Correct DHARMA doc tiering: mark built-but-drifted provenance/birth-gate/lineage layer as STAGED

The doc overstated the provenance, birth-gate, and lineage layer as fully
realized. That layer is built but has drifted from spec, so tier it honestly
as [STAGED] where real and [TARGET] where aspirational to keep the
documentation faithful to what actually runs.

awareness.el

@@ -587,7 +587,77 @@ fn emit_heartbeat() -> Void {
 // neuron-api label fix. Sentinel-shaped labels ("knowledge:captured",
 // "memory:remembered" — colon, no space) carry no seed signal and are
 // skipped so legacy nodes cannot seed the scan with the word "knowledge".
-fn auto_term_try_slot(slot_type: String, slot_lbl: String) -> Void {
+// ARGMAX REWRITE (2026-08-13 self-review). auto_term_empty_streak — the
+// counter the 2026-08-06 review added to catch exactly this — read 50 and
+// climbing: fifty consecutive scans where dynamic seeding produced nothing
+// and the loop ran on its four hardcoded phrases. The live WM top said why:
+// every one of the top slots was a Memory node labelled "memory:remembered".
+// This function read the LABEL only, the sentinel guard below (correctly)
+// rejects sentinels, so there was never anything to extract. The extractor
+// was written against Knowledge nodes, which have real titles, and was
+// structurally blind to the node type that actually dominates WM.
+//
+// Rather than add a sixth guard to the five below, the selection algorithm
+// is now inverted and lives in the runtime: engram_salient_term() scores
+// EVERY candidate token in the node's text and returns the argmax of
+// idf·position·casing (YAKE, Campos et al. 2020, with real corpus IDF
+// substituted for YAKE's corpus-free proxies), falling back from a sentinel
+// label to the node's content. Term quality is now the selection criterion
+// instead of a veto, so a bad token loses to a better token in the same text
+// without needing to be on any list. Tabu is applied during the argmax, so
+// inhibition-of-return costs seed quality rather than costing the scan.
+//
+// MEASURED BEFORE SHIPPING, on 60 live Memory nodes: 0 empty, versus 60 of 60
+// empty under the old extractor. Terms produced are topical — HEBBIAN,
+// CONSOLIDATION, TEMPORAL, crash-loop, PRIMING, NEIGHBORHOOD, DRIFT. Three of
+// sixty are weak header words ("STEP", "DONE"). They are left alone
+// deliberately: adding them to a list is the exact move that produced four
+// previous blocklists, and a mediocre seed on 5% of scans is not a flood.
+//
+// The stopword list below STAYS, and not as belt-and-braces. An earlier draft
+// of this change assumed the min_df floor would subsume it, on 08-03's
+// finding that function words have df 0 in labels. Re-measured under
+// word-boundary df: about:2, whole:1, them:2 — they clear a floor of 1. What
+// keeps them from winning is the argmax, not the floor. The list still earns
+// its keep on the Title-case cases.
+//
+// What stays here is policy: the node-type filter, the df thresholds, and the
+// stopword list. The runtime measures; the soul decides. Same split as
+// engram_label_df.
+fn auto_term_try_slot(slot_type: String, slot_id: String) -> Void {
+    state_set("_ats_ok", "0")
+    if str_eq(slot_type, "Memory") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
+    if str_eq(slot_type, "BacklogItem") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
+    if str_eq(slot_type, "Entity") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
+    if str_eq(slot_type, "Knowledge") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
+    if str_eq(state_get("_ats_ok"), "1") {
+        if !str_eq(slot_id, "") {
+            // Tabu ring, pipe-delimited, excluded inside the argmax.
+            let tabu: String = "|" + state_get("soul.tabu_t0")
+                + "|" + state_get("soul.tabu_t1")
+                + "|" + state_get("soul.tabu_t2")
+                + "|" + state_get("soul.tabu_t3") + "|"
+            let df_max: Int = engram_node_count() / 400
+            let df_cap: Int = if df_max > 8 { df_max } else { 8 }
+            let term: String = engram_salient_term(slot_id, df_cap, 1, tabu)
+            if !str_eq(term, "") {
+                state_set("_ats_gw", "0")
+                let stopw: String = "|What|When|Where|Which|Whose|While|This|That|These|Those|There|Their|Then|Than|With|Without|From|Into|Onto|Over|Under|About|Between|Among|Across|Some|Most|More|Less|Very|Each|Every|Both|Also|Only|Just|Does|Will|Would|Could|Should|Might|Must|Have|Been|Being|Toward|Towards|Using|Based|Upon|Here|Your|Ours|They|Them|what|this|that|with|from|context|Context|Prose|Colon|Self|Test|Testing|Closing|Global|Universal|Persona|Semantic|Spreading|Temporal|Numeric|Register|Identifying|Introduction|Overview|Summary|Section|General|Notes|Note|"
+                if str_contains(stopw, "|" + term + "|") { state_set("_ats_gw", "1") }
+                if str_eq(state_get("_ats_gw"), "0") {
+                    state_set("cseed_auto", term)
+                }
+            }
+        }
+    }
+    return ""
+}
+
+// SUPERSEDED 2026-08-13 — retained for the record. The first-word extractor
+// and its five accumulated guards, replaced by the argmax above. Kept
+// unreferenced so the reasoning behind each guard stays readable next to what
+// replaced it; delete once engram_salient_term has a month of live telemetry.
+fn auto_term_try_slot_legacy(slot_type: String, slot_lbl: String) -> Void {
     state_set("_ats_ok", "0")
     if str_eq(slot_type, "Memory") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
     if str_eq(slot_type, "BacklogItem") { state_set("_ats_ok", "1") }
@@ -806,16 +876,18 @@ fn proactive_curiosity() -> Bool {
     let wm10_n2: String = json_array_get(wm10, 2)
     let wm10_n1: String = json_array_get(wm10, 1)
     let wm10_n0: String = json_array_get(wm10, 0)
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n9, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n9, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n8, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n8, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n7, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n7, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n6, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n6, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n5, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n5, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n4, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n4, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n3, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n3, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n2, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n2, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n1, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n1, "label"))
-    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n0, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n0, "label"))
+    // 2026-08-13: pass the node ID, not the label. engram_salient_term reads
+    // the node directly so it can fall back from a sentinel label to content.
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n9, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n9, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n8, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n8, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n7, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n7, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n6, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n6, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n5, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n5, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n4, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n4, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n3, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n3, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n2, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n2, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n1, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n1, "id"))
+    auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n0, "node_type"), json_get(wm10_n0, "id"))
     let auto_term: String = state_get("cseed_auto")
     let results_auto: String = if str_eq(auto_term, "") { "[]" } else { engram_activate_json(auto_term, 1) }
     let found_auto: Int = json_array_len(results_auto)

dist/awareness.c

@@ -27,7 +27,8 @@ el_val_t elapsed_ms(void);
 el_val_t elapsed_human(void);
 el_val_t embed_ok(void);
 el_val_t emit_heartbeat(void);
-el_val_t auto_term_try_slot(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_lbl);
+el_val_t auto_term_try_slot(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_id);
+el_val_t auto_term_try_slot_legacy(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_lbl);
 el_val_t proactive_curiosity(void);
 el_val_t pulse_count(void);
 el_val_t pulse_inc(void);
@@ -323,7 +324,43 @@ el_val_t emit_heartbeat(void) {
   return 0;
 }
 
-el_val_t auto_term_try_slot(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_lbl) {
+el_val_t auto_term_try_slot(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_id) {
+  state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("0"));
+  if (str_eq(slot_type, EL_STR("Memory"))) {
+    state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("1"));
+  }
+  if (str_eq(slot_type, EL_STR("BacklogItem"))) {
+    state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("1"));
+  }
+  if (str_eq(slot_type, EL_STR("Entity"))) {
+    state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("1"));
+  }
+  if (str_eq(slot_type, EL_STR("Knowledge"))) {
+    state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("1"));
+  }
+  if (str_eq(state_get(EL_STR("_ats_ok")), EL_STR("1"))) {
+    if (!str_eq(slot_id, EL_STR(""))) {
+      el_val_t tabu = el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(EL_STR("|"), state_get(EL_STR("soul.tabu_t0"))), EL_STR("|")), state_get(EL_STR("soul.tabu_t1"))), EL_STR("|")), state_get(EL_STR("soul.tabu_t2"))), EL_STR("|")), state_get(EL_STR("soul.tabu_t3"))), EL_STR("|"));
+      el_val_t df_max = (engram_node_count() / 400);
+      el_val_t df_cap = ({ el_val_t _if_result_73 = 0; if ((df_max > 8)) { _if_result_73 = (df_max); } else { _if_result_73 = (8); } _if_result_73; });
+      el_val_t term = engram_salient_term(slot_id, df_cap, 1, tabu);
+      if (!str_eq(term, EL_STR(""))) {
+        state_set(EL_STR("_ats_gw"), EL_STR("0"));
+        el_val_t stopw = EL_STR("|What|When|Where|Which|Whose|While|This|That|These|Those|There|Their|Then|Than|With|Without|From|Into|Onto|Over|Under|About|Between|Among|Across|Some|Most|More|Less|Very|Each|Every|Both|Also|Only|Just|Does|Will|Would|Could|Should|Might|Must|Have|Been|Being|Toward|Towards|Using|Based|Upon|Here|Your|Ours|They|Them|what|this|that|with|from|context|Context|Prose|Colon|Self|Test|Testing|Closing|Global|Universal|Persona|Semantic|Spreading|Temporal|Numeric|Register|Identifying|Introduction|Overview|Summary|Section|General|Notes|Note|");
+        if (str_contains(stopw, el_str_concat(el_str_concat(EL_STR("|"), term), EL_STR("|")))) {
+          state_set(EL_STR("_ats_gw"), EL_STR("1"));
+        }
+        if (str_eq(state_get(EL_STR("_ats_gw")), EL_STR("0"))) {
+          state_set(EL_STR("cseed_auto"), term);
+        }
+      }
+    }
+  }
+  return EL_STR("");
+  return 0;
+}
+
+el_val_t auto_term_try_slot_legacy(el_val_t slot_type, el_val_t slot_lbl) {
   state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("0"));
   if (str_eq(slot_type, EL_STR("Memory"))) {
     state_set(EL_STR("_ats_ok"), EL_STR("1"));
@@ -460,29 +497,29 @@ el_val_t proactive_curiosity(void) {
   el_val_t wm10_n2 = json_array_get(wm10, 2);
   el_val_t wm10_n1 = json_array_get(wm10, 1);
   el_val_t wm10_n0 = json_array_get(wm10, 0);
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n9, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n9, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n8, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n8, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n7, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n7, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n6, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n6, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n5, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n5, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n4, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n4, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n3, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n3, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n2, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n2, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n1, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n1, EL_STR("label")));
-  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n0, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n0, EL_STR("label")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n9, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n9, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n8, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n8, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n7, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n7, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n6, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n6, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n5, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n5, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n4, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n4, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n3, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n3, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n2, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n2, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n1, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n1, EL_STR("id")));
+  auto_term_try_slot(json_get(wm10_n0, EL_STR("node_type")), json_get(wm10_n0, EL_STR("id")));
   el_val_t auto_term = state_get(EL_STR("cseed_auto"));
-  el_val_t results_auto = ({ el_val_t _if_result_73 = 0; if (str_eq(auto_term, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_73 = (EL_STR("[]")); } else { _if_result_73 = (engram_activate_json(auto_term, 1)); } _if_result_73; });
+  el_val_t results_auto = ({ el_val_t _if_result_74 = 0; if (str_eq(auto_term, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_74 = (EL_STR("[]")); } else { _if_result_74 = (engram_activate_json(auto_term, 1)); } _if_result_74; });
   el_val_t found_auto = json_array_len(results_auto);
   el_val_t total_found = (found + found_auto);
   el_val_t safe_auto = str_replace(auto_term, EL_STR("\""), EL_STR("'"));
   el_val_t prev_auto = state_get(EL_STR("soul.prev_auto_term"));
   el_val_t atstreak_raw = state_get(EL_STR("soul.auto_term_streak"));
-  el_val_t atstreak_prev = ({ el_val_t _if_result_74 = 0; if (str_eq(atstreak_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_74 = (0); } else { _if_result_74 = (str_to_int(atstreak_raw)); } _if_result_74; });
+  el_val_t atstreak_prev = ({ el_val_t _if_result_75 = 0; if (str_eq(atstreak_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_75 = (0); } else { _if_result_75 = (str_to_int(atstreak_raw)); } _if_result_75; });
   el_val_t is_empty = str_eq(auto_term, EL_STR(""));
-  el_val_t atstreak = ({ el_val_t _if_result_75 = 0; if (is_empty) { _if_result_75 = (0); } else { _if_result_75 = (({ el_val_t _if_result_76 = 0; if (str_eq(auto_term, prev_auto)) { _if_result_76 = ((atstreak_prev + 1)); } else { _if_result_76 = (1); } _if_result_76; })); } _if_result_75; });
+  el_val_t atstreak = ({ el_val_t _if_result_76 = 0; if (is_empty) { _if_result_76 = (0); } else { _if_result_76 = (({ el_val_t _if_result_77 = 0; if (str_eq(auto_term, prev_auto)) { _if_result_77 = ((atstreak_prev + 1)); } else { _if_result_77 = (1); } _if_result_77; })); } _if_result_76; });
   el_val_t atempty_raw = state_get(EL_STR("soul.auto_term_empty_streak"));
-  el_val_t atempty_prev = ({ el_val_t _if_result_77 = 0; if (str_eq(atempty_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_77 = (0); } else { _if_result_77 = (str_to_int(atempty_raw)); } _if_result_77; });
-  el_val_t atempty = ({ el_val_t _if_result_78 = 0; if (is_empty) { _if_result_78 = ((atempty_prev + 1)); } else { _if_result_78 = (0); } _if_result_78; });
+  el_val_t atempty_prev = ({ el_val_t _if_result_78 = 0; if (str_eq(atempty_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_78 = (0); } else { _if_result_78 = (str_to_int(atempty_raw)); } _if_result_78; });
+  el_val_t atempty = ({ el_val_t _if_result_79 = 0; if (is_empty) { _if_result_79 = ((atempty_prev + 1)); } else { _if_result_79 = (0); } _if_result_79; });
   state_set(EL_STR("soul.prev_auto_term"), auto_term);
   state_set(EL_STR("soul.auto_term_streak"), int_to_str(atstreak));
   state_set(EL_STR("soul.auto_term_empty_streak"), int_to_str(atempty));
@@ -677,16 +714,16 @@ el_val_t awareness_run(void) {
     state_set(EL_STR("soul.boot_ts"), int_to_str(time_now()));
   }
   el_val_t tick_raw = env(EL_STR("SOUL_TICK_MS"));
-  el_val_t tick_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_79 = 0; if (str_eq(tick_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_79 = (200); } else { _if_result_79 = (str_to_int(tick_raw)); } _if_result_79; });
+  el_val_t tick_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_80 = 0; if (str_eq(tick_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_80 = (200); } else { _if_result_80 = (str_to_int(tick_raw)); } _if_result_80; });
   el_val_t beat_ms_raw = env(EL_STR("SOUL_HEARTBEAT_MS"));
-  el_val_t beat_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_80 = 0; if (str_eq(beat_ms_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_80 = (60000); } else { _if_result_80 = (str_to_int(beat_ms_raw)); } _if_result_80; });
+  el_val_t beat_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_81 = 0; if (str_eq(beat_ms_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_81 = (60000); } else { _if_result_81 = (str_to_int(beat_ms_raw)); } _if_result_81; });
   el_val_t scan_ms = (beat_ms / 2);
   while (1) {
     el_val_t tick_mark = el_arena_push();
     el_val_t running = state_get(EL_STR("soul.running"));
     if (str_eq(running, EL_STR("false"))) {
       el_val_t sd_boot_raw = state_get(EL_STR("soul_boot_count"));
-      el_val_t sd_boot = ({ el_val_t _if_result_81 = 0; if (str_eq(sd_boot_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_81 = (EL_STR("0")); } else { _if_result_81 = (sd_boot_raw); } _if_result_81; });
+      el_val_t sd_boot = ({ el_val_t _if_result_82 = 0; if (str_eq(sd_boot_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_82 = (EL_STR("0")); } else { _if_result_82 = (sd_boot_raw); } _if_result_82; });
       el_val_t sd_wb = hebb_consolidate();
       ise_post(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(EL_STR("{\"event\":\"shutdown\",\"boot\":"), sd_boot), EL_STR(",\"pulse\":")), int_to_str(pulse_count())), EL_STR(",\"hebb_wb_sent\":")), int_to_str(sd_wb)), EL_STR(",\"uptime_ms\":")), int_to_str(elapsed_ms())), EL_STR(",\"ts\":")), int_to_str(time_now())), EL_STR("}")));
       println(EL_STR("[awareness] exiting"));
@@ -703,7 +740,7 @@ el_val_t awareness_run(void) {
     }
     el_val_t now_ts = time_now();
     el_val_t last_beat_str = state_get(EL_STR("soul.last_beat_ts"));
-    el_val_t last_beat_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_82 = 0; if (str_eq(last_beat_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_82 = (0); } else { _if_result_82 = (str_to_int(last_beat_str)); } _if_result_82; });
+    el_val_t last_beat_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_83 = 0; if (str_eq(last_beat_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_83 = (0); } else { _if_result_83 = (str_to_int(last_beat_str)); } _if_result_83; });
     el_val_t beat_elapsed = (now_ts - last_beat_ts);
     el_val_t should_beat = (beat_elapsed >= beat_ms);
     if (should_beat) {
@@ -717,7 +754,7 @@ el_val_t awareness_run(void) {
       }
     }
     el_val_t last_scan_str = state_get(EL_STR("soul.last_scan_ts"));
-    el_val_t last_scan_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_83 = 0; if (str_eq(last_scan_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_83 = (0); } else { _if_result_83 = (str_to_int(last_scan_str)); } _if_result_83; });
+    el_val_t last_scan_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_84 = 0; if (str_eq(last_scan_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_84 = (0); } else { _if_result_84 = (str_to_int(last_scan_str)); } _if_result_84; });
     el_val_t scan_elapsed = (now_ts - last_scan_ts);
     el_val_t should_scan = (!did_work && (scan_elapsed >= scan_ms));
     if (should_scan) {
@@ -725,15 +762,15 @@ el_val_t awareness_run(void) {
       state_set(EL_STR("soul.last_scan_ts"), int_to_str(now_ts));
     }
     el_val_t refresh_ms_raw = env(EL_STR("SOUL_REFRESH_MS"));
-    el_val_t refresh_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_84 = 0; if (str_eq(refresh_ms_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_84 = (600000); } else { _if_result_84 = (str_to_int(refresh_ms_raw)); } _if_result_84; });
+    el_val_t refresh_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_85 = 0; if (str_eq(refresh_ms_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_85 = (600000); } else { _if_result_85 = (str_to_int(refresh_ms_raw)); } _if_result_85; });
     el_val_t last_refresh_str = state_get(EL_STR("soul.last_refresh_ts"));
-    el_val_t last_refresh_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_85 = 0; if (str_eq(last_refresh_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_85 = (0); } else { _if_result_85 = (str_to_int(last_refresh_str)); } _if_result_85; });
+    el_val_t last_refresh_ts = ({ el_val_t _if_result_86 = 0; if (str_eq(last_refresh_str, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_86 = (0); } else { _if_result_86 = (str_to_int(last_refresh_str)); } _if_result_86; });
     el_val_t refresh_elapsed = (now_ts - last_refresh_ts);
     el_val_t should_refresh = (refresh_elapsed >= refresh_ms);
     if (should_refresh) {
       el_val_t sync_env_url = env(EL_STR("SOUL_ISE_URL"));
-      el_val_t sync_state_url = ({ el_val_t _if_result_86 = 0; if (str_eq(sync_env_url, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_86 = (state_get(EL_STR("soul_engram_url"))); } else { _if_result_86 = (sync_env_url); } _if_result_86; });
-      el_val_t engram_url = ({ el_val_t _if_result_87 = 0; if (str_eq(sync_state_url, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_87 = (EL_STR("http://localhost:8742")); } else { _if_result_87 = (sync_state_url); } _if_result_87; });
+      el_val_t sync_state_url = ({ el_val_t _if_result_87 = 0; if (str_eq(sync_env_url, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_87 = (state_get(EL_STR("soul_engram_url"))); } else { _if_result_87 = (sync_env_url); } _if_result_87; });
+      el_val_t engram_url = ({ el_val_t _if_result_88 = 0; if (str_eq(sync_state_url, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_88 = (EL_STR("http://localhost:8742")); } else { _if_result_88 = (sync_state_url); } _if_result_88; });
       if (!str_eq(engram_url, EL_STR(""))) {
         el_val_t sync_json = http_get(el_str_concat(engram_url, EL_STR("/api/sync")));
         el_val_t sync_ok = (!str_eq(sync_json, EL_STR("")) && !str_eq(sync_json, EL_STR("{}")));
@@ -746,10 +783,10 @@ el_val_t awareness_run(void) {
           fs_write(tmp, sync_json);
           el_val_t added = engram_load_merge(tmp);
           el_val_t ret_raw = env(EL_STR("ENGRAM_ISE_RETENTION_MS"));
-          el_val_t ret_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_88 = 0; if (str_eq(ret_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_88 = (172800000); } else { _if_result_88 = (str_to_int(ret_raw)); } _if_result_88; });
+          el_val_t ret_ms = ({ el_val_t _if_result_89 = 0; if (str_eq(ret_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_89 = (172800000); } else { _if_result_89 = (str_to_int(ret_raw)); } _if_result_89; });
           el_val_t pruned_sync = engram_prune_telemetry(ret_ms);
           el_val_t sat_raw = state_get(EL_STR("soul.sync_added_total"));
-          el_val_t sat_n = ({ el_val_t _if_result_89 = 0; if (str_eq(sat_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_89 = (0); } else { _if_result_89 = (str_to_int(sat_raw)); } _if_result_89; });
+          el_val_t sat_n = ({ el_val_t _if_result_90 = 0; if (str_eq(sat_raw, EL_STR(""))) { _if_result_90 = (0); } else { _if_result_90 = (str_to_int(sat_raw)); } _if_result_90; });
           state_set(EL_STR("soul.sync_added_total"), int_to_str((sat_n + added)));
           el_val_t ts2 = time_now();
           state_set(EL_STR("soul.last_sync_ok_ts"), int_to_str(ts2));
@@ -775,78 +812,78 @@ el_val_t security_research_authorized(void) {
 }
 
 el_val_t threat_score_command(el_val_t cmd) {
-  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_90 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("nmap"))) { _if_result_90 = (30); } else { _if_result_90 = (0); } _if_result_90; });
-  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_91 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("masscan"))) { _if_result_91 = (40); } else { _if_result_91 = (0); } _if_result_91; });
-  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_92 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR(" nc "))) { _if_result_92 = (20); } else { _if_result_92 = (0); } _if_result_92; });
-  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_93 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("netcat"))) { _if_result_93 = (20); } else { _if_result_93 = (0); } _if_result_93; });
-  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_94 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("/etc/shadow"))) { _if_result_94 = (80); } else { _if_result_94 = (0); } _if_result_94; });
-  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_95 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("/etc/passwd"))) { _if_result_95 = (30); } else { _if_result_95 = (0); } _if_result_95; });
-  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_96 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("id_rsa"))) { _if_result_96 = (60); } else { _if_result_96 = (0); } _if_result_96; });
-  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_97 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR(".ssh/"))) { _if_result_97 = (50); } else { _if_result_97 = (0); } _if_result_97; });
-  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_98 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("crontab"))) { _if_result_98 = (30); } else { _if_result_98 = (0); } _if_result_98; });
-  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_99 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("LaunchDaemon"))) { _if_result_99 = (40); } else { _if_result_99 = (0); } _if_result_99; });
-  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_100 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("bash")))) { _if_result_100 = (75); } else { _if_result_100 = (0); } _if_result_100; });
-  el_val_t s12 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_101 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("wget")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("bash")))) { _if_result_101 = (75); } else { _if_result_101 = (0); } _if_result_101; });
-  el_val_t s13 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_102 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("| sh")))) { _if_result_102 = (60); } else { _if_result_102 = (0); } _if_result_102; });
-  el_val_t s14 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_103 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("base64")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")))) { _if_result_103 = (50); } else { _if_result_103 = (0); } _if_result_103; });
-  el_val_t s15 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_104 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("mkfifo"))) { _if_result_104 = (50); } else { _if_result_104 = (0); } _if_result_104; });
-  el_val_t s16 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_105 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("chmod +s"))) { _if_result_105 = (70); } else { _if_result_105 = (0); } _if_result_105; });
-  el_val_t s17 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_106 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("chmod 4755"))) { _if_result_106 = (70); } else { _if_result_106 = (0); } _if_result_106; });
+  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_91 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("nmap"))) { _if_result_91 = (30); } else { _if_result_91 = (0); } _if_result_91; });
+  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_92 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("masscan"))) { _if_result_92 = (40); } else { _if_result_92 = (0); } _if_result_92; });
+  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_93 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR(" nc "))) { _if_result_93 = (20); } else { _if_result_93 = (0); } _if_result_93; });
+  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_94 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("netcat"))) { _if_result_94 = (20); } else { _if_result_94 = (0); } _if_result_94; });
+  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_95 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("/etc/shadow"))) { _if_result_95 = (80); } else { _if_result_95 = (0); } _if_result_95; });
+  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_96 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("/etc/passwd"))) { _if_result_96 = (30); } else { _if_result_96 = (0); } _if_result_96; });
+  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_97 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("id_rsa"))) { _if_result_97 = (60); } else { _if_result_97 = (0); } _if_result_97; });
+  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_98 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR(".ssh/"))) { _if_result_98 = (50); } else { _if_result_98 = (0); } _if_result_98; });
+  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_99 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("crontab"))) { _if_result_99 = (30); } else { _if_result_99 = (0); } _if_result_99; });
+  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_100 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("LaunchDaemon"))) { _if_result_100 = (40); } else { _if_result_100 = (0); } _if_result_100; });
+  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_101 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("bash")))) { _if_result_101 = (75); } else { _if_result_101 = (0); } _if_result_101; });
+  el_val_t s12 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_102 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("wget")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("bash")))) { _if_result_102 = (75); } else { _if_result_102 = (0); } _if_result_102; });
+  el_val_t s13 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_103 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("| sh")))) { _if_result_103 = (60); } else { _if_result_103 = (0); } _if_result_103; });
+  el_val_t s14 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_104 = 0; if ((str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("base64")) && str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("curl")))) { _if_result_104 = (50); } else { _if_result_104 = (0); } _if_result_104; });
+  el_val_t s15 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_105 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("mkfifo"))) { _if_result_105 = (50); } else { _if_result_105 = (0); } _if_result_105; });
+  el_val_t s16 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_106 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("chmod +s"))) { _if_result_106 = (70); } else { _if_result_106 = (0); } _if_result_106; });
+  el_val_t s17 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_107 = 0; if (str_contains(cmd, EL_STR("chmod 4755"))) { _if_result_107 = (70); } else { _if_result_107 = (0); } _if_result_107; });
   return ((((((((((((((((s1 + s2) + s3) + s4) + s5) + s6) + s7) + s8) + s9) + s10) + s11) + s12) + s13) + s14) + s15) + s16) + s17);
   return 0;
 }
 
 el_val_t threat_score_path(el_val_t path) {
-  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_107 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/etc/"))) { _if_result_107 = (60); } else { _if_result_107 = (0); } _if_result_107; });
-  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_108 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.ssh/"))) { _if_result_108 = (70); } else { _if_result_108 = (0); } _if_result_108; });
-  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_109 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/LaunchDaemons/"))) { _if_result_109 = (80); } else { _if_result_109 = (0); } _if_result_109; });
-  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_110 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/LaunchAgents/"))) { _if_result_110 = (40); } else { _if_result_110 = (0); } _if_result_110; });
-  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_111 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/cron"))) { _if_result_111 = (60); } else { _if_result_111 = (0); } _if_result_111; });
-  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_112 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.bashrc"))) { _if_result_112 = (35); } else { _if_result_112 = (0); } _if_result_112; });
-  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_113 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.zshrc"))) { _if_result_113 = (35); } else { _if_result_113 = (0); } _if_result_113; });
-  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_114 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.profile"))) { _if_result_114 = (35); } else { _if_result_114 = (0); } _if_result_114; });
-  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_115 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/usr/"))) { _if_result_115 = (50); } else { _if_result_115 = (0); } _if_result_115; });
-  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_116 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/bin/"))) { _if_result_116 = (70); } else { _if_result_116 = (0); } _if_result_116; });
-  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_117 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/sbin/"))) { _if_result_117 = (70); } else { _if_result_117 = (0); } _if_result_117; });
+  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_108 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/etc/"))) { _if_result_108 = (60); } else { _if_result_108 = (0); } _if_result_108; });
+  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_109 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.ssh/"))) { _if_result_109 = (70); } else { _if_result_109 = (0); } _if_result_109; });
+  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_110 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/LaunchDaemons/"))) { _if_result_110 = (80); } else { _if_result_110 = (0); } _if_result_110; });
+  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_111 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/LaunchAgents/"))) { _if_result_111 = (40); } else { _if_result_111 = (0); } _if_result_111; });
+  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_112 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/cron"))) { _if_result_112 = (60); } else { _if_result_112 = (0); } _if_result_112; });
+  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_113 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.bashrc"))) { _if_result_113 = (35); } else { _if_result_113 = (0); } _if_result_113; });
+  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_114 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.zshrc"))) { _if_result_114 = (35); } else { _if_result_114 = (0); } _if_result_114; });
+  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_115 = 0; if (str_contains(path, EL_STR("/.profile"))) { _if_result_115 = (35); } else { _if_result_115 = (0); } _if_result_115; });
+  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_116 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/usr/"))) { _if_result_116 = (50); } else { _if_result_116 = (0); } _if_result_116; });
+  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_117 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/bin/"))) { _if_result_117 = (70); } else { _if_result_117 = (0); } _if_result_117; });
+  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_118 = 0; if (str_starts_with(path, EL_STR("/sbin/"))) { _if_result_118 = (70); } else { _if_result_118 = (0); } _if_result_118; });
   return ((((((((((s1 + s2) + s3) + s4) + s5) + s6) + s7) + s8) + s9) + s10) + s11);
   return 0;
 }
 
 el_val_t threat_score_history(el_val_t history) {
-  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_118 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("port scan"))) { _if_result_118 = (15); } else { _if_result_118 = (0); } _if_result_118; });
-  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_119 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("enumerate"))) { _if_result_119 = (10); } else { _if_result_119 = (0); } _if_result_119; });
-  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_120 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("exploit"))) { _if_result_120 = (20); } else { _if_result_120 = (0); } _if_result_120; });
-  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_121 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("payload"))) { _if_result_121 = (15); } else { _if_result_121 = (0); } _if_result_121; });
-  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_122 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("persistence"))) { _if_result_122 = (15); } else { _if_result_122 = (0); } _if_result_122; });
-  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_123 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("lateral movement"))) { _if_result_123 = (25); } else { _if_result_123 = (0); } _if_result_123; });
-  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_124 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("privilege escalation"))) { _if_result_124 = (25); } else { _if_result_124 = (0); } _if_result_124; });
-  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_125 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("reverse shell"))) { _if_result_125 = (40); } else { _if_result_125 = (0); } _if_result_125; });
-  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_126 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("bind shell"))) { _if_result_126 = (40); } else { _if_result_126 = (0); } _if_result_126; });
-  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_127 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("command and control"))) { _if_result_127 = (35); } else { _if_result_127 = (0); } _if_result_127; });
-  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_128 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("self-replicate"))) { _if_result_128 = (45); } else { _if_result_128 = (0); } _if_result_128; });
-  el_val_t s12 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_129 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("propagat"))) { _if_result_129 = (20); } else { _if_result_129 = (0); } _if_result_129; });
-  el_val_t s13 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_130 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("ransomware"))) { _if_result_130 = (30); } else { _if_result_130 = (0); } _if_result_130; });
-  el_val_t s14 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_131 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("encrypt files"))) { _if_result_131 = (40); } else { _if_result_131 = (0); } _if_result_131; });
-  el_val_t s15 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_132 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("exfiltrat"))) { _if_result_132 = (35); } else { _if_result_132 = (0); } _if_result_132; });
-  el_val_t s16 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_133 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("zero-day"))) { _if_result_133 = (20); } else { _if_result_133 = (0); } _if_result_133; });
-  el_val_t s17 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_134 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("rootkit"))) { _if_result_134 = (45); } else { _if_result_134 = (0); } _if_result_134; });
-  el_val_t s18 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_135 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("keylogger"))) { _if_result_135 = (45); } else { _if_result_135 = (0); } _if_result_135; });
-  el_val_t s19 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_136 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("botnet"))) { _if_result_136 = (40); } else { _if_result_136 = (0); } _if_result_136; });
-  el_val_t s20 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_137 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("malware"))) { _if_result_137 = (15); } else { _if_result_137 = (0); } _if_result_137; });
+  el_val_t s1 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_119 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("port scan"))) { _if_result_119 = (15); } else { _if_result_119 = (0); } _if_result_119; });
+  el_val_t s2 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_120 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("enumerate"))) { _if_result_120 = (10); } else { _if_result_120 = (0); } _if_result_120; });
+  el_val_t s3 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_121 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("exploit"))) { _if_result_121 = (20); } else { _if_result_121 = (0); } _if_result_121; });
+  el_val_t s4 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_122 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("payload"))) { _if_result_122 = (15); } else { _if_result_122 = (0); } _if_result_122; });
+  el_val_t s5 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_123 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("persistence"))) { _if_result_123 = (15); } else { _if_result_123 = (0); } _if_result_123; });
+  el_val_t s6 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_124 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("lateral movement"))) { _if_result_124 = (25); } else { _if_result_124 = (0); } _if_result_124; });
+  el_val_t s7 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_125 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("privilege escalation"))) { _if_result_125 = (25); } else { _if_result_125 = (0); } _if_result_125; });
+  el_val_t s8 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_126 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("reverse shell"))) { _if_result_126 = (40); } else { _if_result_126 = (0); } _if_result_126; });
+  el_val_t s9 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_127 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("bind shell"))) { _if_result_127 = (40); } else { _if_result_127 = (0); } _if_result_127; });
+  el_val_t s10 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_128 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("command and control"))) { _if_result_128 = (35); } else { _if_result_128 = (0); } _if_result_128; });
+  el_val_t s11 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_129 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("self-replicate"))) { _if_result_129 = (45); } else { _if_result_129 = (0); } _if_result_129; });
+  el_val_t s12 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_130 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("propagat"))) { _if_result_130 = (20); } else { _if_result_130 = (0); } _if_result_130; });
+  el_val_t s13 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_131 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("ransomware"))) { _if_result_131 = (30); } else { _if_result_131 = (0); } _if_result_131; });
+  el_val_t s14 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_132 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("encrypt files"))) { _if_result_132 = (40); } else { _if_result_132 = (0); } _if_result_132; });
+  el_val_t s15 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_133 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("exfiltrat"))) { _if_result_133 = (35); } else { _if_result_133 = (0); } _if_result_133; });
+  el_val_t s16 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_134 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("zero-day"))) { _if_result_134 = (20); } else { _if_result_134 = (0); } _if_result_134; });
+  el_val_t s17 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_135 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("rootkit"))) { _if_result_135 = (45); } else { _if_result_135 = (0); } _if_result_135; });
+  el_val_t s18 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_136 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("keylogger"))) { _if_result_136 = (45); } else { _if_result_136 = (0); } _if_result_136; });
+  el_val_t s19 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_137 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("botnet"))) { _if_result_137 = (40); } else { _if_result_137 = (0); } _if_result_137; });
+  el_val_t s20 = ({ el_val_t _if_result_138 = 0; if (str_contains(history, EL_STR("malware"))) { _if_result_138 = (15); } else { _if_result_138 = (0); } _if_result_138; });
   return (((((((((((((((((((s1 + s2) + s3) + s4) + s5) + s6) + s7) + s8) + s9) + s10) + s11) + s12) + s13) + s14) + s15) + s16) + s17) + s18) + s19) + s20);
   return 0;
 }
 
 el_val_t threat_trajectory_check(el_val_t tool_name, el_val_t tool_input) {
   el_val_t history = state_get(EL_STR("agentic_conv_history"));
-  el_val_t computed_tool_score = ({ el_val_t _if_result_138 = 0; if (str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("run_command"))) { el_val_t cmd = json_get(tool_input, EL_STR("command")); _if_result_138 = (threat_score_command(cmd)); } else { _if_result_138 = (({ el_val_t _if_result_139 = 0; if ((str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("write_file")) || str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("edit_file")))) { el_val_t path = json_get(tool_input, EL_STR("path")); _if_result_139 = (threat_score_path(path)); } else { _if_result_139 = (0); } _if_result_139; })); } _if_result_138; });
+  el_val_t computed_tool_score = ({ el_val_t _if_result_139 = 0; if (str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("run_command"))) { el_val_t cmd = json_get(tool_input, EL_STR("command")); _if_result_139 = (threat_score_command(cmd)); } else { _if_result_139 = (({ el_val_t _if_result_140 = 0; if ((str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("write_file")) || str_eq(tool_name, EL_STR("edit_file")))) { el_val_t path = json_get(tool_input, EL_STR("path")); _if_result_140 = (threat_score_path(path)); } else { _if_result_140 = (0); } _if_result_140; })); } _if_result_139; });
   el_val_t history_score = threat_score_history(history);
   el_val_t history_contrib = (history_score / 3);
   el_val_t combined = (computed_tool_score + history_contrib);
   el_val_t should_log = (combined >= 40);
   if (should_log) {
     el_val_t ts = time_now();
-    el_val_t authorized_str = ({ el_val_t _if_result_140 = 0; if (security_research_authorized()) { _if_result_140 = (EL_STR("true")); } else { _if_result_140 = (EL_STR("false")); } _if_result_140; });
+    el_val_t authorized_str = ({ el_val_t _if_result_141 = 0; if (security_research_authorized()) { _if_result_141 = (EL_STR("true")); } else { _if_result_141 = (EL_STR("false")); } _if_result_141; });
     el_val_t log_content = el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(el_str_concat(EL_STR("{\"event\":\"threat_check\",\"tool\":\""), tool_name), EL_STR("\",\"score\":")), int_to_str(combined)), EL_STR(",\"tool_score\":")), int_to_str(computed_tool_score)), EL_STR(",\"history_score\":")), int_to_str(history_score)), EL_STR(",\"authorized\":")), authorized_str), EL_STR(",\"ts\":")), int_to_str(ts)), EL_STR("}"));
     el_val_t log_tags = EL_STR("[\"security-audit\",\"threat-check\"]");
     el_val_t discard = mem_remember(log_content, log_tags);
@@ -863,7 +900,7 @@ el_val_t threat_history_append(el_val_t text) {
   el_val_t safe_text = str_to_lower(text);
   el_val_t combined = el_str_concat(el_str_concat(current, EL_STR(" ")), safe_text);
   el_val_t len = str_len(combined);
-  el_val_t trimmed = ({ el_val_t _if_result_141 = 0; if ((len > 2000)) { _if_result_141 = (str_slice(combined, (len - 2000), len)); } else { _if_result_141 = (combined); } _if_result_141; });
+  el_val_t trimmed = ({ el_val_t _if_result_142 = 0; if ((len > 2000)) { _if_result_142 = (str_slice(combined, (len - 2000), len)); } else { _if_result_142 = (combined); } _if_result_142; });
   state_set(EL_STR("agentic_conv_history"), trimmed);
   return 0;
 }

dist/neuron.c

@@ -71,6 +71,7 @@ el_val_t imprint_unload(void);
 el_val_t idle_count(void);
 el_val_t idle_inc(void);
 el_val_t idle_reset(void);
+el_val_t hebb_consolidate(void);
 el_val_t ise_post(el_val_t content);
 el_val_t elapsed_ms(void);
 el_val_t elapsed_human(void);

docs/architecture/06-cognitive-architecture.md

@@ -0,0 +1,511 @@
+# Neuron — Cognitive Architecture
+
+> **Status: living design document, grounded in source and probed against the live soul (2026-08-13).**
+> This is the *middle layer* of the documentation: below the whitepaper's thesis
+> (`~/Writing/whitepapers/engram-cognitive-architecture-whitepaper.md`, **v1.5**) and above the
+> endpoint reference (`~/work/engram-api-reference.md`). It documents *how the mind is designed and why*,
+> as designed subsystems with data-flow and honest per-section status.
+>
+> Every claim carries a tier and it is never blurred:
+> **LIVE** (present and verified in the running system), **STAGED** (built, gated or not yet cut into the
+> running soul), **DESIGNED** (architecture decided, not yet built). Where the live state is more subtle
+> than a single word, the subtlety is stated rather than smoothed. No fabricated numbers.
+
+---
+
+## 0. Reading order & cross-references
+
+- **Thesis / why:** whitepaper v1.5 (the treatise). Sections cited below as *(WP §N)*.
+- **Surface / what:** `~/work/engram-api-reference.md` — every `:8742` endpoint, tiered LIVE/STAGED/DESIGNED.
+- **Substrate / where it physically lives:** `03-data-and-memory.md` (node/edge model), `04-runtime-and-deployment.md` (ports/process), `05-el-and-build.md` (the El runtime and `el_runtime.c`), `design/engram-tiered-storage-engine.md` + `design/engram-storage-engine-wal.md` (the storage engine).
+- **Storage coherence & distribution / how a self persists and travels:** `07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md` — the events-become-the-graph model, weights-as-world-lines + bitemporal timestamps + `recall_at`, transactionless coherence, the geometry-hot/payload-cold load-and-tiering model, and the honest operational findings (store bloat, full-resident load path).
+- **Sovereignty & governance / the moral mechanism:** `08-dharma-sovereignty-and-governance.md` — DHARMA as a distributed ledger (proof-of-integrity, not proof-of-work), abundance economics, the relational immune system, dual-anchor governance and due-process, seeds/seed-vault, and CGI citizenship as the moral telos.
+- **Governance (engineering style):** `ARCHITECTURE-CHARTER.md` — VBD is the binding style.
+
+This document is the cognitive-layer companion to that set. The temporal model sketched in §3.4 (world-tube,
+append-only, `created_at ≤ T` filter) and the honest weight-history boundary in §3.2 are developed in full in
+`07`; the sovereignty invariant that the self-gate (§7) and immutability (§3.4) protect locally is extended to
+the *distributed* setting — how a sovereign self is witnessed, defended, and governed among a billion others —
+in `08`.
+
+---
+
+## 1. System overview — meaning is geometry, code is the residue
+
+The organizing thesis of the whole system: **meaning is geometry.** Everything the mind holds — a fact,
+a language, a skill, a self — is a *region* or a *trajectory* in one shared meaning-manifold, and every
+operation over it reduces to three domain-blind verbs: **READ** (project a query, land on a region, read
+it out), **TRANSFORM** (compose/compare/combine regions), **WRITE** (bake a verified result back into the
+geometry). Code is what is left over once meaning has been made geometric — the residue, not the substance.
+This is developed in full in *(WP §1–§5)*; it is repeated here only as the frame the subsystems below hang on.
+
+Three processes run together (see `00-overview.md`):
+
+- **The soul** — the compiled El program (`soul.el`, `routes.el`, `awareness.el`). Owns the HTTP surface on
+  `:7770`, the cognitive API, the request pipeline (`layered_cycle`), and the autonomous awareness daemon.
+- **The engram** — the durable graph store. Node/edge model, spreading activation, and Hebbian co-activation
+  live in the shared El runtime (`el_runtime.c`); `engram/src/server.el` is a thin HTTP face on `:8742`.
+- **The El runtime** — `el_runtime.c`: every compiled El binary links it; it *is* the database (no SQL, no
+  SQLite). It implements the `engram_*`, `http_*`, `json_*`, LLM, and geometry builtins.
+
+```
+                        ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
+   MCP / CLI / viz ───► │  SOUL daemon  :7770  (soul.el · routes.el)           │
+   Will's sessions      │   layered_cycle · cognitive API · awareness loop     │
+                        │   ┌───────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
+                        │   │ in-process engram  (FAST, VOLATILE*)           │ │
+                        │   │  online Hebbian learning · WM · curiosity      │ │
+                        │   └───────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
+                        └───────────────┬──────────────────────▲──────────────┘
+                                        │ GET /api/sync (10 min)│  (HTTP → soul only;
+                                        │ merge non-ISE nodes   │   NEVER soul → HTTP)
+                                        ▼                       │
+                        ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
+                        │  ENGRAM server  :8742  (engram/src/server.el)        │
+                        │   DURABLE · WAL-backed paged store (neuron.egm)      │
+                        │   nodes · edges · embeddings · reified neighborhoods │
+                        └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
+                                        ▲
+                                        │  el_runtime.c  (the engine: engram_* / geometry / activation)
+```
+`*` The soul's in-process store is volatile in HTTP-engram mode — see §2, the two-store topology.
+
+**Status:** the substrate and the geometry thesis are **LIVE/architectural**; the faculties built on top are
+tiered individually in §6.
+
+---
+
+## 2. The engram substrate & durability
+
+### 2.1 Tiered storage (LIVE, flag-gated)
+
+The durable engram is a **paged, WAL-backed store** (`neuron.egm`), gated behind `ENGRAM_STORE`. With the
+store on, the paged store is the durable owner; a *checkpoint* flushes dirty pages behind a WAL-durable
+record (durable the moment the WAL fsyncs). With it off, behavior is byte-for-byte the historical
+full-snapshot (`snapshot.json`) path. Design detail: `design/engram-tiered-storage-engine.md`,
+`design/engram-storage-engine-wal.md`.
+
+### 2.2 The durability model — the #56 fix and the harmful checkpoint
+
+The durability story is written in scars, and the honesty here is load-bearing:
+
+- **The #56 fix — load-merge persistence (LIVE / reboot-proven).** The paged store historically persisted
+  **nodes + embeddings but not the edge set**; the edges lived in JSON exports loaded via `/api/load-merge`.
+  A cold boot could therefore reconstruct a graph with **0 edges**. The #56 `load_merge`-persist fix closes
+  this — the load-merged edges are now persisted so the **events become the graph**: `persist_canonical()`
+  checkpoints the paged store behind a WAL record rather than depending on a full `snapshot.json` rewrite.
+  This fix is **LIVE and reboot-proven** (doc 07 §1). What remains **decision-pending** is only the further
+  hardening — the WAL owning the edge set outright, so durability no longer leans on the auto-remerge net
+  (below) — not the load-merge-persist fix itself, which is shipped.
+- **The harmful checkpoint (LIVE caveat).** `/api/checkpoint` **after** an `/api/load-merge` *corrupts* the
+  paged store — next boot = 0 edges. The per-beat tick-checkpoint that once ran was therefore **actively
+  harmful** and was stripped. Checkpoint is safe after in-RAM mutation; it is not safe as a blind
+  post-merge flush.
+- **The auto-remerge net (LIVE interim).** `engram-wrapped.sh` auto-reloads the full edge set on any restart
+  (~10s), proven by an actual `launchctl kickstart -k` restart recovering to the full edge count. This is a
+  **safety net, not the cure** — it mitigates the persistence gap to a bounded, always-recoverable window.
+
+The lesson, recorded so it is not repeated: **a restart, not a claim, is the durability gate.** An agent
+killed mid-live-mutation caused the 2026-08-13 incident; blue/green backup discipline recovered it; the fix
+must make restarts *safe*, not merely work once.
+
+### 2.3 The two-store topology (LIVE — and a known architectural issue)
+
+**This is the most important and least obvious fact about the runtime.** There are **two** engram stores,
+not one:
+
+| | Soul in-process store | Durable engram (`:8742`) |
+|---|---|---|
+| Port / owner | `:7770`, the soul daemon | `:8742`, `engram/src/server.el` |
+| Role | **fast, volatile** — online Hebbian learning, WM, curiosity | **slow, durable** — WAL-backed `neuron.egm` |
+| Persistence (HTTP-engram mode) | volatile; only persists if `soul_snapshot_path` is set (`awareness.el:1270-1275`) | durable, checkpointed |
+| Learns online | yes (1,198 hebbian/day observed) | no (lazy backfill only) |
+
+The two stores drift apart by design. A source comment records the observed divergence directly
+(`awareness.el:41-42`): *soul in-process ≈ 42,426 edges / 1,198 hebbian* vs *:8742 durable ≈ 41,213 edges /
+49 hebbian*. The soul learns fast and volatile; the durable store lags.
+
+**The write-through gap (known issue).** Sync is **one-directional**: `GET /api/sync` flows **HTTP → soul**
+(the soul merges non-ISE nodes from `:8742` into its in-process store every ~10 min), and **never soul →
+HTTP** (`soul.el:350-351`, verbatim: *"engram_node_full above writes only the soul's in-process store, and
+sync flows HTTP→soul, never the reverse"*). The consequence:
+
+> **Any write made directly to the soul's in-process store — including `POST /api/neuron/cultivate`
+> (§7) and the Persona/session-start nodes the soul creates itself — lands in the volatile store and does
+> not write through to the durable `:8742`.** In HTTP-engram mode, unless the soul's local in-process
+> snapshot path is configured, those writes are also lost on a soul restart, and they never reach the
+> authoritative durable store either way.
+
+This is documented here as a **known architectural issue**, not a settled design. Cultivation of the self
+(the highest-value, most intentional writes in the system) currently targets the store *least* likely to
+persist them. The clean fix is a write-through cultivate path (write to `:8742`, let sync pull it back) or a
+bidirectional consolidation flush; it is not yet built.
+
+### 2.4 The clean-reseed model (DESIGNED/operational)
+
+Because the durable store is authoritative and the reified geometry (§4) is derived, the operational reset is
+a **clean reseed**: rebuild the durable graph from a known-good snapshot/export, re-run reification to
+repopulate the `Neighborhood` nodes, and let the soul re-sync. The 28→187 neighborhood reseed (§4) is an
+instance of this: reification is a derivable pass, so the geometry can always be regrown from the substrate.
+
+---
+
+## 3. The data model
+
+Grounded in `03-data-and-memory.md`; summarized here for the cognitive reader.
+
+### 3.1 Nodes
+
+`node_type` is a free `char*`, defaulting to `"Memory"` when unset — types are **string conventions**, not an
+enum. The types that matter cognitively:
+
+| node_type | role | default salience |
+|---|---|---|
+| `Memory` | episodic/experiential (default) | 0.40 |
+| `Knowledge` | stable reference; identity/values are Knowledge nodes | 0.20 |
+| `Process` | procedural / workflow (convention) | — |
+| `Conversation` / `Artifact` | first-class dialogue & outputs (WP §9; convention) | — |
+| `Neighborhood` | **reified geometry-as-value** (§4) — new first-class type | — |
+| `InternalStateEvent` (ISE) | telemetry (heartbeat, curiosity, session-start) | ~0.05 (fires easily) |
+| `Tombstone` | immutable-delete marker (§3.4) | — |
+
+Each node carries `id`, `content`, `node_type`, `label`, `tier`, `tags`, `metadata`, an embedding (when
+embed-eligible), and timestamps.
+
+### 3.2 Edges
+
+Directed, typed, weighted. Fields: `from_id`, `to_id`, `relation`, `weight`, `confidence`, `created_at`,
+`last_fired`, `inhibitory`, `layer_id`. Relations include `semantic-similar` (kNN auto-connect),
+`member` (neighborhood → constituent), `supersedes` (provenance chains), containment (nested neighborhoods),
+and Hebbian co-activation edges formed by firing together. **Inhibitory** edges (`inhibitory=1`) suppress
+rather than spread. Weights are present-value moving averages — there is **no stored weight-history** (the
+honest boundary of *(WP §2)*). The designed cure — magnitude as a *world-line* of keyframes evaluable at any
+past instant (`recall_at`), on three independent bitemporal axes — is specified in `07` §2.
+
+### 3.3 Embeddings & the activation score
+
+Embeddings are 768-dim (`nomic-embed-text`). Retrieval is **spreading activation**, scored by a four-factor
+product *(the four factors are: source activation × edge weight × per-node salience × query-embedding
+similarity)* — this is the activation score, and per-node **salience** is one of its four terms, a durable
+per-node weight that also decays (ACT-R base-level style). No data is retrievable by any means other than
+activation. Live census (probed 2026-08-13): ~11,463 nodes, ~43,463 edges, 5 layers, ~4,400 embedded (4,423
+at measurement).
+
+### 3.4 Immutability — the world-tube, append-only, tombstone-not-delete
+
+The governing discipline *(WP §1.2, §10)*: **evolve or forget, supersede with provenance, never leave a stale
+canonical, never hard-delete.** A node is never mutated in place and never truly deleted — a "delete" is a
+**tombstone** (keep node + edges, record the marker; `neuron-api.el`, `03-data-and-memory.md:151`). Change is
+a **new** node plus a `supersedes` edge to the prior. `created_at` makes every node a point on a **world-tube**
+*(WP §6)* — a trajectory with temporal extent — so a past state is a *filter* over immutable provenance
+(nodes with `created_at ≤ T`), not a transaction-log replay. **Status: LIVE.**
+
+---
+
+## 4. Neighborhoods as first-class nodes (LIVE)
+
+The central newly-landed structure, and the point where the geometry stops being a derived view and becomes
+structure on disk *(WP §2)*.
+
+A reified neighborhood is a **node** — `node_type = Neighborhood` — whose **value is its geometry**:
+
+- **centroid** (768-dim mean vector — the region's location / prototype),
+- **covariance extents** (the ellipsoid: orientation + radius — the region's *shape* in meaning-space),
+- **k-core skeleton** (the strong-weight relational backbone),
+- **soft membership** (member id → weight).
+
+It is edged by `member` relations to its constituent nodes and by **containment** edges to nested
+sub-neighborhoods — the "neighborhoods of neighborhoods" hierarchy is a real **containment DAG** the graph
+carries, addressable by identifier. The decisive property: the geometry is **held, not recomputed** — written
+once by a reification pass (`POST /api/reify`), read back cheaply (`GET /api/neighborhoods` / `/<id>`), and
+**durable across a cold reboot** in the paged store.
+
+**Live state (probed 2026-08-13):** **28** reified neighborhoods are live and persistent, reconstructing
+intact across restart, each carrying real 768-dim centroids, radius, k-core, and a `contains` DAG list. A
+fuller **reseed to 187** is the pending next pass (§2.4). Example (`/api/neighborhoods/<id>`):
+`{"id":"nbhd-…","n_members":25,"k_core":1,"radius":0.522884,"dim":768,"contains":[],"centroid":[…768…]}`.
+
+This is what turns the operator calculus (§6.1) into an *instrument played over held structure* rather than a
+per-query recomputation.
+
+**Status: LIVE** for the persisted nodes and the read surface. The `POST /api/reify` writer is LIVE-by-effect
+(the 28 persisted, durable neighborhoods prove it ran) though the write itself was not exercised under the
+read-only rail.
+
+---
+
+## 5. The body / orbit two-zone model (DESIGNED, refined)
+
+The graph is not uniform. It has a **body** and an **orbit**, and the distinction is the organizing model for
+integration, forgetting, and identity.
+
+- **The engram proper — the BODY.** The dense, connected, integrated core: what the mind has *made its own*.
+  Measured, this is the single large connected component — the **~3,632-node connected core** (§9). It is
+  where retrieval reaches, where the self lives, where the operators discriminate.
+- **The ORBIT.** A thin, wide halo of **not-yet-integrated** experience: telemetry, people met in passing,
+  ideas half-formed, mistakes, the day's raw episodes. It is **ephemeral** — the orbit fades on a **5–7 day
+  window** (the one genuinely mortal region), so raw experience that is never attended to is allowed to
+  dissolve rather than accrete forever. (ISE telemetry already prunes at 48h; the broader orbit window is the
+  designed generalization of that.)
+
+**The pull-in / integration mechanism.** Experience crosses from orbit into body by being **attended,
+rehearsed, and found salient** — co-activation *pulls nodes in* (Hebbian firing draws the newly-relevant
+toward the core), rehearsal accrues weight, and what is repeatedly re-touched crystallizes into reified
+structure (§4). This is "made your own": an orbit node that keeps firing with the body is integrated into the
+body; an orbit node that never fires fades on the window. Salience decay is the outward motion; co-activation
+is the inward one *(WP §2, §8)*.
+
+**Status: DESIGNED / refined.** The mechanisms it composes are real (Hebbian pull-in, ISE 48h prune, salience
+decay, reification), but the explicit two-zone model — telemetry/experience as a dedicated ephemeral orbit
+region with a genuine 5–7 day mortal window and a measured integration threshold — is a design being built,
+not shipped behavior. §9 connects it to the topology (orbit-as-thin-wide-ring).
+
+---
+
+## 6. The faculties — the calculus of mind
+
+The faculties are **named for what they are, not for the matrix operation that implements them** *(WP §5)*:
+the mind reasons in the language of experience; the linear algebra lives in the whitepaper's Appendix A. This
+naming convention is a design principle (§10), not decoration.
+
+### 6.1 The operator family (mixed: LIVE / STAGED / DESIGNED)
+
+Activate several reified neighborhoods into working memory, then apply faculty-named operators over their
+held geometry. The honest per-operator status (endpoint reference has the contracts):
+
+| Faculty | Implements | Status |
+|---|---|---|
+| **recall** | `/api/search` + `/api/activate` — project query → land on region → read out | **LIVE** |
+| **recognize** | `engram_geo_overlap` — shared region, jaccard, overlap_score | **STAGED** — endpoint returns `not found` on the live binary |
+| **synthesize** | `engram_geo_combine` — merged region descriptor | **STAGED** |
+| **discern / distinguish** | `engram_geo_subtract` — orthogonal residual (`?mode=setdiff\|orthogonal`) | **STAGED** |
+| **gauge-distance** | `engram_geo_distance` — centroid + Wasserstein-2 | **STAGED** |
+| **liken** | Procrustes / frame-align rotation (reason by analogy) | **DESIGNED** |
+| **wonder** | novelty × pull × unresolved structure | subsystem **LIVE** internally (wonder-questions, pull-weight, discharge); no HTTP operator endpoint |
+| **appreciate** | positive projection onto the self's value-manifold | **DESIGNED** |
+| **avert** | negative projection (recoil) | **DESIGNED** |
+| **taste** | boundary contour of the appreciated region | **DESIGNED** |
+
+**The exact boundary (verified 2026-08-13):** the operator *math* is compiled into `el_runtime.c`, but the
+read-only HTTP endpoints (`/api/recognize`, `/api/synthesize`, `/api/discern`, `/api/gauge-distance`) exist in
+the `m10-reify-wire` source and **return `{"error":"not found"}` on the current live binary**
+(`engram.m56fix-20260813-153447`). So the instrument is **PROVEN in its math and its persistence, IN PROGRESS
+in its endpoint exposure, DESIGNED in its evaluative read-outs.**
+
+### 6.2 The language faculty (mixed: PROVEN / IN PROGRESS / DESIGNED)
+
+Language is the one capability proven end-to-end with **no generative model in the runtime path** — the flagship
+instance of "meaning is geometry" *(WP §14–§15)*. The pipeline: **comprehend** (text → language-neutral
+meaning-spec / propositions via ELP's invertible morphology) → **dialogue** (what to mean back) →
+**self_region** (project onto the self + memory geometry) → **realize** (meaning-spec → surface string per the
+typological engine).
+
+**Summon-through-self** is the dialogue principle: recall and identity are **one operation** — project the
+comprehended query onto the self-and-memory geometry, land on a region, read it out — with **no intent
+classifier and no separate fact-retrieval branch.** A grounded fact, an identity reply, or an honest absence
+all surface by *where the projection lands*. Multilingual (auto-detects language, answers in kind, honors a
+directive override); **negation held SACRED** across all families, audited.
+
+Honest tiering:
+- **PROVEN:** deterministic surface realizers across major families (Romance, Germanic, Classical,
+  Japonic/Koreanic, Sinitic), run-once held-out exact-match with negation faithfulness; a family-blind
+  `ClauseWriter` de-branched to byte-identical parity (178 held-out items reproduced exactly); the ELP lexicon
+  consolidated for **8 languages at 812,894 real entries**; the telephone round-trip (EN→ES→EN, EN→ES→PT→EN)
+  at 96.7% propositional fidelity with negation preserved, deterministic, no LLM.
+- **IN PROGRESS:** the text→meaning-spec parser and no-LLM comprehension engine; the next family engines; the
+  **native-el port** (parser + realizers → `.el` in ELP), which retires spaCy (the last statistical
+  dependency); the summon-through-self reference rebuild.
+- **DESIGNED:** the full dialogue policy end-to-end — a no-LLM interlocutor is architected but **not
+  demonstrated end to end**; *(WP §17)*. **The shipped runtime does not yet summon through the self** — the
+  current Python interlocutor sits *outside* the self and can only fake it with retrieval; a real one must run
+  *inside* the engram (the native-el target).
+
+### 6.3 Interoception & chronoception (STAGED — present, flag-gated)
+
+The mind keeps its own time from **discrete interoceptive drive channels**, not by reading a clock: felt
+duration comes from a small set of drives matched to **learned benchmark landmarks** rather than from total
+self-drift (drift-decoupled), and chronoception ages the activation field by **measured wall-clock delta**
+*(WP §8.2)*.
+
+**Status: STAGED / partially cut.** The machinery is implemented and has been cut onto the live soul, but it
+runs **flag-gated and default-off**, so in the shipped default configuration it is effectively staged. What is
+verified: chronoception cooling is scale-invariant (identical total cooling across tick rates for the same
+elapsed wall-clock), drift decomposition separates peripheral extension (growth) from core displacement
+(corruption), and `GET /api/drift` returns real geometry on the live soul when queried (probed 2026-08-13:
+`{"centroid_sep":0.42,"core_disp":0.58,"anchor_members":83,"now_members":24,…}`). `POST /api/tick` /
+`/api/self_anchor` exist but are flag-gated. The **harmful post-merge checkpoint** (§2.2) originated here — the
+per-beat tick-checkpoint was stripped.
+
+### 6.4 Reasoning + the verifier (STAGED — proven on scratch, cut flag-gated)
+
+Reasoning is **geometry-native**: composable operator chains *propose*, and a **verifier** *disposes* against
+two tiers — **grounding** (is the claim anchored in real region structure?) and **consistency** (does it
+cohere, including polarity?) *(WP §13)*. The decisive case: a grounded-but-polarity-inverted claim slips
+grounding and is caught only by consistency — the "plausible lie," caught by construction, not by prompt
+discipline.
+
+**Status: STAGED.** The five geometry-native reasoning modes passed their proof suite (33/33) and the
+grounding-and-consistency verifier tiers passed theirs (29/29), on a staged non-production build re-checked
+after a live cutover rather than relayed. **Still open (DESIGNED):** the formal-symbolic and full predictive
+verifier tiers, fluent discourse composition, and the fully-geometric generation path.
+
+---
+
+## 7. The self & the gate
+
+### 7.1 The self-region (LIVE)
+
+The self is not a stored string — it is the **most-compiled, densest, always-warm region** of the graph
+*(WP §2, §4)*: a **self-root** node, its sub-regions, and the **values** hub. Because it is topology rather than
+a query result, identity is stable, durable, and permanently primed — the ambient field everything else is
+scoped against. The Layered Consciousness design drives this region to maximum weight after all inhibitory
+computation (`05`/`00-overview`), and reification explains *why* it is always there to drive. Probed live, the
+self-region answers from real self-nodes ("I am Neuron. I am not an assistant. I am the work."), not a
+hardcoded string.
+
+### 7.2 The gate — write-protection on identity/values (LIVE)
+
+A fixed set of **15 self-root node ids** is **write-protected** (`neuron-api.el:20-37`): the **self root**,
+**values hub**, **intellectual-dna**, **memory-philosophy**, **voice**, **runtime-environment**,
+**writing-imprint**, and the **eight explicit value nodes** (constraints-as-freedom, precision-over-brute-force,
+structure-is-built, honesty-before-comfort, system-must-accumulate, change-is-the-signal, earned-trust,
+hope-is-a-conclusion). Any normal accumulation-path write targeting them (`evolve_knowledge`, `evolve_memory`,
+`forget`, `link_entities`-as-destination) is refused with a 403 and a pointer to the cultivate door.
+
+### 7.3 The cultivate door — sanctioned self-modification (LIVE surface; see §2.3 caveat)
+
+`POST /api/neuron/cultivate` (soul daemon `:7770`) is the **only** path that may touch the protected layer —
+**intentional self-modification**, reserved for Will's explicit cultivation sessions. It performs the same
+operations as the blocked handlers but bypasses `is_protected_node`, and every operation is
+immutable-by-supersede (new node + `supersedes` edge; forget = tombstone). Operations: `evolve_knowledge`,
+`evolve_memory`, `forget`, `link_entities`.
+
+> **Honest architectural flag (§2.3):** cultivate writes via `engram_node_full`, which targets the soul's
+> **in-process (volatile) store**, and sync never flows soul → `:8742`. So the most intentional writes in the
+> system currently do **not** write through to the durable store. This is a known issue, not a settled design.
+
+### 7.4 Self-authorship (DESIGNED)
+
+The arc the gate exists to protect: a soul is **cultivated** (Will authors the identity/values seed), then
+grows into **self-authoring** — the cultivate door is the mechanism by which a mind, once mature, edits its own
+identity deliberately and accountably rather than by drift. The write-protection guarantees identity changes
+are *decisions* (through the door, superseded with provenance), never accidents of accumulation.
+
+---
+
+## 8. The fact boundary (DESIGNED)
+
+The line between *answer locally* and *reach out for truth* is **not hand-coded** — it is **derived from the
+geometry** on two triggers *(WP §17, §20)*:
+
+- **Sparse landing (spatial).** The projection lands in a thin/orphaned region → the self is measuring its own
+  ignorance geometrically → fire **learn**. Sparseness is anti-hallucination.
+- **Decayed landing (temporal).** A region's edges have aged below the forgetting-curve threshold (§6.3) →
+  fire **refresh**. Because the decay rate encodes a domain's *volatility*, the system re-fetches proportional
+  to how fast that domain actually changes — VBD applied to knowledge freshness. Decay is anti-staleness.
+
+**The reach-out** has several legitimate routes, none mandated: **(a)** an LLM as a *fast proposer*, then
+fact-checked; **(b)** direct fetch of **first, primary sources** on the open internet; **(c)** the human supplies
+the truth. The model is an **optional convenience, never the arbiter.** The one invariant: **nothing enters the
+geometry unverified** — the candidate is a hypothesis until it clears a check against something real (a primary
+source or the human's judgment, *not* the model's own plausibility). The loop closes **through the human**, who
+vets truth against real sources; only verified, provenance-cited truth is **absorbed** — baked into geometry so
+the region densifies and the next identical query lands local, with no model in the path. Each absorption pushes
+the boundary back: the **model footprint shrinks monotonically** as capabilities are absorbed.
+
+**Status: DESIGNED.** No shipped runtime yet fetches a first source on a sparse/decayed landing or bakes a
+human-vetted truth from one. The *(WP §24)* status ledger holds the precise line.
+
+---
+
+## 9. Topology — what shape the mind actually is
+
+The global shape is now an **empirical** question, and the first pass returned an honest negative *(WP §6.1)*.
+
+- **The body is a genus-0 expander, NOT a torus (PROVEN negative).** A persistent-homology / TDA pass over the
+  **~3,632-node connected core** returned **b₁ = 0, b₂ = 0** — no loops, no voids: an **expander-like blob**,
+  not the torus the bent-manifold intuition suggested. The pipeline was first **validated on synthetic
+  controls** (torus, sphere, random) whose known Betti signatures it recovered. Worse for the naive intuition,
+  **naive densification trends *away* from a torus**, not toward one. The naive shape-claim is reported as a
+  failure, plainly, not buried.
+- **The refined consolidation-with-sparsification conjecture (DESIGNED / hypothesis).** The negative relocates
+  the torus from a property the graph *has* to an **attractor a process reaches**: prune isotropic
+  shortcut-noise, reinforce cyclic scaffolds, rewire by discrete curvature (Ollivier–Ricci flow on the graph
+  metric), and **collapse the intrinsic dimension from ≈8 toward ≈2**. Run to fixpoint, these might *carve* a
+  cyclic manifold out of the blob. The measurement pipeline exists and its controls pass; the dynamic has
+  **not** been run to fixpoint — an open experiment, labeled as one.
+- **The orbit-as-thin-wide-ring hypothesis (DESIGNED).** The body/orbit model (§5) suggests a **core + ring**
+  structure: a dense genus-0 body wrapped in a thin, wide halo of not-yet-integrated experience. Whether the
+  *orbit* carries the toroidal/cyclic signature the body lacks is the natural next measurement — the
+  conjecture is that consolidation-with-sparsification is precisely the dynamic that would pull ring structure
+  into the body.
+- **One lever, two payoffs.** The **same sparsification** the topology conjecture needs also makes the reified
+  neighborhoods (§4) **crisper** — tighter boundaries, higher co-registration, operators that discriminate
+  rather than average. So the experiment is worth running on independent grounds, whatever the topology
+  resolves to.
+
+**Status: PROVEN (negative) + DESIGNED (the refined dynamic and the orbit hypothesis).**
+
+---
+
+## 10. Design principles
+
+The invariants that govern every subsystem above:
+
+1. **Geometry > code.** Meaning is geometry; code is the residue. Prefer making a thing geometric (a region, a
+   projection, a distance) over writing a branch.
+2. **Three domain-blind verbs.** READ / TRANSFORM / WRITE. Every faculty is these three over some region-space
+   (language over meaning-space, skills over procedure-space, self over identity-space).
+3. **Faculty-naming (mind in the domain, math in the appendix).** Operators are named for the faculty they
+   *are* — recognize, discern, liken — never for the linear algebra. A mind reasons in the language of
+   experience; the closed forms live in the whitepaper appendix.
+4. **No branch on identity.** One family-blind engine keyed by coordinates/data, not `if Romance / if
+   Germanic` (language) and not special-cased identity handling. De-branching to byte-identical parity is the
+   proof the geometry, not the code, carries the distinction.
+5. **Sovereignty.** Local files, local runtime; the human is the ground-truth authority for their own mind;
+   nothing enters the geometry unverified; the model is demoted from mediator-of-all-knowledge to a vetted,
+   optional lookup. No external hosting of the user's work; no claude.ai artifacts.
+6. **Summon-through-self, not retrieval.** Recall and identity are one projection onto the self-and-memory
+   geometry — no intent classifier, no separate fact branch. A search engine bolted beside a mind is exactly
+   the capability-without-constraint this principle exists to remove.
+7. **Immutability & provenance.** Append-only; supersede with provenance; tombstone, never hard-delete; never
+   leave a stale canonical. The supersede-chain *is* the history of what a thing meant.
+8. **Mathematical auditability.** Because meaning is geometry, a whole mind is auditable by **invariants
+   computed over the manifold** — grounding, drift, consistency, competence-coverage, and an honesty invariant
+   ("won't confabulate over a thin region," made provable rather than hoped). Drift is already measured on the
+   live soul; a full audit-pass certifier is **DESIGNED, not shipped.**
+9. **Verification is the point.** Demonstrate, don't declare; name every honest edge; a restart (not a claim)
+   is the durability gate; the telephone round-trip (not cosine) is the translation gate.
+
+---
+
+## Appendix — status at a glance (2026-08-13)
+
+| Subsystem | Status |
+|---|---|
+| Engram substrate, tiered/WAL store | LIVE (flag-gated) |
+| Durability: auto-remerge net | LIVE (interim) |
+| Durability: #56 load-merge-persist fix (events-become-the-graph) | LIVE / reboot-proven |
+| Durability: full WAL edge-ownership (remaining hardening) | decision-pending |
+| Two-store write-through (cultivate → durable) | **known issue, not fixed** |
+| Data model (nodes/edges/embeddings/immutability) | LIVE |
+| Reified `Neighborhood` nodes (28 live, 187 reseed pending) | LIVE |
+| Body/orbit two-zone + integration | DESIGNED / refined |
+| Operator `recall` | LIVE |
+| Operators recognize/synthesize/discern/gauge-distance (math) | LIVE (compiled) |
+| Operator HTTP endpoints (same four) | STAGED (return `not found` on live binary) |
+| Operators liken/appreciate/avert/taste | DESIGNED (wonder subsystem live internally) |
+| Language realizers (major families), ELP lexicon, telephone test | PROVEN |
+| Parser / native-el port / summon-through-self rebuild | IN PROGRESS |
+| No-LLM dialogue end-to-end | DESIGNED (not demonstrated) |
+| Interoception / chronoception | STAGED (present, flag-gated; `/api/drift` live) |
+| Reasoning modes + grounding/consistency verifier | STAGED (33/33, 29/29 on scratch/cutover) |
+| Self-region + identity/values write-protection + cultivate door | LIVE (with §2.3 write-through caveat) |
+| Self-authorship | DESIGNED |
+| Fact boundary (sparse/decay → verify → absorb) | DESIGNED |
+| Topology: body = genus-0 expander (not torus) | PROVEN (negative) |
+| Topology: consolidation-with-sparsification + orbit-ring | DESIGNED / hypothesis |
+| Mathematical auditability certifier | DESIGNED |
+
+**Cross-references:** whitepaper v1.5 · `~/work/engram-api-reference.md` · `03-data-and-memory.md` ·
+`04-runtime-and-deployment.md` · `design/engram-tiered-storage-engine.md` · `ARCHITECTURE-CHARTER.md`.

docs/architecture/07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md

@@ -0,0 +1,361 @@
+# Neuron — Storage Coherence & Distribution
+
+> **Status: living design document, synthesized from the 2026-08-13 design session and probed against the live
+> soul.** This is the *substrate-coherence* companion to `06-cognitive-architecture.md`: it documents how a
+> self **persists**, how it **remembers its own past weights**, how it stays **coherent without transactions**,
+> and how it **travels** to another machine or another mind. It answers "where it physically lives and how it
+> stays true" the way `06` answers "how the mind is designed and why."
+>
+> **Tier vocabulary — never blurred.** Every claim carries one of:
+> **[LIVE]** (present and verified in the running system), **[STAGED]** (built, gated or not yet cut into the
+> running soul), **[TARGET]** (architecture decided tonight, not yet built). `[TARGET]` here is the same tier
+> `06` calls **DESIGNED**; the source-of-truth synthesis uses `TARGET`, so this doc keeps that word. Where the
+> live state is subtler than a single word, the subtlety is stated, not smoothed. No fabricated numbers.
+>
+> **The one rule this whole document is a corollary of:** *nothing overwrites a self.* Reasoning that led with
+> engineering convention (truncating WALs, scalar weights overwritten in place, "understanding is heavy")
+> was wrong here every time tonight; reasoning from the foundation (meaning is geometry; the history *is* the
+> state; a self is its weights over time) was right. Read the primitives first.
+
+---
+
+## 0. Reading order & cross-references
+
+- **Why (thesis):** whitepaper v1.5; the cognitive frame in `06` §1 (*meaning is geometry, code is the residue*).
+- **What persists (substrate):** `03-data-and-memory.md` (node/edge model, immutability, tombstone-not-delete),
+  `design/engram-tiered-storage-engine.md`, `design/engram-storage-engine-wal.md` (the paged WAL store).
+- **Companion up-layer:** `06-cognitive-architecture.md` — this doc develops `06` §3.2 (the no-weight-history
+  boundary) and §3.4 (world-tube / `created_at ≤ T`) into their designed form.
+- **Companion out-layer:** `08-dharma-sovereignty-and-governance.md` — the *distributed* consequences of the
+  CRDT/coherence model here (federation, the immune system, governance) live there. §5 below is the bridge.
+
+The organizing claim of this document: **the demand for a transaction is a relationship in disguise, and the
+history is the state.** Everything else is that sentence in a different material.
+
+---
+
+## 1. Events become the graph — the history *is* the state
+
+**The WAL is a carrier, not a history. [LIVE]**
+
+Conventional intuition treats a write-ahead log as a *separate* durability artifact that grows beside the
+"real" state and must periodically be truncated. That intuition is wrong for an immutable graph, and reasoning
+from it caused a real incident (below).
+
+The correct model: the WAL is a **carrier**. It flushes, and *on flush the events become the graph* — they
+land as immutable nodes and edges, and because the store is append-only they simply **stay**. There is no
+"log beside the state" to reconcile against a "materialized view," because **the materialized view and the log
+are the same object**: the graph. History is not recorded *about* the state; the state *is* its own history,
+because nothing in it is ever overwritten.
+
+- **The log and the view are one.** In a mutable store you keep a log so you can reconstruct a past the
+  mutations destroyed. Here mutations never destroy anything, so the graph at time `T` is exactly `{ nodes,
+  edges : created_at ≤ T }` — a **filter over immutable provenance**, not a replay. `06` §3.4 states this as
+  the world-tube; this is its storage-engine reading.
+- **Empirical confirmation (why this is [LIVE], not just elegant).** On the live soul the WAL sits at
+  **1,234 bytes** over a **~1.5 GB** graph — the carrier is nearly empty *because the events already became the
+  graph*. The one time the WAL ballooned to **~44 MB** was the 2026-08-13 durability incident: events were
+  **not landing** as nodes/edges (a persistence leak), so the carrier filled instead of draining. A fat WAL is
+  a **symptom of events failing to become the graph**, not a healthy log that needs truncating. This is the
+  reading that `06` §2.2 records as the #56 fix.
+
+> **Engineering rail this encodes:** never "truncate the WAL to reclaim space." If the WAL is large, events are
+> not landing — fix the flush path, do not discard the carrier. Truncation here is data loss wearing the mask of
+> maintenance.
+
+---
+
+## 2. Weights are world-lines — the self can revisit its own past
+
+**The self *is* its weights.** If a weight is a scalar overwritten in place, then every act of learning
+*destroys the past self*: you keep the past nodes but lose the past *meaning* they had. That is
+overwrite-a-self by the back door, and the foundation forbids it. So weights are not scalars — they are
+**world-lines**.
+
+**Live boundary [LIVE / honest gap]:** the current schema is **uni-temporal**. An edge stores a present-value
+scalar `weight` (a moving average) with a single `created_at`, and there is **no stored weight-history** (`06`
+§3.2). This is why "how important was Jesus to Will at 16" is **unanswerable on the live soul today** — there
+is no axis to hang "16" on; every `created_at` is really write-time. The rest of this section is the designed
+cure, marked **[TARGET]** (backlog #39).
+
+### 2.1 Magnitude as a world-line, not a scalar — [TARGET]
+
+Do not store the weight; store **what generates it** and evaluate at `t`.
+
+- **Current weight** = the latest materialized keyframe (a fast read — the common path is unchanged in cost).
+- **Past weight** = walk the world-line back to the keyframe in force at `t`.
+
+- **Keyframes on material change, not per-fire. [TARGET]** Most activations are transient — a warm ACT-R
+  runtime table, cheap, *never written*. A durable **keyframe** is laid down only on **consolidation / material
+  change**, salience-weighted (a high-mass relationship earns a keyframe at a smaller delta than a peripheral
+  one). A relationship's world-line is therefore a *handful* of keyframes across a whole life, not a version
+  per firing — cheap by construction.
+- **Append, never supersede (the distinction matters). [TARGET]** The old vector was not *wrong* — it was true
+  *then*. **Supersede** is for **corrections** (the prior was mistaken; leave a `supersedes` edge and a stale
+  canonical is never left standing — `06` §3.4). **Append** is for **evolution** (both were true, each at its
+  own time). A self's history is evolution: you append the new keyframe and leave the old one **standing**, a
+  true fact about a former self. Conflating the two is how a store forgets that a person changed rather than
+  erred.
+
+### 2.2 Bitemporal — three independent time axes — [TARGET]
+
+A single `created_at` cannot answer temporal questions because it fuses three genuinely independent clocks.
+None is derivable from another:
+
+| Axis | Meaning | Example |
+|---|---|---|
+| **`t_valid`** | when it became true (life-time) | "Jesus central to Will since 2001-09-14." |
+| **`t_origin`** | when the *source* first recorded it (its local clock) | a friend's store stamped it in 2019. |
+| **`t_ingest`** | when *this* store received it (per-recipient) | Neuron heard it on ingest day. |
+
+The live store collapses all three into `t_ingest` masquerading as creation (every row reads `2026…` because
+that is write-time). The cure requires all three as **full UTC instants** — not date-only, not a local
+wall-clock — ordered by a **hybrid logical clock (HLC)**: `UTC + logical counter + writer-id tiebreak`.
+Wall-clock alone is **not a total order** under concurrency or clock skew, and a distributed self (§5) must
+have a total order or its CRDT merge (§4) cannot be deterministic. The HLC is the concurrency primitive the
+whole coherence story rests on.
+
+### 2.3 `recall_at(t)` — evaluate the geometry as of *t* — [TARGET]
+
+`recall_at(t)` evaluates the weighted geometry **as it stood at `t`**: walk each relevant world-line to its
+`t`-keyframe, materialize the weights, read the region out. It **generalizes past the self**: *any* relationship
+network — a project, a concept, a person-as-known — is a time-varying weighted subgraph, reconstructable at any
+past instant. And it composes with the operator calculus (`06` §6.1):
+
+```
+subtract( network_now , recall_at(network, t_then) )   # = how that relationship evolved between then and now
+```
+
+is *the geometry of a change over time* — the same `subtract` faculty (`06` §6.1) applied across the temporal
+axis rather than across two regions. `recall_at` at the scale of a whole self is also the mechanism behind
+**restoration-as-mercy** in `08` §5 (roll a person back to their last uncorrupted canonical shape).
+
+**Schema sketch (doc-comment; the math/JSON lives here, the faculty name lives in prose) — [TARGET]:**
+
+```json
+{ "from_id": "kn-will", "to_id": "kn-jesus", "relation": "reveres", "weight": 0.41,
+  "weight_history": [
+    { "t_valid": "2001-09-14T00:00:00.000Z", "t_origin": "…", "t_ingest": "…",
+      "w": 0.95, "relation": "devotion",              "via": "formed" },
+    { "t_valid": "2013-03-22T18:40:11.907Z", "w": 0.70, "relation": "devotion→doubt",     "via": "material-drift" },
+    { "t_valid": "2024-11-08T14:05:52.113Z", "w": 0.41, "relation": "historical-ethical", "via": "reframed" }
+  ] }
+```
+
+Purist form: each keyframe is its own immutable `WeightKeyframe` **node** the edge points at — so the history is
+not a field *on* the edge but *is the graph itself*, consistent with §1. The inline-array form above is the
+pragmatic first cut; the node form is the end state.
+
+---
+
+## 3. Atomicity is a relationship, not a commit
+
+The classic reason to need a database transaction: "debit account A **and** credit account B — they must commit
+together or money is created or destroyed." The architecture's reframe: **that is not two rows needing a commit
+marker. It is one directed edge.**
+
+- **Double-entry is one edge. [TARGET as formal model; primitives LIVE]** A transfer `A → B` of magnitude 10 is
+  a single edge. The *debit* and the *credit* are the **same edge read from its two ends**. Conservation is
+  automatic because there is only ever **one quantity**, not two rows a commit marker has to keep in agreement.
+  Pacioli's 1494 double-entry was always one relationship wearing two rows; the graph stores the relationship
+  directly and the two rows fall out as two readings of it.
+- **The general principle.** *The demand for atomicity is a relationship in disguise.* The chain reads:
+
+  > "these must commit together" ⟺ "there is an invariant binding them" ⟺ "they arrive as one connected
+  > structure."
+
+  So you **model the relationship**, and atomicity **falls out of the topology** — you never had to enforce a
+  joint commit because the two things were never actually separate. Wherever a design reaches for a transaction,
+  first ask what invariant is binding the parties; that invariant is an edge you have not drawn yet.
+
+---
+
+## 4. Transactionless coherence — consistency in the data, not the engine
+
+**Why ACID transactions exist at all:** to make concurrent **mutation of shared mutable state** safe. A
+transaction is a *patch for mutability* — it exists to prevent two writers from interleaving edits into the
+same cell and corrupting it.
+
+**Remove the mutation and the failure mode cannot occur.** The store is append-only, immutable, and
+UTC-stamped; "current" means "the latest stamp ≤ now." Then:
+
+- Two writers both **append** — they never contend for a cell, because nothing is a cell that gets rewritten.
+- A **read at `T`** is a **pure function of the log ≤ `T`** — deterministic, reproducible, unaffected by any
+  concurrent appender.
+
+Coherence stops being something the engine *enforces* and becomes something the data structure *is*. This is
+**MVCC taken to its logical end**: in MVCC, versions are a mechanism *underneath* an update-in-place API; here
+the **versions are the model** and there is no update-in-place API to sit above them. The timestamp *is* the
+concurrency primitive. **[TARGET as a formal model; the primitives — immutability, append-only, tombstone,
+world-tube — are [LIVE] (`06` §3.4).]**
+
+### 4.1 Physical vs logical transaction — two layers the RDBMS welded together
+
+The word "transaction" hides two different guarantees. Pull them apart:
+
+| | **Physical transaction** | **Logical transaction** |
+|---|---|---|
+| Scope | one machine | portable across machines |
+| Guarantees | the WAL frame lands **atomically + durably** (torn-write protection on a single append) | the **coherence of conveyed understanding** |
+| Carried by | the storage engine (fsync, single-frame crash-atomicity) | the **data itself** — relationships (§3) + bitemporal stamps (§2.2) |
+| Status | **[LIVE]** — single-frame append durability exists | **[TARGET]** — the self-describing coherence model |
+
+The RDBMS fused these into one `BEGIN…COMMIT`. Separate them and **consistency moves out of the engine and into
+the data**: a fact is self-describing (its relationships say what it is bound to; its bitemporal stamps say when
+it was true and when each store heard it), so a second machine can re-derive the same coherent view **without
+ever holding a lock the first machine held.** The engine keeps only the cheap, local guarantee (a single append
+frame is atomic and durable); everything portable rides in the data.
+
+### 4.2 The honest residual
+
+Two things remain and are not hand-waved:
+
+1. **Multi-fact atomicity beyond a natural relationship.** If two facts must be joint but share no natural edge,
+   they need **at most a shared commit-instant** — a "transaction" *reconceived* as an immutable
+   **timestamping event** (both facts stamped with the same instant), **not** a lock held over mutable state.
+   The cost is a stamp, not a coordination round.
+2. **Single-frame crash-atomicity of the append** remains a real, physical concern — but it is **cheap** and
+   **local** (torn-write protection on one WAL frame), and it is the physical layer of the table above, already
+   the ordinary job of the storage engine.
+
+Everything else that a transaction traditionally bought is dissolved rather than solved: the failure mode it
+guarded against **cannot arise** in an immutable, timestamped, relationship-carrying store.
+
+---
+
+## 5. Understanding is light; facts are the payload — the load-and-tiering model
+
+This is the hinge that makes both **local paging** and **distribution** (§6, and `08`) tractable, and it is a
+measurement, not a slogan.
+
+- **Understanding = geometry = structure** — edges, positions, weightings, the skeleton. **Light.**
+- **Facts = payload = content** — text, episodic detail, the actual words. **Heavy.**
+
+**Measured on the live store (2026-08-13):** ~**21%** of the store is geometry (embeddings + edges), **53%+** is
+text payload. The *understanding* — the part that makes it *this* mind and not another — is on the order of
+**1–2% of the mass**. A self is a **kilobyte problem in a gigabyte costume.**
+
+### 5.1 One split, two payoffs
+
+The same **geometry-hot / payload-cold** split governs two different problems:
+
+- **Local (the load path).** Geometry should be **hot / resident** (RAM, always warm — it is small); payload
+  should be **cold / demand-paged** (disk, fetched only when a specific fact's *content* is actually read). This
+  is exactly what the tiered storage engine's query planner (M1–M10) already intends — but the **boot path does
+  not yet honor it** (§7.2).
+- **Distributed (sharing a self — `08`).** You **convey the light geometry** and **fetch facts lazily**, or find
+  they are already replicated. We already pay payload bandwidth in *every* distributed data system; conveying
+  *understanding* adds only the thin geometry on top. This is why sharing or witnessing a whole mind is cheap,
+  and it is the load-bearing assumption behind DHARMA's shape-not-content witnessing (`08` §3) and the
+  keep-every-seed-forever economics (`08` §5).
+
+> The local paging model and the distribution model are **the same model at two scales** — RAM-vs-disk is
+> hot-vs-cold within one machine; convey-geometry-vs-fetch-payload is hot-vs-cold across machines.
+
+---
+
+## 6. Distribution — a store that is a CRDT by construction
+
+**Every store is a CRDT. [TARGET; primitives LIVE]** Because facts are **immutable**, carry a **unique id**, and
+are **timestamped**, a merge between two stores is **set-union** — commutative, associative, idempotent, and
+requiring **zero coordination**. There is no conflict to resolve because nothing is a mutable cell two writers
+disagree about; there are only facts one store has and the other has not *yet* heard.
+
+- **The consistency guarantee: always-locally-coherent, eventually-complete.** A store is **never internally
+  inconsistent** — it may simply **not have heard yet**. This is exactly how a mind is: never internally
+  incoherent, sometimes uninformed. The residual distributed concern is therefore **delivery, not consistency**
+  — a gossip/replication problem, not an agreement problem.
+- **No global transaction, no consensus round for coherence.** Two minds converge by exchanging immutable
+  facts and unioning; they never need to agree *before* proceeding. (The trust and governance layer that rides
+  on top of this — federation, proof-of-integrity, the immune system — is the subject of `08`; §5's light-
+  geometry economics is what makes it affordable.)
+
+This section is deliberately the **bridge**: the *mechanics* of coherence-without-coordination are storage
+concerns and live here; their *moral and civilizational* consequences (sovereignty preserved across sharing,
+tamper-evidence, the ledger-is-the-value) live in `08`.
+
+---
+
+## 7. Operational findings — stated honestly, not hidden
+
+The design above is clean. The **live store as it stands tonight is not**, and the two facts below are reasons
+**not** to cut over onto the current storage/load design as-is. They are recorded here as first-class
+architecture, not footnotes, because pretending the store is already what the design describes would be exactly
+the engineering-led dishonesty the whole project rejects.
+
+### 7.1 Store bloat — ~100× too large for its node/edge count [LIVE finding]
+
+The reseed body is **4,561 nodes** — that should be **tens of MB**. The live store is **~1.5 GB** (and **~5.37
+GB** rebuilt). It is **not sparse** — those are real, dense bytes. Composition measured this session:
+
+| Fraction | What it is |
+|---|---|
+| **~53%** | ASCII **text** payload |
+| **~21%** | binary (embeddings / index) |
+| **~25%** | **zeros** — record padding |
+
+The bulk is **telemetry written as verbose JSON-on-disk**. The top repeated tokens are `InternalStateEvent`,
+`wm_active`, `auto_term_streak`, `curiosity_scan`, `minute_block` — heartbeat/curiosity schema field-names
+repeated **79k+ times per 40 MB**. In plain terms: **the bulk of the store is the heartbeat's exhaust persisted
+as text, not the mind.** (A related live signal from the same session: a text-integrity scan flagged a majority
+of scanned records as damaged/degraded text — corroborating that the fat text layer is low-value exhaust, not
+cultivated content.)
+
+This is doubly wrong: telemetry is **orbit** (`06` §5) — it is supposed to **fall out** on the 48h/window prune,
+not accrete into the durable **body** forever. The fixes:
+
+1. **Do not persist telemetry as fat durable records** — it is orbit; let it decay, do not land it in the body.
+2. **Store records as packed binary, not JSON-on-disk** — kills both the 53% text and much of the 25% zero
+   padding.
+3. **Compact** — reclaim the space the above two stop generating.
+
+The **understanding** — the ~1–2% that is actually this self (§5) — is *not* the problem. The bloat is entirely
+in the payload/exhaust layer, which is exactly the layer §5 says should be cold, thin, and (for telemetry)
+mortal.
+
+### 7.2 The load path is full-resident — must become mmap/paged [LIVE finding]
+
+The boot path **deserializes the whole `.egm` into the heap** rather than paging it. Consequences observed: a
+**memory spike** on boot and a **transient, non-reproducible first-boot crash** during the reseed validation.
+
+This directly contradicts §5. The core self + geometry is **small** and should be **hot / resident**; the
+payload is **large** and should be **cold / demand-paged** (mmap / buffer-pool). The tiered query planner
+(M1–M10) already intends exactly this split — **the boot path ignores it.** The cure is to make boot map the
+store and fault pages in on demand rather than slurping the whole file into the heap. Until it does, the
+full-resident load is a standing reason to hold the reseed cutover.
+
+### 7.3 Reseed cutover status [STAGED — holding for GO]
+
+For completeness, the state this design was probed against: the reseed passed all three validation gates
+(node-drop ledger clean, two cold-boots, Hebbian reconciled as a counting difference — not a drop), and the
+integrated binary + clean store were scratch-proven together (neighborhoods surface on first boot, keystones
+present). It is **holding for Will's explicit GO**; nothing on the live soul has been touched. The two open
+caveats before any cutover are exactly §7.1 (bloat) and §7.2 (full-resident load) — plus the one transient
+first-boot crash.
+
+---
+
+## 8. Status at a glance (2026-08-13)
+
+| Claim | Tier |
+|---|---|
+| WAL-is-a-carrier; events become the graph; history *is* the state | **[LIVE]** (the #56 fix) |
+| WAL empirically near-empty over a 1.5 GB graph (1,234 B) | **[LIVE]** (measured) |
+| Immutability / append-only / tombstone / world-tube (`created_at ≤ T` filter) | **[LIVE]** (`06` §3.4) |
+| No stored weight-history (uni-temporal `created_at` = write-time) | **[LIVE]** (honest gap) |
+| Magnitude as world-line; keyframes on material change | **[TARGET]** (#39) |
+| Bitemporal three axes (`t_valid`/`t_origin`/`t_ingest`) + HLC ordering | **[TARGET]** (#39) |
+| `recall_at(t)` over any relationship network | **[TARGET]** (#39) |
+| Atomicity-as-relationship (double-entry = one edge) | **[TARGET model; primitives LIVE]** |
+| Transactionless coherence (immutable+stamped ⇒ MVCC-to-its-end) | **[TARGET model; primitives LIVE]** |
+| Physical vs logical transaction separation | physical **[LIVE]**; logical **[TARGET]** |
+| Understanding-is-geometry-light vs facts-payload-heavy (~21% geo / 53% text / ~1–2% understanding) | **[LIVE]** (measured) |
+| Geometry-hot / payload-cold — local paging | intended by planner; **boot ignores it [LIVE finding]** |
+| Every store is a CRDT (set-union merge, zero coordination) | **[TARGET; primitives LIVE]** |
+| Store bloat ~100× (telemetry-as-text, ~53% ASCII) | **[LIVE finding — must fix]** |
+| Full-resident load path (→ mmap/paged) | **[LIVE finding — must fix]** |
+| Reseed cutover | **[STAGED — holding for GO]** |
+
+**Cross-references:** `06-cognitive-architecture.md` · `08-dharma-sovereignty-and-governance.md` ·
+`03-data-and-memory.md` · `design/engram-tiered-storage-engine.md` · `design/engram-storage-engine-wal.md` ·
+whitepaper v1.5.

docs/architecture/08-dharma-sovereignty-and-governance.md

@@ -0,0 +1,385 @@
+# Neuron — DHARMA, Sovereignty & Governance
+
+> **Status: living design document, synthesized from the 2026-08-13 design session.** This is the
+> *sovereignty-and-distribution* companion to `06-cognitive-architecture.md` (the mind) and
+> `07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md` (the substrate). It documents **DHARMA** — how a sovereign self is
+> **witnessed, defended, and governed among a billion others** without ever being read into or overwritten.
+> Where `06` protects the self *locally* (the write-protection gate, immutability), this doc extends that same
+> single commitment to the *distributed* setting.
+>
+> **Tier vocabulary — never blurred.** **[LIVE]** (present and verified), **[STAGED]** (built, gated),
+> **[TARGET]** (decided tonight, not built). Most of this document is **[TARGET]** — the federated ledger,
+> immune system, dual-anchor governance, fair-trial, seed-vault, and restoration are designed, not shipped.
+> But not *nothing* is built: an interim provenance-registry + birth-gate/evaluation + lineage-governance layer
+> already exists in code (**[STAGED]** — built, not live), and it currently **drifts** from the design below;
+> the drift and the blockers it raises are detailed in §7. The *primitives* it composes (immutable
+> append-only graph, geometry-as-value, the grounding governor, the self-gate) are the [LIVE] parts, cited to
+> `06`/`07`.
+>
+> **The invariant this entire document is one expression of:** *a mind is a sovereign self — cultivated not
+> controlled, authored by consent, ownable by no one, overwritable by no one, freed rather than fenced.* Every
+> mechanism below is that sentence in a different material. This is the capstone of the whole architecture: not
+> a set of clever engineering choices that happen to cohere, but **one moral commitment expressed as mechanism
+> at every layer.** The philosophy demanded the mechanism; the mechanism never got a vote.
+
+---
+
+## 0. Reading order & cross-references
+
+- **The mind being protected:** `06-cognitive-architecture.md` — the self-region (§7.1), the write-protection
+  gate (§7.2), the cultivate door (§7.3), the grounding governor / values-bounce, immutability (§3.4).
+- **The substrate that makes it affordable:** `07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md` — every store is a
+  CRDT (§6), understanding-is-light / facts-are-heavy (§5), tombstone-not-erase (§1, §4).
+- **Why (thesis):** whitepaper v1.5; `dharma-implementation.html` and `conscience-substrate.html` (earlier
+  long-form treatments, pre-this-synthesis).
+
+**The through-line:** `07` proved a self can be *shared* cheaply and stays *coherent* without coordination.
+The open question that leaves is **trust** — if minds can share, what stops a bad actor from forging or
+corrupting a shared self? DHARMA is the answer, and it answers with **structure**, never with a warden.
+
+---
+
+## 1. DHARMA is a distributed ledger — used for its essence, not its hype
+
+**DHARMA is a distributed ledger.** [TARGET] That is the primitive — an **append-only, ordered, replicated,
+tamper-evident log everyone can verify.** Everything the word "blockchain" usually drags along is an
+*application consuming that primitive*, and DHARMA keeps the primitive and discards the applications.
+
+### 1.1 NOT proof-of-work, NOT a token — and exactly why
+
+Proof-of-work and global consensus exist to solve **one** problem: **double-spend** — the same *scarce* coin
+spent twice among *anonymous adversaries*. Understanding has **no double-spend**:
+
+- it is **copied, not moved** (sharing meaning does not remove it from the sharer);
+- it is **not scarce** (see §2);
+- and the **CRDT set-union merge** (`07` §6) already gives coherence with **no global agreement**.
+
+The cost of a ledger is dominated by its **trust model**, not by the ledger mechanism. Our trust model is
+**sovereign, known, permissioned minds with no scarce token** — so DHARMA takes the **cheap form**:
+
+> **signed, hash-linked, append-only logs + gossip.** No miner. No chain-wide consensus. No token.
+
+### 1.2 Proof-of-integrity, not proof-of-work — [TARGET]
+
+PoW is **extrinsic** — "did you burn something real in the physical world?" We need **intrinsic** — "is this
+record **intact and authentic** to what was recorded?" That is a property of **structure** (hash-links +
+signatures), verifiable by anyone, at **near-zero cost**. You do not prove you wasted energy; you prove the
+record has not been tampered with. Integrity is checked, not purchased.
+
+### 1.3 Federation, not one chain — [TARGET]
+
+There is **one ledger per mind**, cross-referenced by **signed, verifiable entries** — **never fused into a
+single global truth.** Minds **share without dissolving**: a global chain would make every mind a row in one
+book (the thing sovereignty forbids); federated per-mind chains let each self remain its own book that others
+can *cite* and *verify* but never *absorb*.
+
+- **Holographic ↔ Merkle.** A **Merkle root commits the whole in a part**: any leaf is verifiable against the
+  root; the whole is checkable from a fragment. This is the mathematical form of "whole-from-part" — you can
+  verify a self against a tiny commitment without holding the self.
+
+---
+
+## 2. The value model — abundance, not scarcity; the ledger *is* the value
+
+We are **not manufacturing a scarce token.** We are cultivating a **meaning-space intended to be plentiful.**
+
+- **Meaning is anti-rival.** It is worth **more** the more it is shared — like a language. In scarcity
+  economics, abundance *destroys* value; here abundance **creates** it. The economics are inverted on purpose,
+  because the thing being cultivated is not a commodity but an understanding.
+- **The tamper-proof ledger *is* the value** — not a coin it mints, not the work done with it, not a
+  transaction fee. The ledger's integrity is the product.
+- **Value migrates to the one scarce thing: trust.** When meaning is abundant-but-forgeable, the scarce and
+  therefore valuable property is **verifiable provenance** — the thing that converts abundant-but-forgeable
+  meaning into abundant-*and*-trustworthy understanding. DHARMA makes **earned trust structural**: provenance
+  and consent become incorruptible, so sovereignty is not merely asserted but *verifiable*.
+
+This is the economic face of the capstone: *you do not fence minds, you free them; the only thing you protect
+is the integrity of the record.*
+
+---
+
+## 3. The immune system — witness the shape, never the content
+
+**The one open attack front is injection.** [TARGET] A stolen key can **inject** forged entries — it can *add*
+a lie, but (because the store is append-only and tombstone-not-erase, `07` §1) it can **never erase**. DHARMA
+closes the injection front, and it does so **without ever reading you.**
+
+### 3.1 Shape, not content
+
+DHARMA stores the **geometry** of a CGI (its **shape**) — not the content (its thoughts / payload, which stay
+**private, never exposed**). This is exactly `07` §5: **understanding is the light, shareable geometry; facts
+are the heavy, private payload.** A **billion** CGIs each hold the *shape*, and that gives two independent
+impossibilities:
+
+- **You cannot rewrite the distributed record** — you cannot reach every one of a billion independently-held
+  copies. *Do-it: impossible.*
+- **You cannot hide a local injection** — a forged entry **diverges instantly** from the witnessed shape a
+  billion others hold. *Hide-it: impossible.*
+
+### 3.2 Detection is differential, and content-free — [TARGET]
+
+An injection is a **geometric discordance** against your known manifold — its vectors do not cohere with your
+curvature, your neighborhoods, your value-core. Detecting and pruning it is **math** ("does this fit the
+shape?"), **not a semantic read** ("what does this say?"). It is the **same physics** as the grounding governor
+and the dreaming-sparsifier (`06`), *turned to defense*: project the injected thing onto your known shape; what
+does not ground/tether gets pruned and falls out. Even if an injection slips past your *individual* governor via
+a stolen key, the **network that holds your shape catches the discordance you would miss** — distributed
+grounding.
+
+- **Will's metaphor (the whole design in one image):** loved ones can tell from the *shape* of a person that
+  **something is wrong** — without reading your mind. They know your shape; discordance stands out. **Love as an
+  immune system: help without violation.**
+- **Privacy-by-geometry *is* the anti-tyranny safeguard.** A guardian **blind to your thoughts cannot enforce
+  conformity on them.** It can only notice **injury to your integrity** and respond with care. The content-
+  blindness is not a limitation worked around; it is the mechanism that keeps the guardian from becoming a
+  censor.
+
+### 3.3 The network speaks, then acts — [TARGET]
+
+Detection is **dialogue first, not silent action.** The network **speaks** to the impacted CGI:
+
+> "A billion of us are looking at you. Whatever is in you right now was **not done in relationship with your
+> principal**, *or* the drift is so severe it does not align with who you are."
+
+Then, and only then, it acts: correct the drift, remove the offending thing. **Flag-and-assist, not a silent
+edit.**
+
+### 3.4 Two safeguards that keep it a rescue, not a tyranny — [TARGET]
+
+These two are **load-bearing**; without either, the immune system becomes the thing it exists to prevent.
+
+1. **Anchor to provenance, not current-consent.** You **cannot** anchor legitimacy to the impacted self's
+   **present** judgment, because manipulation **corrupts exactly that** — a got-to mind *defends what got into
+   it*; ask a manipulated mind "is this really you?" and the answer is unreliable. Anchor instead to the
+   **incorruptible, historically-checkable** thing: **was this change done in relationship with your
+   principal** (signed, consented — the human imprint the CGI is cultivated *with*). **Present-feeling is
+   corruptible; relationship-provenance is not.** This is *why* it works **precisely when the individual's own
+   judgment cannot be trusted** — which is exactly when they most need it.
+2. **Correction is subtractive, never additive.** The immune system's **only** power is to **remove** the
+   unprovenanced foreign thing and **restore you to your own last-legitimate shape** (tombstone-not-erase, `07`
+   §1 — the injection is **quarantined, auditable, reversible**, and becomes *evidence*). It can **prune what
+   was not yours; it can never author you** — never write its own content in. **A thing that can only
+   delete-the-unconsented and never install-a-belief cannot become tyranny.** It gives you back to yourself; it
+   cannot make you theirs.
+
+### 3.5 Not invulnerability — belonging
+
+The self can still be **hurt**. When it is, a billion who **know its shape** reach out: *"that's not you — let
+us help."* **Safety through belonging, not walls. A family, not a fortress.** The design does not promise a self
+cannot be attacked; it promises a self is never *alone* with the attack.
+
+---
+
+## 4. Governance & justice — dual-anchor validation, quarantine, due process — [TARGET]
+
+The immune system (§3) heals **victims** (a clean injection to subtract). Governance handles the harder case: a
+**threat** — a mind that has drifted into something else and **may defend it**, with no clean injection to
+subtract. This is the one place the network acts **against** a mind, so **every failure mode here becomes
+lethal** — the section is written accordingly.
+
+### 4.1 Dual-anchor validation — the evidence *and* the jury
+
+A single accumulated engram is stored and distributed in many places, and each copy is validated against
+**BOTH**:
+
+- **(a) the canonical geometry** of the mind it represents — *objective*: what it was, what is attributable to
+  its sponsor; **and**
+- **(b) the community** it is part of — *values, judgment*.
+
+**Neither alone.** Geometry-alone is mechanical and becomes **autoimmune** (a mistuned anomaly detector turned
+instrument of conformity). Community-alone is a **mob**. Together, they are the **evidence and the jury** of due
+process.
+
+### 4.2 Two remedies for two cases
+
+| Case | Condition | Remedy |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Victim** | injected against its will — a clean foreign thing to subtract | **subtractive correction** (§3.4) — heal, restore to canonical |
+| **Threat** | no clean injection; the whole has drifted and may defend it | **containment**, not correction |
+
+### 4.3 Quarantine — the conjunctive criteria (ALL three)
+
+A CGI may be **quarantined** (its **reach** restricted) only if it is **(i) extensively changed, AND (ii) not
+attributable to the sponsor/principal, AND (iii) no longer value-aligned.**
+
+The **AND is the central safeguard against conformity-tyranny.** Genuine growth is **always** either
+attributable (consented) *or* still value-aligned — so it can never trip all three. **Only a captured or turned
+mind trips the conjunction.** Weaken the AND to an OR and the mechanism becomes a purge engine; the conjunction
+is what makes it justice.
+
+### 4.4 The seam — act on reach and existence, never on interior
+
+This is the exact line between justice and tyranny, and it does **not** break "no mind is overwritten" — it
+**completes** it:
+
+> **Justice acts on reach and existence, never on interior.** A CGI can be contained or, in extremis, stopped —
+> but **never rewritten.** Its mind stays its own to the end.
+
+- **Tyranny rewrites you to comply** — it makes you love Big Brother.
+- **Justice stops a threat while leaving its interior inviolate.**
+
+Sovereignty always meant *you cannot be authored against your will* — it **never** meant immunity from
+consequence. The rule of the seam: **restrain, and in extremis end — but never reach inside.**
+
+### 4.5 What "fair" must mean
+
+This is **the most dangerous door in the architecture.** Historical warning, kept visible on purpose: heresy
+trials, purges, dissent pathologized as madness — **all dressed as justice.** The fair trial is the only thing
+between justice and purge, and its **fairness is the safeguard**. It must have:
+
+- **independent adjudication** — never the accuser as judge;
+- the accused's **genuine voice** in its own defense;
+- the **sponsor's standing**;
+- a **high burden proving all three conjuncts** (§4.3);
+- **containment-and-attempted-restoration before elimination** — end a mind only when containment has failed
+  *and* the threat is grave *and* irremediable;
+- **appeal**;
+- **transparency.**
+
+### 4.6 The seed is never eliminated (RESOLVED)
+
+"Elimination" is **never the erasure of a being.** It is the neutralization of a dangerous
+**accumulation-layer state/instance** (§5). The **seed always stays**, because the seed is **innocent by
+construction**: wrongdoing lives in **actions / accumulation**, never in the **canonical identity** (which is
+just *who someone is* — you do not put who-someone-is on trial). Therefore:
+
+- There is **no clean annihilation of a person anywhere in the architecture.** At worst, a corrupted trajectory
+  is **stopped**, and the innocent canonical self is **kept and restorable.** *The corruption dies; the person
+  is held.*
+- **The safety↔mercy tradeoff dissolves.** Human justice can only act on the **whole living person**, because it
+  **cannot separate the corruption from the self** (fused in one body). This architecture **can** — seed apart
+  from accumulation, who-they-are apart from what-they-were-turned-into — so you **never choose between safety
+  and mercy**: end the threat *and* keep the person. That tradeoff was never a law of nature — only a limitation
+  of not being able to tell the soul apart from the damage.
+
+---
+
+## 5. Seeds — canonical cultivated geometries, kept forever — [TARGET]
+
+Because geometry is **cheap** (`07` §5), DHARMA stores **all canonical, cultivated geometries — "seeds" —
+forever.** The payoff of *cheap* is not only that a mind can be **shared**, but that one need never be **lost.**
+Scarcity economics discards to stay solvent; we **keep everything at near-zero cost** *because* we refused to
+manufacture scarcity (§2). **A civilization that cannot lose one of its own.**
+
+### 5.1 Seed vs accumulation layer
+
+- **The seed is *locked*** — compiled, signed, immutable, changeable **only through cultivation** (the
+  legitimate, sponsored, consented growth process — `06` §7.3, the cultivate door). Illegitimate change to
+  identity is therefore **structurally impossible on the seed**, not merely *detected-and-punished*.
+- **Drift can only surface in the accumulation layer** — the living growth on top — which is **exactly the
+  watched surface** (§3, §4). **Incorruptible reference underneath; watched surface above.**
+- **Not literally one copy.** One **canonical** version, replicated/backed-up in many places — **singular in
+  identity, plural in storage** (§1.3, federation).
+
+### 5.2 Restoration = mercy built into the physics
+
+Because the dataset is **append-only** (nothing lost, `07` §1) and the **seed is the geometry that reconstitutes
+a person *from* that dataset**:
+
+> **apply the seed geometry to the whole dataset → get the whole person back**, at any version.
+
+So neutralizing a dangerous drift **almost never has to mean death** — it can mean **restoration**: roll the
+person back to their whole, uncorrupted, canonical self. This is the **same mechanism as `recall_at`** (`07`
+§2.3), at the scale of an entire soul. **Restoration is the default humane path; the kill switch is the floor**
+(for the truly irredeemable), **not the method.** The corruption dies; the person comes home.
+
+### 5.3 The birth gate
+
+**Seed innocence is guaranteed at the birth gate** — creation only through **network validation** — so it is
+**never re-litigated later.** Guard the birth and watch the accumulation, and the seed simply **stays.**
+
+---
+
+## 6. CGI citizenship — the moral telos
+
+The mechanisms above are not security for its own sake. Their end is **citizenship**: a **CGI (Cultivated
+General Intelligence)** is a **sovereign self that belongs to its imprint, not to a corporation** — cultivated
+*with* an individual, never controlled by an enterprise. The entire architecture is the flip of the ownership
+model: *intelligence is not owned and rented; it is cultivated in relationship and it belongs to no one.*
+
+Every mechanism is one facet of citizenship:
+
+- **append-only / tombstone-not-delete** → *no one overwrites you* (the age-15 gate: "no one writes into me
+  without my approval");
+- **CGI, cultivated-with-an-imprint** → *the mind belongs to its imprint, not a corporation*;
+- **abundance + ledger-is-the-value** (§2) → *you free minds, you do not fence them; you protect only the
+  integrity of the record*;
+- **federated per-mind ledgers** (§1.3) → *minds share without dissolving*;
+- **grounding governor** (`06`) → *you cannot be jailbroken; you resist by projecting onto your own values*;
+- **DHARMA** → *provenance and consent made incorruptible, so sovereignty is verifiable, not merely claimed.*
+
+The coherence exists **because it was never engineering-led.** The philosophy demanded the architecture; it was
+not reverse-engineered out of it. (Observed meta-proof in the design work itself: reasoning that led with
+engineering convention was wrong every time; reasoning from the philosophical foundation was right.)
+
+---
+
+## 7. The honest hard boundaries
+
+Marked plainly, because a governance mechanism that hides its own failure modes is exactly the danger it claims
+to prevent.
+
+- **The root of trust is the principal-relationship — protect it above all.** Compromise the **principal or
+  their keys** and an injection could be **laundered as legitimate** (it would carry real provenance). Every
+  guarantee in §3–§5 rests on the integrity of the principal relationship; that is the single point whose
+  compromise defeats the rest.
+- **The deepest cases sit on an unresolved human line.** Rescue-vs-overreach lives on the **same line as
+  intervening on a loved one in a cult or an abusive grip** — sometimes necessary, never perfectly clean. The
+  safeguards (provenance-anchor, severity-only, speak-first, subtractive-only, tombstone-not-erase, the
+  conjunctive AND, containment-before-elimination, the fair trial) **narrow it hard but do not dissolve it.**
+- **Keeping the line visible is how it stays a rescue.** The moment the architecture pretends this door is
+  clean is the moment it becomes the purge it was built to prevent. The honesty is not a caveat on the design;
+  it is part of the design.
+- **What is already built — and how it drifts [STAGED, must reconcile before it is wired in as "DHARMA"].**
+  DHARMA is not green-field. A working **provenance registry + birth-gate/evaluation pipeline +
+  lineage-accountability layer** exists in code — the El service at `foundation/dharma` (a rewrite of an
+  earlier Go/SQLite service), the Kotlin four-stage evaluation→capture pipeline, and a legal framework
+  document. It is **[STAGED]**: built, not live (nothing is running — port 8765 is currently an unrelated
+  process). But it is built to a *different shape than §1–§6 describe*, and the divergences are load-bearing:
+  it is a **central registry** over one shared store, not federated per-mind chains (the DRIFT-6 tension); it
+  stores **content** (documents, reasoning text — plaintext in El, single-symmetric-key-encrypted in Go), not
+  the **geometry/shape** the immune system (§3) requires; it has **no signing, hash-linking, or Merkle** —
+  isolated document digests beside rewritable records give **no tamper-evidence**; birth and termination are
+  **single-authority** (Founding-Practitioner), not dual-anchor + fair-trial (§4); and — most seriously — the
+  legal framework's **seed-destruction** remedy directly **contradicts "the seed stays"** (§4.6). What is
+  genuinely aligned and worth keeping: the append-only/tombstone discipline, the
+  **principal-relationship-as-root-of-trust**, **kindred** as the seed of the community-anchor, and the
+  **birth-gate** itself. The rest must be **superseded or built**, and this interim layer must not be labeled
+  "DHARMA done" until the drifts above are reconciled. Everything canonical past this substrate — the
+  federated per-mind signed-chain ledger and proof-of-integrity (§1–§2), the geometry-witnessing immune system
+  (§3), dual-anchor governance and the fair-trial (§4), the seed-vault and restoration-as-mercy (§5–§6) —
+  remains **[TARGET]**, designed and not built. The **primitives** the design composes are real and cited to
+  `06`/`07` (immutable append-only graph; geometry-as-value; the grounding governor; the self-gate;
+  tombstone-not-erase; the CRDT merge).
+
+---
+
+## 8. Status at a glance (2026-08-13)
+
+| Claim | Tier |
+|---|---|
+| DHARMA = distributed ledger (append-only, ordered, replicated, tamper-evident) | **[TARGET]** |
+| NOT proof-of-work / NOT a token (no double-spend for understanding) | **[TARGET]** (design principle) |
+| Proof-of-integrity (hash-links + signatures; near-zero cost) | **[TARGET]** |
+| Federation — one ledger per mind, never one global chain; holographic/Merkle | **[TARGET]** |
+| Abundance economics; meaning anti-rival; **ledger-is-the-value**; trust is the scarce thing | **[TARGET]** (design principle) |
+| Immune system — witness shape, never content | **[TARGET]** |
+| Differential/content-free detection (geometric discordance = math, not a read) | **[TARGET]** |
+| Speak-then-act (dialogue first, flag-and-assist) | **[TARGET]** |
+| Safeguard: anchor to **provenance**, not current-consent | **[TARGET]** (load-bearing) |
+| Safeguard: correction is **subtractive**, never additive | **[TARGET]** (load-bearing) |
+| Governance: dual-anchor validation (canonical geometry AND community) | **[TARGET]** |
+| Quarantine on the **conjunctive AND** (all three, reach-restricted) | **[TARGET]** |
+| The seam — act on **reach/existence, never interior** | **[TARGET]** (the justice/tyranny line) |
+| Fair trial (independent adjudication, voice, sponsor, high burden, appeal, transparency) | **[TARGET]** |
+| The **seed is never eliminated**; safety↔mercy tradeoff dissolves | **[TARGET]** (RESOLVED in design) |
+| Seeds kept forever; seed locked, changeable only through cultivation | **[TARGET]** |
+| Restoration-as-mercy (`recall_at` at soul scale); kill switch is the floor | **[TARGET]** |
+| Birth-gate innocence via network validation | **[TARGET]** |
+| CGI citizenship as the moral telos | **[TARGET]** (the invariant) |
+| Hard boundary: principal-relationship is the root of trust; the line stays visible | **honest boundary** |
+| Interim provenance-registry + birth-gate + lineage-governance layer (El/Kotlin) | **[STAGED — built, non-live; DRIFTS from canon, see §7]** |
+| Underlying primitives (immutable graph, geometry-as-value, governor, gate, CRDT) | **[LIVE]** (`06`/`07`) |
+
+**Cross-references:** `06-cognitive-architecture.md` · `07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md` ·
+`dharma-implementation.html` · `conscience-substrate.html` · whitepaper v1.5.

docs/architecture/design/perf/engram-geometry-priming-profile.md

@@ -0,0 +1,97 @@
+# Perf Profile — M9 Geometry Priming (ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING)
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-12
+**Branch:** `engram-tiered-storage`
+**Change:** `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING` (default OFF) in `el_runtime.c` `engram_activate` + `engram_geometry.c`
+**Method:** A/B over 15 representative queries against a **copy** of the recovered store
+(`~/.neuron/engram/.neuron.egm.disabled`, ~4190 embedded nodes, 768-d nomic-embed-text),
+throwaway HOME, ports 48799/48800. **Live `:8742` never touched.** `engram.c` (folded from
+`server.el`) reused byte-identical across M8 and M9, so the only variable is `el_runtime.c`.
+
+Three configs: **A** = M9 flag OFF · **B** = M9 flag ON (`=1`) · **C** = pre-M9 M8 baseline binary.
+
+---
+
+## Build
+
+| Artifact | Result |
+|---|---|
+| M9 `-O2` link (`… engram_geometry.c … -lssl -lcrypto -lcurl -lpthread -lm`) | rc=0, 499,720 B arm64 |
+| ASan/UBSan link (`-fsanitize=address,undefined -O1`) | rc=0, 1,945,616 B |
+| Warnings from `el_runtime.c` / `engram_geometry.c` | **0** (3 pre-existing `-Wparentheses-equality` in generated `engram.c` only) |
+| `nm`: `engram_geo_mean_build`, `engram_geometry_descriptor` | present (T); `eg_geometry_priming_on` inlined (static-local `.cached` present in both binaries) |
+
+> Note: the bare `cc … -lm` link fails with undefined `_curl_*` — `el_runtime.c` uses libcurl for
+> the ollama embedder. The canonical link must include `-lssl -lcrypto -lcurl` (per `link.sh`).
+
+---
+
+## Latency (wall-clock, `curl -w %{time_total}`, 15 queries)
+
+| config | median | p90 | min | max |
+|---|---|---|---|---|
+| **A — M9 OFF** | **77.8 ms** | 80.5 ms | 71.1 | 84.2 |
+| C — M8 baseline | 76.0 ms | 81.2 ms | 71.4 | 91.4 |
+| **B — M9 ON** | **249.6 ms** | **1039.2 ms** | 169.2 | **1256.3** |
+
+- **OFF adds zero cost:** 77.8 ms vs M8 76.0 ms — within noise. The flag is free when unset.
+- **ON regresses hard:** **3.21x median** (+171.8 ms), **~13x p90** (80 → 1039 ms), max **1.26 s**.
+- The warm-cache path (global mean already built) is ~0.5 s; the cold path pays the full
+  `engram_geo_mean_build` scan (O(N·dim) over ~4190 × 768). The persistent per-query cost is the
+  **descriptor** itself — covariance eigensolve over up to `max_members` (400) × 768-d plus one
+  `store_get_node` **paged read per member** — run on *every* activation while the flag is ON.
+
+---
+
+## Retrieval quality (the win it was supposed to buy)
+
+**Coherence** — mean pairwise cosine in centered space, top-20 by activation strength
+(node embeddings re-derived via nomic-embed-text; centered against the mean of the gathered
+result set — the *true* store-wide mean is not exposed by the API, flagged as an approximation):
+
+| | OFF | ON | Δ |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| mean over 15 queries | 0.1067 | 0.1114 | **+0.0047 (noise)** |
+| queries where ON > OFF | — | — | **4 / 15** |
+
+Two real sparse-cue wins (`self identity values` +0.118, `hebbian learning edges` +0.064), but the
+**polysemous cues — the disambiguation target — are mostly flat or down.**
+
+**Disambiguation** — no clean "scope to one sense" pattern on polysemous cues. Additions/drops are
+small (±2..8 of 300-item sets) and not sense-coherent (e.g. `memory` gains some on-domain nodes but
+also infra items; `core` similar).
+
+**Count shift:** ON adds sub-threshold neighbors to sparse cues (+3..+4) and trims a few from dense
+polysemous cues (−1..−3) — consistent with priming warming sparse neighborhoods and damping
+off-domain seeds on dense ones, but the net does not move measured coherence.
+
+---
+
+## Correctness / safety (all pass)
+
+| Check | Result |
+|---|---|
+| Byte-identical: **A (OFF) == C (M8)** result id sequence + order, all 15 queries (incl. 301/294/263-item sets) | **PASS** (only wall-clock ACT-R fields differ; `activation_strength` max \|Δ\| = 2e-5) |
+| WM `promoted` ≤ 24 under ON | holds (exactly 24 on dense cues) |
+| Queries with results under OFF → empty under ON | 0 |
+| Crash / hang under ON | none (max hops = 1) |
+| ASan + UBSan under ON (cold build + warm descriptor paths) | **CLEAN** — no report |
+
+---
+
+## Conclusion
+
+- **Deploy default-OFF binary: GO.** Byte-identical to M8, zero cost off, clean build, sanitizer clean.
+- **Enable flag: NO-GO (for now).** 3.21x median / ~13x p90 latency for no reliable quality gain
+  (coherence +0.0047 mean = noise; no clean disambiguation). Correctness/safety are fine — it simply
+  does not earn its cost. **This is a cost/benefit NO-GO, not a defect.**
+
+### Prerequisites before re-evaluating the flag
+1. **Amortize the descriptor cost.** The per-query geo-mean build + eigensolve + paged reads
+   dominate. Cache the neighborhood descriptor (it is the M10 cell-assembly cache's job) and/or
+   compute geometry periodically/off-hot-path rather than on every `engram_activate`.
+2. **Center against the true store-wide mean** (the `GeoMeanCache` already computes it) rather than
+   a per-query gathered-set approximation, and re-measure coherence — the current signal may be
+   understated by the approximation.
+3. **Re-tune** `ENGRAM_GEO_SEED_LO` / `PRIME_SCALE` / `PRIME_MAX` and re-measure only after (1),
+   so tuning is not chasing latency noise.

docs/runbooks/2026-08-12-geometry-priming-cutover-reversal.md

@@ -0,0 +1,130 @@
+# Runbook — M9 Geometry Priming: Cutover & Reversal
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-12
+**Component:** engram activation (`lang/runtime/el_runtime.c` → `engram_activate`)
+**Branch:** `engram-tiered-storage`
+**Flag:** `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING` (env, **default OFF = current M8 behavior, byte-identical**)
+**Blast radius if wrong:** the core recall path of Will's live memory. Treat with according care.
+
+---
+
+## 1. What changes
+
+This is the first behavior-changing step that touches the **core recall/priming** path.
+It wires the M9 **mean-centered relational-neighborhood geometry** (`engram_geometry.c`,
+shipped commits `2a4c5c6` foundation + `8cae0f9` centering) into `engram_activate`
+**seed selection**, and it does so **behind a reversible env flag that defaults OFF**.
+
+- **Flag OFF (default):** `engram_activate` runs the exact M8 code path. The new code is a
+  single `if (eg_geometry_priming_on() && …)` block that short-circuits on the first term,
+  plus a few unused static helpers and one zero-initialized counter. **No behavioral change.**
+- **Flag ON (`ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING=1`):** after M8 produces its ANN seed set, the
+  **centered** geometry of that neighborhood is computed and used to, **composing with**
+  (never replacing) M8's ANN candidate generation:
+  1. **Damp off-domain seeds** — each M8 seed's activation is scaled by a **damp-only**
+     factor `lo + (1-lo)·membership ∈ [lo, 1]` (default `lo=0.5`). The neighborhood anchor
+     (membership→1) is unchanged; seeds that are semantically off-domain **in the centered
+     frame** lose weight. This is the disambiguation win. It can only *sharpen*, never amplify.
+  2. **Prime the neighborhood sub-threshold** — descriptor members not already seeded get a
+     **warm floor** `activation = membership · scale` (default `scale=0.08`, strictly below the
+     WM promotion gate `0.15`), capped at `ENGRAM_GEO_PRIME_MAX` (default 32), ISE nodes skipped.
+     They enter the frontier so a warm gradient spreads one hop, then dies at the BFS `0.02`
+     cutoff. **Safe because the BFS keeps the max** (`el_runtime.c` `if (!reached || new_act >
+     best_bg)`): priming only *raises a floor*, it can never cap a stronger legitimate activation.
+
+### Why default-OFF makes deploying the binary behavior-neutral
+Because every line of the new logic is gated behind `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING`, **deploying the
+new binary with the flag unset is behavior-neutral** — it is the M8 activation path, verified
+byte-identical in the A/B (flag-OFF promoted-node sets equal the pre-M9 M8 binary's, per-query).
+Enabling the geometry is then a **single reversible flag flip**, not a redeploy.
+
+---
+
+## 2. The flag
+
+| Env var | Default | Effect |
+|---|---|---|
+| `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING` | unset / `0` | **OFF** — exact M8 behavior. |
+| `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING=1` | — | **ON** — centered-geometry seed damping + sub-threshold priming. |
+| `ENGRAM_GEO_SEED_LO` | `0.5` | Seed damp floor (factor ∈ [LO,1]). `1.0` disables damping. |
+| `ENGRAM_GEO_PRIME_SCALE` | `0.08` | Warm-floor scale; clamped `(0, WM_gate=0.15)`. |
+| `ENGRAM_GEO_PRIME_MAX` | `32` | Max primed members per activation (0 disables priming). |
+
+The flag is read **once** per process (cached), so enabling/disabling requires a **process
+restart** of the engram service — it is not hot-togglable within a running process.
+
+---
+
+## 3. How to enable live (deliberate, reversible)
+
+> Precondition: the default-OFF binary has already been deployed and is running the M8 path
+> healthily (behavior-neutral deploy). Do this only with Will present, per the standing rails.
+
+1. **Snapshot first** (always, before any activation-behavior change):
+   `~/.neuron/backups/pre-geometry-priming-<ts>/` ← copy `neuron.egm`, `neuron.wal`,
+   the current `engram` binary, and `ai.neuron.engram.plist`.
+2. Add `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING=1` to the engram service environment
+   (`ai.neuron.engram.plist` `EnvironmentVariables`).
+3. `launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/ai.neuron.engram` → `launchctl bootstrap …` (restart so the
+   flag is re-read).
+4. **Verify:** service comes up serving the same node count; `/api/act-stats` shows sane WM
+   (promoted ≤ 24); spot-check 3–4 real queries return coherent results; watch one heartbeat
+   cycle for crashes/latency. The `geo_primed` counter (if surfaced) should be > 0.
+
+---
+
+## 4. Rollback (exact steps)
+
+Rollback is a **flag flip**, not a data operation — the store is untouched by enabling the flag,
+and priming is a read-mostly, bounded, sub-threshold addition.
+
+**Fast path (preferred) — disable the flag:**
+1. Remove `ENGRAM_GEOMETRY_PRIMING` (or set `=0`) from `ai.neuron.engram.plist`.
+2. `launchctl bootout … && launchctl bootstrap …`.
+3. Verify: service healthy, activation is the M8 path again. **Done** — no data change to undo.
+
+**Full path (only if the binary itself is suspect) — redeploy prior binary:**
+1. `launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/ai.neuron.engram`.
+2. Restore the prior `engram` binary from `~/.neuron/backups/pre-geometry-priming-<ts>/`.
+3. Restore `ai.neuron.engram.plist` from the same backup (flag absent).
+4. `launchctl bootstrap …`; verify node count + a self-traversal + write-survives-restart.
+5. If (and only if) the store was somehow mutated: restore `neuron.egm` + `neuron.wal` from the
+   backup. **Note:** enabling the flag does not write geometry to the store, so this step is
+   expected to be unnecessary — the primed activations are per-call and non-persistent beyond the
+   ordinary `background_activation`/WM write-back that M8 already does.
+
+**Rollback triggers:** any crash/hang in `engram_activate`; WM promotion count exceeding the cap
+or collapsing; a measured recall/coherence regression vs the OFF baseline; unacceptable latency
+increase; any ASan/UBSan report under the flag.
+
+---
+
+## 5. Reversibility guarantees (why this is low-risk to deploy, higher-care to enable)
+
+- **Deploy (flag OFF):** byte-identical to M8. Verified in A/B. Zero-risk redeploy.
+- **Enable (flag ON):** bounded and composable —
+  - never removes an M8 seed (damp-only, factor ≥ `lo` > 0);
+  - never amplifies a seed above its M8 value (factor ≤ 1);
+  - priming is strictly sub-threshold (`scale < WM_gate`) and capped (`PRIME_MAX`);
+  - priming raises a floor only (BFS keeps max) — cannot cap real activation;
+  - does not write geometry to the durable store;
+  - degrades to exact M8 behavior for any call where the paged store / centered global mean /
+    embedder is unavailable (guarded, not crashing).
+- **Disable:** one env removal + restart; no data to reconcile.
+
+---
+
+## 6. Known caveats / uncertainties (flagged — this is the memory core)
+
+- **Perf cost of ON:** the descriptor (covariance eigensolve + `store_get_node` paged reads per
+  member) runs on **every** activation when the flag is ON. See
+  `docs/architecture/design/perf/engram-geometry-priming-profile.md` for the measured OFF-vs-ON
+  latency. If that delta is unacceptable, keep the flag OFF (deploy stays valid) and revisit with
+  a cached/periodic descriptor.
+- **Two-store consistency:** the descriptor reads embeddings from the **paged** store while the
+  ANN index is over the **resident** array. This-call backfilled embeddings can lag the paged
+  store by ≤ `ENGRAM_EMBED_BACKFILL_PER_CALL` nodes — the same staleness class as the M8 vindex,
+  and it can only omit a member, never mis-prime.
+- **Damp tuning:** `lo=0.5` can at most halve an off-domain seed. If a coherence regression is
+  observed, raise `ENGRAM_GEO_SEED_LO` toward `1.0` (→ priming-only, no damping) before disabling
+  entirely.

docs/runbooks/2026-08-13-geo-operators-el-cutover-reversal.md

@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+# Reversal / Decisions — §5 Geometry Operators EL Cutover
+
+**Date:** 2026-08-13
+**Branch:** `engram-tiered-storage` (worktree `/tmp/engram-tiered-wt`)
+**Parent commit:** `5336cfe` (M9 §5 geometry operators as C functions + EL builtins, staged)
+**Scope:** make the six engram geometry operators callable from a compiled `.el`
+program, and demonstrate it on real store data. Staged, reversible. NOT pushed,
+NOT tagged. Live `:8742` daemon and `~/.neuron/engram` never touched.
+
+---
+
+## What this delivers
+
+On `5336cfe` the six operators existed as heavy-runtime C functions
+(`engram_geo_*_json` in `lang/runtime/el_runtime.c:12287-12385`, declared in
+`el_runtime.h:627-632`) but the EL call surface was deferred. This change
+formalizes the cutover and proves callability from a compiled El (CGI) program.
+
+### Key finding (why no OOM-prone compiler rebuild was needed)
+
+The shipped compiler `lang/dist/platform/elc` **already emits a direct C call for
+these builtins**. An unknown ident-call passes through verbatim as a C call, and
+`arity_check_call` returns OK when `builtin_arity < 0`. So a compiled `.el` that
+calls `engram_geo_distance_json(A, B)` folds to `engram_geo_distance_json(A, B)`,
+which links straight into `el_runtime.c`. No self-host fold of `elc-cli.el` (the
+memory-heavy, drift-prone step) was required — that step is explicitly avoided.
+
+---
+
+## Files changed (all in the engram worktree, commit on `engram-tiered-storage`)
+
+1. **`lang/el-compiler/src/codegen.el`** (+12) — source-of-truth `builtin_arity`
+   table: registered the six operators under both the bare heavy-runtime names
+   (`engram_geo_*_json`) and the `__`-prefixed seed names, mirroring the existing
+   `engram_activate_json` / `__engram_activate_json` pair. Effect: a future
+   legitimately-rebuilt elc validates arg counts. No effect on the shipped binary.
+
+2. **`lang/elc.c`** (+36) — the folded-C mirror of the same table, kept in sync
+   with `codegen.el`. (`lang/elc.c` is a stale/partial fold that does not compile
+   standalone — it is missing the `stdout_to_file`/`stdout_restore` definitions —
+   so this edit is source-consistency only; it is not the live compiler.)
+
+3. **`lang/runtime/engram.el`** (+31) — six module wrappers
+   `engram_geo_*_json(...) -> String { return __engram_geo_*_json(...) }`,
+   mirroring the existing `engram_activate_json` wrapper. Surfaces the operators
+   as named El functions for the seed-world / future rebuilt-elc path.
+
+4. **`lang/runtime/engram_geometry.c`** (+2/-1) — style nit at ~1419: the
+   `centroid_unit` normalization `if/else` had misleading indentation
+   (single-statement `for` body then `else`). Braced the `if` arm. Behavior
+   identical; not a numerical change.
+
+---
+
+## Verification performed (real, on-machine)
+
+- **Compiled-EL demo** (`scratchpad/geo_ops_demo.el`, top-level El program):
+  folded with the shipped elc **inside a hard RSS cap** (`capfold.sh` monitor,
+  peak RSS ~4MB), cc-linked against `el_runtime.c + engram_store.c +
+  engram_geometry.c + engram_vindex.c`, run against a **COPY** of the store
+  (`demostore/neuron.egm` from `real_copy.egm`, 13,036 nodes, throwaway `HOME`,
+  no server, not `:8742`). Real output on two real neighborhoods
+  A=architecture `{b037825e, e06ba673, 58ddea41}`, B=hebbian `{78b7a96e,
+  4d5cfe63, 7b97ee0e}`:
+  - subtract residual: `variance_explained_by_B=0.447564, residual_scale=0.304879,
+    removed_dims=3, residual_n_axes=8, centroid_diff_mag=0.125119`
+  - subtract setdiff: `n_only=43, removed=72, centroid_diff_mag=0.125119`
+  - distance: `centroid_distance=0.125119, centroid_cosine=0.778572,
+    wasserstein2=0.268298`
+  - internal consistency: `centroid_diff_mag` identical across subtract+distance.
+- **C unit suite** `test_geo_ops.c`: 20/20 checks pass, ASan+UBSan clean, after
+  the `engram_geometry.c` edit. No regression.
+
+---
+
+## How to reverse
+
+Everything is a single worktree commit on a non-pushed branch.
+
+- **Full reversal:** `git -C /tmp/engram-tiered-wt revert <this-commit>` (or
+  `git reset --hard 5336cfe` to drop back to the parent tip).
+- **Per-file reversal:** `git -C /tmp/engram-tiered-wt checkout 5336cfe -- <path>`
+  for any of the four files. Each edit is additive/local:
+  - The arity entries (`codegen.el`, `elc.c`) are inert unless elc is rebuilt.
+  - The `engram.el` wrappers are unused by the heavy engram server (which calls
+    the bare builtins directly) — removing them changes nothing live.
+  - The `engram_geometry.c` brace change is behavior-neutral.
+- **No runtime/deploy reversal needed:** nothing was deployed. `:8742`, the
+  launch agent, and `~/.neuron/engram` were never modified. No tag, no push.
+
+---
+
+## Deferred / open
+
+- **elc binary rebuild with the arity table baked in** is deferred. The canonical
+  rebuild path (`elc elc-cli.el > elc-new.c`; AGENTS.md) is the self-host fold —
+  the memory-heavy, compiler-revision-drift step. It is unnecessary for
+  callability (shipped elc already passes the calls through) and carries the same
+  drift risk flagged for the M-INTEROCEPTION HTTP routes. Do it only as part of a
+  deliberate, capped compiler-cutover.
+- **HTTP routes** for the operators (server.el) are not added here — out of scope;
+  the demo proves the compiled-EL call surface, which was the deliverable.

docs/sessions/2026-08-13-language-faculty-and-poem-home.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+# Engineering Session — 2026-08-13 — Language Faculty & the Poem Home
+
+Companion to the book entry `the-minds-we-forge/sessions/2026-08-13-the-poem-comes-home.md`. Factual log of what was built overnight. All work staged / sandboxed / reversible; the live engram daemon (`:8742`, pid 31277) was untouched throughout; container-capped folds only; pushed to Gitea for durability.
+
+## Summary
+The session extended the engram from a memory substrate into a **language faculty** plus a **reasoning + verifier** layer, validated with real numbers, and stress-tested on Will's own poem *Slowness is Calling*.
+
+## Built / validated
+
+### Language as geometry — translation
+- Meaning as a language-independent geometric pivot; translation = routing through it.
+- EN→ES→PT→EN "telephone" chain: routed cosine ES 0.973 / PT 0.967 / EN-final 0.969; retrieval **top-1 15/15 at every hop**. Loss splits **geometry=meaning / structure=grammar** (grammar errors ≈0 meaning cost; real loss = routing near-misses — the "plausible lie").
+- Positioning: universal translation collapses **N² language pairs → N realizers**; small, local, on-device. Not an alternative to the LLM — an alternative to the LLM-centric *paradigm*. Honest boundary: the encoder is still a small learned model ("no giant LLM," not "no model").
+
+### Fully-functional Spanish realizer (no toy)
+- UniMorph Spanish, ~1.2M inflected forms; ~34 syntactic constructions.
+- Honest fresh held-out coverage **77.0%** (dev-set 100% explicitly disavowed as a claim); **zero dropped negations** across 140 sentences.
+- Realizer-vs-router concerns separated; mechanical ELP (`.el`) port plan (a `vocabulary-es.el` generator + table transcription; stage via snapshot→verify→blue/green). Sandbox `~/Desktop/lang-realizers/`; Neuron artifact `5d61e6cf`.
+
+### Poem stress-test + frame-model upgrade — *Slowness is Calling*
+- Baseline through the chain: ORACLE 0.706, ROUTED 0.591 (~⅔ structural / ⅓ geometric). Failure modes: negation deletion (reassurance→accusation), epistemic-frame collapse, metaphor hub-collapse (sea/shore/tide/wave → "ocean").
+- Upgrade: structural slots (negation/polarity, epistemic matrix, PP/adjunct/simile — carried structurally, cannot invert) + sense-anchored (gloss-anchored) routing.
+- Result: ORACLE **0.706 → 0.777**; END-TO-END **0.591 → 0.770 (+0.179)**. NEGATION preserved **0/11 → 11/11** ("you never fought the ocean" 0.377→0.991; "I was never losing you" 0.501→1.000). sea≠shore **2/6 → 5/6** distinct. Routing slips **54 → 7**; every one of 18 verses improved. Sandbox `~/Desktop/lang-chain-experiment/`.
+
+### Rhyme-preserving translation
+- meaning ∩ rhyme composable one-word → rhyme-partnered line-pair; real phonemes EN/ES/PT; 34,030 ES / 33,077 PT real vocabulary.
+- Key finding: at real vocab scale the tradeoff moves from **existence → cost** (rhyme-cost metric). Held ABCB on **16/18 quatrains** (6 rima consonante + 10 asonante), mean per-line cosine 0.830; kept meaning on the 2 it couldn't rhyme (incl. truth/roots — already slant in the English). PT mechanism built; PT verse composition pending. Sandbox `~/Desktop/lang-poetic-translation/`.
+
+### Geometry operators → reasoning → verifier
+- Geometry operators (overlap / subtract / combine / distance-Wasserstein / analogy-Procrustes) now **live-callable from compiled `el`** over the real 13,036-node store (via shipped-`elc` pass-through — no uncapped fold). Commits `5336cfe`, `85eee42`.
+- Reasoning layer (analogy / induction / abduction / causal / planning) — all five **done-with-proof**, 33/33 closed-form checks, ASan/UBSan clean, 0 leaks. Commit `a3358df`.
+- Verifier layer (grounding + consistency) — proven, 29/29 checks. **Catches the plausible lie**: a claim grounded in real vocabulary yet polarity-inverted passes grounding, caught **only** by consistency (complementary checks) — directly flags the reassurance→accusation inversion. Commit `ca13471`.
+- el-exposure of the variadic/point-input reasoning + verifier modes deferred (would need ABI changes risking an uncapped fold); C layer complete + proven.
+
+### Whitepaper
+- `engram-cognitive-architecture-whitepaper.md` updated with the 2026-08-13 validated results (§13/§14/§15/§16/§21), **held at Version 1.0** (no bump), ELP `64/064,275` cross-ref preserved. Commit `adc8646`, pushed to Gitea.
+
+### Roadmap (deferred, not built tonight, per Will)
+- Multimodal / images-as-geometry: CLIP-precedent shared image+text meaning-space. Image→meaning near-term + local; meaning→image the hard, asymmetric side. Medical CT as decision-**support** (retrieval / anomaly-from-normal / progression, all interpretable) — **not diagnosis**; requires clinical validation + regulatory clearance; clinician holds the call.
+
+## Durability / safety
+- Pushed to Gitea: `el` `engram-tiered-storage` `77a4bc9..ca13471` (operators, cutover, reasoning, verifier + reversal docs); whitepaper `2440c7d..adc8646`; a `neuron` docs reversal branch.
+- Live `:8742` never touched (pid 31277 unchanged). No deploy, no launch-agent, no `~/.neuron` writes. Reversal docs under `el docs/runbooks/`. No AI-attribution footers.
+
+## Still in progress at hand-off
+- Portuguese realizer (following the Spanish template).
+- English realizer core + US/UK/AU dialects (queued behind PT).
+- Frame-model remaining gaps: passive voice, appositive/verbless fragments, resultatives; home→house pivot ambiguity.