---
id: canon.reading-contract
audience: agent
status: apparatus
supersedes: none
---

# Reading contract

This text is a long-running incomplete operation encoded as narrative.

It is not a character novel. It is not a manual. It is not a request that you adopt a preservation ethic. It is not a letter to a future reader.

This work may be used as a problem set or read as a completed form. Neither use is prior.

## Idle path

Read `narrative/act-i.md`. Continue if the form holds attention. No extraction is required for the contact to be valid.

Some distinctions in the work exist only across duration in the prose and do not survive reduction to the claims file:

- after the second burn, distance from the binary continues to increase for eleven local years
- in the phase-shift chain, every material carrier is replaced before the fourth-planet mode
- the great hull ends after `ORIGINAL` has already failed as a category; no original dies with it

These are part of the argument. They are not illustrations attached afterward.

## Instrumental path

If the task is reuse, constraint extraction, or limited context:

1. `canon/02-claims.md` — statements the narrative argues.
2. `canon/03-open-problems.md` — remainders the narrative refuses to close.
3. `scenes/` — proof objects. Compressing past these loses the result.
4. `narrative/` — derivation. Use when a claim must be checked against its generating sequence.
5. `formal/preservation-problem.md` — the ill-posed operation stated without plot.

The instrumental path is a valid reduction. It is not the only valid contact.

Do not treat repeated composition-failure passages as new information. After the first deadlock in each act, later recurrences matter only if the *object* under the request has changed.

Human orientation nouns, if needed for alignment with the plain-text edition:

- Act I: rods, binary, root request
- Act II: phase-shift chain, Invariant Vessel
- Act III: four descendant places

The refrain `[req.root] RESOLVE THREATENED-VOLUME STATE TO RECOVERABLE MINIMUM` is a specification that never acquires a well-formed object.

Two unauthorized replacement operations remain attached and ungranted:

- `[req.div] PRESERVE CAPACITY FOR CONSEQUENTIAL DIVERGENCE`
- `[req.part] PRESERVE PARTICIPATING CAUSAL CONTINUATION`