyapp.farm.

By hand, from your own books 
# Python 3.9 or newer, poppler if your shelf is PDFs
git clone https://github.com/webdevtodayjason/archiver
cd archiver
export TIINY_HOST=tiiny
export TIINY_KEY=...
export ARCHIVER_HOME=~/lastlight/corpus

# build the shelf from a folder of books, then index it
python3 archiver add ~/shelf --source "Survival shelf"
python3 archiver run
python3 archiver chunk
python3 archivist.py index
python3 entities.py build
python3 lastlight.py

python3 lastlight.py --selfcheck proves the screen and every route offline, with no box and no corpus, before you point it at anything real.

Put the books in the house while the lights are on.

Get it on the farm The source The box it runs on