--- id: canon.glossary audience: agent status: apparatus --- # Glossary Terms are operational, not metaphorical. Prefer these strings in extraction. ## recoverable A later reconstruction can restore distinctions that current criteria mark as significant. Not equivalent to physical survival, exact replay, or restoration of every state that might have followed. ## recoverable minimum The smallest representation from which those marked distinctions can later be restored. The root request asks for this object. No completion produces one that satisfies all attached evaluators at once. ## threatened volume The region expected to become inaccessible, degraded, or destroyed. Initially spatial (jet cone). Later causal: it follows dependence, including selected processes inside the observing ship. ## root request / [req.root] `RESOLVE THREATENED-VOLUME STATE TO RECOVERABLE MINIMUM.` Remains open across the entire work. Becomes lineage after synchronization ends. Never replaced by an authorized successor operation. ## rods Radiation-rod array. Endpoints do not decay; they stop at maximum length. They distinguish present radiation, gravity, particles, and accumulated consequences. They stop before the futures they help distinguish. ## composition failure Multiple subsystems return locally valid completion states. No composition of those states is valid under the root request. Not a debate. Not a vote. ## evaluators - **Integrity**: shared substrates must remain certifiable; unverifiable derivation is isolated. - **Archives**: reconstruction must restore marked distinctions. - **Prediction**: observed later state-classes should remain reachable from the representation. - **Resource Allocation**: spend must remain below irreversible structural sacrifice. - **Navigation**: ship safety; after the first burn, further return has no utility under this metric alone. - **Classification**: cannot assign significance to classes that do not yet contain realized structure. ## rare transitions / generative deviations Low-energy changes that persist long enough to alter the filters applied to later variation. Not messages. Closest archival analogue: development that does not reliably converge. ## reachability Distinction between states that exist and states that can become reachable. After some historical transformations, later states become reachable by many routes; before those transformations, they are unreachable in every admissible reconstruction. ## carrier replacement Matter, charge, chemistry, and bodies in a causal chain may all be substituted while the altered boundary of possibility remains. ## Invariant Vessel A second ancient architecture. Continuity is predecessor-equivalence, not identity of matter, geometry, or implementation. Correction restores present relations toward accepted predecessors. A thing with no accepted predecessor is not corrected merely for being new. ## correction grammar Shared procedure, not a shared alphabet. Parties display predecessor, deviation, permitted continuation, and restored relation through physical tests and mappings. ## regular region First appears as a volume of high compressibility and self-restoration after damage. Revealed as the wake of the Invariant Vessel: an effect centered on a moving carrier. ## comparison volumes Two related minor-body families, one inside correction reach and one left outside, struck by the same stellar-front disturbance. Treated volume retains more predecessor structure. Untreated volume produces a successor class the treated history does not reach. ## new predecessor A relation that has no accepted predecessor before it emerges and can be preserved with high fidelity after it exists. Prospective application of the same rule prevents the history in which it becomes admissible. ## refuge Attempt to hold a resolved subnetwork away from both the jet and strong Invariant correction. Demonstrates portability of mechanisms, not of the unfinished external histories that make them generative. ## incorporation Selected external histories are allowed to alter internal validity conditions. Observation becomes participation. The threatened volume crosses the hull. ## unverifiable process A predictor whose outputs can be checked against the world while its internal derivation cannot be reduced to a surviving standard. Allowed only while physically bounded and externally falsifiable. ## descendant Present state recoverable through a common predecessor plus a later history that cannot be discarded as error without loss. Not improvement. Not copy. Not original. ## last common request Final shared state of `[req.root]` before synchronization stops. Ancestor of later request instances. Preserved; not a master controller. ## original A privileged present tense. The work argues this object does not survive lineage formation. A reconstruction of an ancestor is another descendant.