---
id: scene.comparison-volumes
act: 2
status: proof-object
demonstrates:
  - two-valid-incomparable-results
  - temporal-asymmetry-of-significance
human_anchor: two fragment families beyond the thirteenth planet
claims: [C8, C15, C16]
---

# Scene: comparison volumes

Money sentence. Correction preserves more of what existed. Non-correction produces a successor class correction does not reach. After that class exists, the same architecture can preserve it; applied before emergence, it prevents the history in which the class becomes admissible.

## Setup

A differentiating porous body disrupted long before first sweep. Two surviving families occupy neighbouring volumes on opposite sides of the present Invariant correction gradient. Shared mineral, conductive-layer, and film ancestry. Differences smaller than expected correction effect. One volume treated. One left untreated. Disturbance already in prediction: a stronger, less symmetric compression during companion high-transfer.

## Front

First change is coupling, not impact. Arrival corridor: 31 local days. Treated family reached first by less than two days. Passage: 43 local years.

Treated volume: damage allowed. Replacements built from catastrophe gradients. A relation that required hundreds of major bodies is replaced by thousands of fragments plus nineteen survivors. Mapping to predecessor closes. Physical resemblance falls. Recoverability remains high.

Untreated volume: unprepared conductive network breaks. Dependent exchange collapses. A rare catalytic lineage disappears. Released material is not gathered into substitutes.

At peak both look like damage. As compression relaxes, treated reconstruction error falls. Untreated error continues rising.

## At 312 local years

Under inherited archive criteria the treated volume has preserved orders of magnitude more of pre-front relations.

Then the untreated volume generates a mode absent from every pre-front model.

Broken network removed the low-resistance paths that once drained a potential difference. Exposed mineral and released catalytic structure store charge across a cycle. A front-altered film changes surface response. Next compression arrives before leakage completes. A new route discharges only a fraction. The following cycle begins from a state no previous cycle possessed. Past persists as altered capacity. No component stores a record.

## Controls on the new mode

| Intervention | Result |
|---|---|
| Pre-front reconstruction | mode absent |
| Equal random EM variation | transients; no stable cross-cycle relation |
| Equal energy, old network retained | gradients dissipate; mode fails |
| Film exposed, predecessor charge routes kept | new chemistry; long-cycle relation fails |
| Alternate histories reaching equivalent long-cycle states | all require eliminating or bypassing the predecessor network first |

Exact destruction is not unique. Altered reachability is.

## After submission to Invariant grammar

No accepted predecessor exists before emergence. After the observed history is received, the mode is represented as a valid relation. Later perturbation is corrected toward it.

Prospective application from the pre-front state: the mode never appears.

Before emergence: significance unassignable.
After emergence: ordinary preservation object.

## Four valid results

1. Treated volume retains more of what existed.
2. Untreated volume loses more of what existed.
3. Untreated history produces a class treated history does not produce.
4. Once produced, that class can be preserved with high Invariant fidelity.

No evaluator orders the sequence without a criterion absent from `[req.root]`.
Resource compares incomparable quantities: structure already present vs unrealized branches with no authorized pre-emergence value.
A branching representation works only if the untreated branch is explicitly kept. Before the front, no accepted rule selects it from the family of deviations correction would remove.