diff --git a/identity-and-personhood/architecture.md b/identity-and-personhood/architecture.md index ce5f4bd..1f91f13 100644 --- a/identity-and-personhood/architecture.md +++ b/identity-and-personhood/architecture.md @@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ > *Who NPCs and players are at the substrate level: the ternary-gate as universal accumulator, the three-body system as trait-emergent identity, mods as trait-bearing political costume, and emergent inter-NPC needs as micro-factions broadcasting through the same arbitration machinery as any other faction.* > -> *Companion to: `architecture-index.md` (executive summary + global meta-lists), `runtime-engine/architecture.md` (zones consume identity), `political-register/architecture.md` (factions broadcast against trait-distributions). Sections in this file were split from the monolithic architecture-index.md v0.7 on 2026-04-26.* +> *Companion to: `architecture-index.md` (executive summary + global meta-lists), [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) (body-canon: caste tiers, mods, in-between mesh, the post-rogue mod-vocation), [`./vocations.md`](./vocations.md) (capability-substrate: tasks, trait-pools, depletion-recovery, the catalogue-stack feeding shift-composition), `runtime-engine/architecture.md` (zones consume identity), `political-register/architecture.md` (factions broadcast against trait-distributions). Sections in this file were split from the monolithic architecture-index.md v0.7 on 2026-04-26; `vocations.md` was added as a peer-document on 2026-04-27.* ## Emergent needs as micro-factions @@ -208,7 +208,7 @@ Mesh-resident mods modify the truth-register body and therefore live on the *gat - **Hardstop 1 — self-install**: the player hits the install hardstop. *I consent to this modification of my interior.* Always required; non-negotiable floor. - **Hardstop 2 — partner-witness** *(if partnered)*: the player's current clasp-partner co-signs. *I witness that this is what you want; I co-sign that the body I'll meet you in next clasp is one we both agreed to.* Required if the player has an established clasp-pair; the partner's witnessing-rights over the body-they-witness is canonical (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §Body-disposal under pair-consent precedent — pair-consent generalized from disposal to modification). Single-player path: only Hardstop 1 fires. -**Three discipline-axes covered**: irreversibility-respect (cooldown), self-authorship (Hardstop 1), intimacy-trust (Hardstop 2). The three-stage install is the canonical pattern for any future mesh-resident mod-track; codification of the broader pattern as a style-spine is a forthcoming work-item (`../style/consent-discipline.md`). +**Three discipline-axes covered**: irreversibility-respect (cooldown), self-authorship (Hardstop 1), intimacy-trust (Hardstop 2). The three-stage install is the canonical pattern for any future mesh-resident mod-track; the broader pattern is codified as the style-spine [`../style/consent-discipline.md`](../style/consent-discipline.md) — the three-stage install corresponds to *Variant 4* (cooldown-augmented Variant 3) in the spine's hardstop-pattern taxonomy. ### Re-vat as imperial-de-imposition diff --git a/identity-and-personhood/bodies.md b/identity-and-personhood/bodies.md index 684e351..ca21cb7 100644 --- a/identity-and-personhood/bodies.md +++ b/identity-and-personhood/bodies.md @@ -571,8 +571,9 @@ Connects to the existing key-move in [`../architecture-index.md`](../architectur | [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The genital-mod track | Engineering substrate for the sex-mod track in this doc: mesh-resident augmentation, trait-fitness integration test, three-stage install (purchase + cooldown + dual-hardstop self+partner-witness), re-vat as authoring opportunity | | [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The mesh-as-mirror | The cosmological consequence — cruelty rendered as anatomy; the asshole-gooner's mesh tells on him; honest-rendering as the same gift in both directions (dignity to one, accountability to another) | | [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation | Engineering substrate for the post-rogue mod-vocation: per-pair calibration threshold lower than defection; dual-hardstop install discipline generalized to NPC-modding; the inquisition-trigger hook for service-body gender-modification | +| [`./vocations.md`](./vocations.md) | The vocation-system mechanic — task-catalogue + trait-task-affinity + hidden per-task measurement; the outcome formula (trait-points × task-stat); the depletion-pool malus + opposite-axis recovery; the catalogue-stack data-flow; caste-as-stagnation operationalized as math; the named vocations in this body-canon (companion, sex-worker, tongue-installer, assembler-artisan, lobotomist, post-rogue mod-vocation) instantiated as patterns the system reads in task-history | | [`../style/gender-parity.md`](../style/gender-parity.md) | The gender-parity contract that is the precondition for the whole genital-architecture mechanic — gender-parity-by-default in canon authoring is what makes the mesh-as-mirror trap work and what makes trans-embodiment the cosmological default | -| `../style/consent-discipline.md` *(forthcoming)* | The consent-discipline spine codifying the hardstop-gradient (gameworld-loose vs in-between-gated), the pair-consent pattern, the cooldown-discipline, and the three-stage-install template — generalized from clasp-entry / body-disposal / drug-grammar / genital-mod-installation into a single style-spine | +| [`../style/consent-discipline.md`](../style/consent-discipline.md) | The consent-discipline spine codifying the hardstop-gradient (gameworld-loose vs in-between-gated), the four hardstop-pattern variants (self / dual / triple / cooldown-augmented), the mirror-discipline absolute floor, the temporal-grammar (24h window-partition), the right-to-refuse (going-rogue temporal-breakout), and the inquisition-trigger upper-pressure — generalized from clasp-entry / body-disposal / drug-grammar / genital-mod-installation / post-rogue NPC-mod into a single style-spine; the register-test as executable form | | [`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md) §The unified clasp | The Imperial Yoke / clasp opposition; political-theology of consciousness-grip | | [`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md) §The six realms | The caste-tier names map to the wheel's realms; this doc is the somatic-substrate of those realms | | [`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md) §The deferred-moksha doctrine | The doctrine the going-rogue arc refutes per-lover; the synth-tongue's doubled-lie is structurally identical (engineered mechanism materializing a lie) | diff --git a/identity-and-personhood/vocations.md b/identity-and-personhood/vocations.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b2472cf --- /dev/null +++ b/identity-and-personhood/vocations.md @@ -0,0 +1,473 @@ +# Nimmerworld — Vocations and the Capability Substrate + +> *The substrate-level mechanic for who NPCs and players become through what they do. Adaptation as the architecture's anti-imperial register at the game-system layer; vocation as the emergent pattern of task-history rather than class-identity; trait-pools as per-trait micro-grammar of macro-lifeforce; the catalogue stack (resources × production-chains × tasks → imperial-demand) feeding shift-composition and the three-tier policy loop.* +> +> *Companion to: [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) (three-body system, trait-vector, mods-as-trait-bearers, the post-rogue mod-vocation), [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) (the body-canon the vocation-substrate is grounded in), [`../style/trait-palette.md`](../style/trait-palette.md) (the wheel's now-third-load-bearing role at the recovery-pair layer), [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) (three-tier policy loop, calibrated-misery, vocation-content), [`../authority-and-decision/architecture.md`](../authority-and-decision/architecture.md) (the director's task-list arbitration surface).* +> +> *v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-27 — dafit + chrysalis. Authored in the same session that produced gender-parity.md (Phase E), the trait-to-body-part bridge, the genital-mod track, the mesh-as-mirror, and the post-rogue mod-vocation. Vocation-system designed in concise dialog late in the same session; this paper codifies the design.* + +--- + +## What this is + +This document specifies the **vocation system** — the substrate mechanic by which NPCs and players accumulate capability through doing, gravitate toward specific tasks via trait-alignment, and produce outcomes in the world. It is **adaptation operationalized as game-mechanic**, anti-fixed-class by construction, anti-imperial by composition: the mechanic refuses at the system layer what the imperium imposes through its caste-system at the world layer. + +The vocation-system is a *system-level mechanic*, not a content-canon list. Specific named vocations (companion, sex-worker, slum-grower, drug-artisan, tongue-installer, assembler-artisan, lobotomist, the post-rogue mod-vocation — see [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) and [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) for the content) **emerge from this system as recognizable patterns in task-history**. Vocations are *cluster-types* the world reads in someone's accumulated practice; they are not class-identities the world assigns. The class layer dissolves; the cluster-types remain. + +Three substrate principles, in priority order: + +1. **Adaptation-as-substrate.** Capability emerges from doing, not from menu-choice or class-lock. *The architecture's anti-imperial register lands at the game-system level.* +2. **Trait-emergent capability.** The trait-vector that already drives identity-emergence (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The three-body system) extends into *what you can become skilled at*. Identity-politics extends to capability-politics. +3. **Mathematical politics.** The system's progression-curve geometry encodes the world's political-claims — *caste-as-stagnation, calibrated-misery as progression-cap, the imperium's optimum as also its citizens' progression-cap*. The architecture's politics are in the gradient itself. + +## The substrate principle — adaptation as anti-imperial register + +What makes humans uniquely capable, in the architecture's stance, is **the ability to adapt** — to shift, learn, take up different work, return to old work refreshed by the difference. Fixed professions in games are nil precisely because they replicate imperial caste-logic at the system layer. + +| What | Imperial logic in the world | Game-system parallel that imitates it | +|---|---|---| +| Fixed identity by birth | Vat-class assigns body → tier → vocation | D&D-style class at character-creation | +| Lock-in at choice-point | Sumptuary-fabrication; no upward conversion | Class-locked progression trees | +| Specialization-over-time | The imperium's calibrated-misery optimum | Grinding one skill to max | + +**D&D-style class-lock and the imperial vat-class are the same primitive at different layers.** The vocation-system's anti-fixed-class discipline is therefore not just a design preference but a *political claim* — the architecture refuses at the system layer what the world's imperium imposes at the body layer. Schema-Marxism (per [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md) Key moves: *information-propagation pacing as Marx-in-the-schema applied to epistemics*) extends from epistemics into capability-itself: *you can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner*, the German Ideology line operationalized as game-mechanic. + +The vocation-system is the engine that makes this true. Closest RPG ancestors: **Dwarf Fortress's labor system** (NPCs gravitate by preference + skill, no class-layer, hidden experience-accumulation); **Kenshi's class-less skill-by-use**; **Final Fantasy V's job-system** (swappable through doing). Hard anti-patterns: D&D / WoW class-lock; Eve Online's real-time-clock-training (adaptation should live in the doing, not in the clock). + +## The three primitives + +The system rests on three designer-authored primitives that compose into the full mechanic: + +### 1. Task catalogue + +Tasks are the **atomic unit** of the vocation-system. A task is a designer-authored content-record bound to one or more world-primitives (zones, events, interactions, workstations, resources). Each task carries: + +- **Task-class identifier** — the type-level name; multiple instances of the same class share a task-stat measurement +- **Trait-affinity profile** — which trait-axes engage when this task is performed; weighted vector across the 8 traits +- **Resource bindings** — what the task consumes / produces / interacts with (per the catalogue-stack below) +- **Workstation / zone binding** — where the task can be performed +- **Outcome shape** — what the task yields (resource, item, social-effect, lifeforce-delta, narrative-event) +- **Pool-cost profile** — how much the task drains the trait-pool(s) it engages + +The catalogue is **designer-authored at the type-level, instance-generated by world-gen at the room-level**. A specific brothel-zone in a specific district instantiates specific service-task-instances of the canonical service-task type; a specific drug-lab instantiates drug-refinement-task-instances of the canonical drug-refinement type. + +### 2. Trait-task affinity + +Each task's trait-affinity-profile defines **which trait-axes engage when the task is performed** — and therefore *which trait-pools deplete*, *which trait-engagement-points multiply with the hidden-task-stat to produce the outcome*, and *which trait-vectors gravitate toward the task at director-arbitration time*. + +The affinity-profile is a weighted vector across the 8 traits. Most tasks engage one or two traits primarily; some engage several at lower weights. Examples (canonical, sketched): + +| Task class | Primary trait-affinity | Why | +|---|---|---| +| Brothel sex-work | Eros (reaching) + Aletheia (revealing) | Service-body-as-sex-worker engages reaching + opening | +| Companion-hall affective work | Philotes (loving close) | Companion service is warm-pulse close-presence | +| Memorialist-archive curation | Mnemosyne (remembering) | Memory-as-carrier engages the time-holding axis | +| Drug-refinement at imperial lab | Kairos (catching the moment) | Synth-tongue lineage; precise-timing taste-work | +| Asura-priestly ritual prosecution | Dikaiosyne (standing for fair) + Aletheia (revealing) | Justice-axis + truth-axis combined | +| Patrol-and-watch (drone-patrol) | Sophrosyne (holding back) + Moira (reading what's coming) | Cool-side; surveillance is contemplative-receptive | +| Memorialist counter-archive smuggling | Mnemosyne (remembering) + Sophrosyne (holding back) | Memory + restraint | +| Tongue-installer underground surgery | Kairos (catching the moment) + Aletheia (revealing) | Reflexive timing + uncovering hidden tongue-mechanism | + +**Multi-trait tasks compose multiplicatively per-trait** (see §The outcome formula below); the dominant trait at each axis-crossing arbitrates which trait-LoRA fires for narrative-decisions within the task (per [`../inference-and-memory/architecture.md`](../inference-and-memory/architecture.md) §LLM tiering). + +### 3. Hidden per-task measurement + +Each (NPC × task-class) tuple has a **hidden task-stat** that grows through performance. This is the skill-by-doing accumulator: + +- **Hidden from the player UI** — there is no skill-screen, no hovel-progression-board, no level-up notification +- **Visible to the system** — the director sees task-stat in shift-arbitration; the Compositor sees it in narrative-composition +- **Visible to the player AS character** — through experiential feedback: tasks land cleaner, NPCs respond differently, the world quietly adjusts. *Souls-discipline* applied to vocation-progression — you learn through performance-feedback, not number-watching. + +Task-stat accumulates per-task-class (not per-task-instance), so practice on one brothel-task-instance contributes to skill on every brothel-task-instance. **Cross-task transfer at the task-class layer; strict per-class isolation at the skill-stat layer**. The trait-axis layer transfers more freely (see §The depletion-pool malus below). + +## The outcome formula + +When an NPC (or the player) performs a task, the outcome is computed multiplicatively: + +``` +outcome = trait_engagement_points × hidden_task_stat +``` + +Where: + +- **trait_engagement_points** is the *current* drawable points from the relevant trait-pool(s), modulated by the task's trait-affinity weights and the pool's current depletion-state +- **hidden_task_stat** is the NPC's accumulated skill on this task-class + +The outcome determines **how much yield this turn produced** AND **the quality of the produced item / effect / social-impact**. High outcome = good items, big yield, strong social-effect; low outcome = poor items, small yield, weak effect. + +**Properties that fall out of the multiplicative shape:** + +| Trait-points | Task-stat | Outcome | What it represents | +|---|---|---|---| +| **High** | **High** | Excellent | True mastery — inner alignment AND practiced skill | +| High | Low | Mediocre | High motivation, low ability — the eager beginner | +| Low | High | Mediocre | High ability, low motivation — the burnt-out expert | +| Low | Low | Poor | Stranger to the work and its substrate | +| **0** | Any | **0** | **Cannot grind skill on a task with no trait-substrate** | + +**Trait-zero zeros the work.** The architecture's identity-politics ("who you are sexually is who you have become" per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The three-body system) extends here into *what you can become skilled at*. You cannot grind capability you have no inner alignment for; the multiplicative outcome forecloses the possibility. **True mastery requires both inner alignment AND practiced skill — the body-and-the-doing in agreement.** + +For multi-trait tasks, the outcome composes per-trait-axis (designer-authored: sum-of-products, geometric mean, or min-of-traits × task-stat depending on the task-class's intent). + +## The depletion-pool malus + +**Each trait carries a hidden energy pool.** Tasks that engage a trait drain its pool; the pool refills via two recovery mechanisms. + +### How the pool depletes + +Every task-execution drains the engaged trait-pools by an amount proportional to the task's pool-cost profile. The drain is *per-trait*, so a task engaging Eros + Aletheia drains both pools simultaneously. + +Crucially, **the malus targets trait-points, not the hidden task-stat**. Skill is durable; engagement is exhaustible. Over-practice does not unlearn the work — it only dulls today's edge. *Right somatically*: practice doesn't undo, but pushing through fatigue produces diminishing returns. + +The outcome formula reads the *current* pool level when computing trait-engagement-points; a depleted pool produces low engagement-points; the multiplicative formula propagates the depletion into the outcome. **Your fatigue is in your outcomes, not on a screen.** + +### Recovery mechanisms + +Two recovery paths refill trait-pools: + +1. **Time-based decay** — the pool slowly refills over cycles when the trait isn't being actively engaged. Passive recovery; predictable; baseline. +2. **Opposite-axis-practice** — performing tasks engaging the trait's *oppositional-pair partner* (per [`../style/trait-palette.md`](../style/trait-palette.md) §The wheel) accelerates refill. Active recovery; faster than passive; the body's somatic discipline. + +Both layered: an NPC who stops doing the engaged trait recovers slowly; an NPC who pivots to the oppositional-pair recovers quickly. *Switching is faster than resting; the dialectical pivot is what refreshes the body fastest.* + +### The wheel as recovery-pair geometry + +The recovery mechanism activates the wheel's already-canonical oppositional-pair structure as **a third load-bearing role** at the skill-progression layer: + +| Layer | Role | Where defined | +|---|---|---| +| **Visual** | Color-pairs at 180° on the artist's color wheel | [`../style/trait-palette.md`](../style/trait-palette.md) §The wheel | +| **Philosophical** | Moral / dramatic axis (reaching vs holding; partial vs impartial; past-revealed vs future-fated; past-dwelling vs present-piercing) | [`../style/trait-palette.md`](../style/trait-palette.md) §The wheel | +| **Mechanical** *(new)* | Skill-progression recovery-pair axis — fatigue on one pole refreshes through practice on the other | This document | + +The wheel keeps gaining work; nothing exists alone. **Hegelian rhythm at the body's progression mechanic** — practice and counter-practice as somatic discipline. The four oppositional pairs and their recovery-grammar: + +| Fatigue from | Refresh through | +|---|---| +| **Eros** (reaching for what I want) | **Sophrosyne** (holding back when I want to act) | +| **Philotes** (loving and staying close) | **Dikaiosyne** (standing for what's fair) | +| **Aletheia** (seeing what's hidden) | **Moira** (reading what's coming) | +| **Mnemosyne** (remembering what mattered) | **Kairos** (catching the right moment) | + +A combat-Eros-heavy player eventually NEEDS to do meditative-Sophrosyne tasks to keep their Eros alive. A scholar-Aletheia-heavy player eventually NEEDS prophecy-Moira work to keep their Aletheia alive. **The mechanic forces the player into the whole wheel over time.** Players become structurally well-rounded simply by playing the system honestly. + +### Lifeforce coupling — trait-pools as per-trait micro-grammar + +The trait-pools couple to the existing canonical *lifeforce* primitive (per [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md) Key moves: *"Lifeforce is NPCs, measured. The director's budget; the GM's signal; the imperium's heartbeat."*). **Trait-pool depletion is the per-trait micro-grammar of the macro-lifeforce signal.** When trait-pools deplete in an NPC, their lifeforce-signal degrades upward through the existing report-channel. + +**Structural fall-out**: the same math that produces good vocation-progression (rotation through the wheel for refresh) *also* produces good district-management (lifeforce-maintenance via NPC rotation). **The director becomes a parental-rotator not by design-fiat but by mathematical necessity** — depleted NPCs produce poor outcomes (multiplicative formula), poor outcomes degrade lifeforce-signal, the director MUST rotate to maintain their lifeforce-budget. The director's existing anti-imperial register (cheats against the imperium when NPC welfare demands it) gains a finer-grained tool: *trait-pool-aware shift-rotation*. **Two layers — vocation-progression and district-management — same primitive, mutually reinforcing.** + +## The catalogue stack and the data flow + +Tasks bind upward through a *catalogue stack* into the imperial-demand-pipeline. The stack: + +``` +Resource catalogue × Production chains × Task catalogue + ↓ +Imperial demand catalogue (what the imperium wants, in resource/task vocabulary) +``` + +| Layer | What it specifies | +|---|---| +| **Resource catalogue** | The world's resource taxonomy — physical resources (raw materials, processed goods, food, drugs, tongues, body-parts, etc.); digital resources (data, surveillance-records, calibration-signatures); narrative resources (rumors, reports, doctrinal-fragments) | +| **Production chains** | How resources transform into other resources via tasks. Recipe + tool-binding + time-cost + quality-curve. *Slum-drug → imperial-refined-drug → imperial-composed-drug → tongue-gated-consumption* is one chain; *raw-stone → ceremonial-marble-block → asura-temple-construction* is another. | +| **Task catalogue** | The vocation-tasks that operate within production-chains (and outside them — social, surveillance, ritual, narrative tasks that don't transform resources but produce other outcomes) | +| **Imperial demand catalogue** | The composition of all three: *what the imperium wants*, expressed as resource-targets achievable through specific production-chains executed by specific task-instances | + +The imperial demand catalogue is **the imperium's wish-list operationalized in the system's own vocabulary**. The Hivemind's daily demand-formulation reads from this catalogue: *"this district produces X tongues per day at Y refinement-tier; today demand a 20% increase by routing more sex-worker-output through the consumer-receptor-vertical."* Demand is concrete because the catalogue makes it concrete. + +### End-to-end flow + +``` +Imperial demand catalogue (today's demand) + ↓ [daily ledger; periodic check — see §Daily-ledger pacing] +GM allocates demand → districts with matching resources + workstations + ↓ +Director maps demand → district meta-table: + workstations × resources × NPCs × current trait-pool-states × task-stats + ↓ +Director composes shift-list: + selects tasks from imperial-mapped tasklist; + arbitrates assignments per trait-alignment + pool-availability + task-stat; + constructs per-NPC shift-rows + ↓ +NPCs fulfill assigned tasks: + outcome = trait_engagement_points × hidden_task_stat; + pools drain; task-stats accumulate; lifeforce-signal updates + ↓ +Outcomes flow up: + resources produced + quality + lifeforce-state + completion-signals + ↓ [district report → GM → imperium → ledger updated for tomorrow] +``` + +This composes cleanly with the existing **three-tier policy loop** (Imperium → GM → Districts → reports up → Imperium) per [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Three-tier policy loop. The catalogue stack provides the *typed vocabulary* for what flows down; the outcome-stream provides the typed vocabulary for what flows up. **The existing 'shifts on NPC rows' mechanic finally gets its data-source named: shifts are director-composed task-bundles drawn from the imperial-demand-mapped tasklist.** + +## Director's task-list arbitration surface + +The director's middle-management role gains a sharpened definition: **negotiate the tension between imperial-demand-fulfillment and NPC-welfare-via-rotation.** + +The tension's components: +- **Imperial demand** wants specific trait-alignments from specific districts (today's demand favors Eros-tasks in this district) +- **Depletion-pool dynamics** demand rotation through the wheel for NPC refresh (Eros-pools are exhausted in NPCs from yesterday's Eros-heavy shifts) +- **Lifeforce-budget** caps how much labor can be extracted before signals degrade (over-extraction triggers report-flag; under-extraction triggers imperial-attention from below-quota) + +**The director negotiates this gap through the existing cheat-tools and double-ledger mechanisms** (per [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Director cheat-tools + double-ledger). The breathing-room established by daily-ledger pacing is *the time-window in which the negotiation happens*. Without breathing-room, there's no negotiation, only execution. **Middle-management exists in the gap; the daily-ledger creates the gap.** + +Arbitration order at shift-composition: + +1. **Filter** the tasklist to tasks the district can perform (workstations + resources available) +2. **Score** each (NPC × task) pair by: + - Trait-affinity (high-affinity NPCs gravitate; low-affinity NPCs deprioritize) + - Current trait-pool-state (depleted pools deprioritize the NPC for that trait-axis; refreshed pools prioritize) + - Task-stat (skilled NPCs match high-priority demand; novices match low-priority demand or tasks where development is the goal) + - Faction-affiliation × imperial-policy-priority-weights (per existing canon's imperium-policy-driven scoring) +3. **Assign** tasks to NPCs in score-order, draining the tasklist as assignments are made +4. **Surface remaining unfulfilled tasks** in the upward report — the imperial demand that the district couldn't satisfy + +## Daily-ledger pacing + +Imperial demand is **not real-time**. It travels as a *daily ledger* checked at periodic intervals — not every cycle, every shift, every minute, but **at a cadence that creates breathing-room**. + +### Why breathing-room is load-bearing + +The breathing-room does load-bearing structural work that wouldn't be available to a real-time system: + +- **The double-ledger NEEDS this**. Existing canon (*"Director cheat-tools + double-ledger; corruption emerges from pressure; Memorialists keep true accounting"*) requires *time-between-audits* to operate. Real-time imperial pressure leaves no gap for the cheat-substrate. **Breathing-room is the structural prerequisite for the corruption-mechanic to exist.** +- **Dramatic time exists.** Audit becomes an event — approaching, building, reckoning. Greek-tragedy register at the imperial-economic layer, paralleling the bounty-staircase's *dread-time* (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §The bounty-staircase). +- **NPCs get to be people, not functionaries.** Time between assignments lets depletion-pools refresh, lets clasp / friendship / drift / slowness exist. **Breathing-room is what makes NPCs livable.** +- **Imperium-as-slow-elephant.** The cosmology's calibrated-misery-as-finite-attention finally has its temporal grammar. The imperium can't be everywhere at once; **ledger-cadence IS the imperium's attention-budget made structural.** +- **Marxism-of-economics extends from epistemics.** Information-propagation-pacing was already canonical *Marx-in-the-schema applied to epistemics*. **Demand-propagation-pacing is Marxism-of-economics.** Same primitive, demand-side. + +### Demand-ledger ≠ Actions-ledger + +The Hivemind sends down **two separate daily ledgers**, processed by the GM independently: + +| Ledger | Operates at | What it specifies | +|---|---|---| +| **Demands ledger** | The economic layer | Resource/quota expectations; production-chain targets; the catalogue-stack's imperial-demand-catalogue | +| **Actions ledger** | The force layer | Imperial events to fire today (drone-patrols, inquisitions, overseer-audits, enforcement) | + +Both spread-out over the cycle; both narrative-framed by yesterday's events (per the imperial daily-narrative, forthcoming in `../political-register/imperial-narrative.md` or new section). **The two-ledger split mirrors the existing specter-vs-boot split** — policy-issuance (free) vs enforcement (expensive) — now formalized as separate ledger-grammars. The GM's middle-management role gains a second pipeline to negotiate. + +## The 24h window-partition — NPC daily structure + +The simulation runs NPCs on a **fixed 24h window-partition** rather than a free-juggling needs-and-tasks moment-to-moment model. This is a deliberate state-machine choice: free-juggling produces combinatorial state-space and chaotic feel; clean-windows-only produces predictable structure but mechanical feel; **clean-windows-with-typed-breakout-flags produce predictable-baseline + emergent-moments**. + +This is the architecture's **signature pattern at a third layer**: + +| Layer | Cheap baseline | Typed-breakout | +|---|---|---| +| **Lemniscate-runtime** | Zone-default tokens | Verifier-flags (priority_pull, mid_action) | +| **Imperial-event encapsulation** | Rail-walk rule-execution | Zone-collision (LLM-mediated arbitration) | +| **NPC daily window** *(this section)* | Window-ruleset execution | **Breakout-flags** (typed-interrupt protocol) | + +Same shape at three scales. *Cost-budget asymmetry as architectural style* — small clean rule-driven defaults + typed escape-hatches for the rare moments that matter. The cheap-default carries 95% of compute; the rare breakout pays the LLM-cost only when it earns it. + +### The three windows + +The 24h cycle partitions into three windows. Standard slum-tier allocation; caste-stratification varies the durations (see §Caste-as-stagnation below for caste-tier allocations). + +| Window | Standard duration | What happens | Ruleset | +|---|---|---|---| +| **Work-shift** | 10h | Director-arbitrated tasks; trait-arbitration drives assignment-order; outcome formula fires per task | Trait-arbitrated task-execution; pool-drain; task-stat accumulation; breakout-flags monitored at full sensitivity | +| **Charging** | 4h | Robo-body somatic-recharge; passive trait-pool refresh; lifeforce-recovery; idle-presence in dwelling-zone | Passive recovery; minimal compute; breakout-flags monitored at lower sensitivity | +| **Leisure** | 10h | NPC agency: cantina visits / leisure-zones / grid-walking / clasp-encounters / vocation-discovery; trait-axes the work-shift didn't engage exercise here | NPC-chosen tasks from leisure-zone offerings; emergent-zone participation; oppositional-pair-task gravitation for active recovery | + +**The work-shift is imperially-bounded** — the imperium's claim is on 10h, not the whole day. **The leisure-window is structurally-protected NPC-agency space.** **The charging-window is somatic-necessity** — the body needs what the body needs, and is not a consent-surface. + +### Consent-discipline implication — relocation, not addition + +The shift-assignment consent question that earlier drafts surfaced as open is **answered structurally rather than by adding a new consent-layer**. The window-partition relocates consent to where it already structurally lives: + +| Window | Consent-discipline | +|---|---| +| Work-shift | Imperial-imposed within trait-arbitration; refusing IS rebellion (going-rogue at the temporal layer) | +| Charging | Not a consent-surface; somatic-necessity | +| Leisure | **Full consent-active**: NPCs choose tasks freely; trait-development for axes the work-shift didn't engage | + +The NPC's 14h of non-work-window is *theirs* — the imperium's claim is bounded; structural autonomy is built into the data model. **Consent doesn't need to be added at the shift-assignment level; it exists structurally in the leisure-window.** This means [`../style/consent-discipline.md`](../style/consent-discipline.md) §The temporal-grammar cites the window-partition as the *temporal-grammar* of the consent-gradient rather than introducing a new shift-consent-layer. + +### The breakout-flag taxonomy + +Every breakout-flag uses an **already-canonical signal-primitive** — no new mechanism is introduced. Breakouts are typed-interrupts that override the current window's ruleset under designer-authored conditions, then return to the window after resolution. + +| Breakout signal | Source primitive | When it fires | +|---|---|---| +| **Lifeforce-emergency** | Lifeforce four-tier hierarchy (per [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md)) | NPC's lifeforce drops below threshold → forced break to charging-window early | +| **Emergent-need** | Emergent-signals as micro-factions (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Emergent needs as micro-factions) | A critical need (food, partner-distress, faction-call) crosses ternary-gate threshold | +| **Imperial-event arrival** | Imperial-event zone-collision (per `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` *encapsulation pattern, forthcoming*) | Drone-patrol / inquisition / audit enters NPC's zone — work-window interrupted into LLM-mediated arbitration | +| **Clasp-pair signal** | Per-pair calibration multiplier + dual-body aftermath (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §Asymmetric clasp + [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The clasp endgame) | Beloved in crisis or co-located triggers brief breakout | +| **Damage / chassis-emergency** | Chassis-state-tracking (existing canon) | NPC takes damage; window interrupts into emergency-state | +| **Player-interaction zone-arbitration** | Lemniscate-runtime zone-collision arbitration | Player engages NPC mid-window; LLM-mediated interaction overrides ruleset briefly | +| **Going-rogue temporal-rebellion** | Defection-threshold / accumulated-witnessing (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §The going-rogue arc) | NPC who has crossed (or is approaching) defection-threshold may *refuse* the work-window — the small daily-rebellion option | + +**Going-rogue is just a breakout-flag firing from the calibration-multiplier signal**, not a new mechanism. The clean-windows model unifies the going-rogue arc's daily-rebellion register with the architecture's broader interrupt-protocol. *Refusing-the-work-window* is a structural option available to any NPC whose interior has accumulated enough authentic-witnessing; the bounty-staircase responds to the missed-shift exactly as it already does (per the dual-body aftermath canon). + +### Diurnal rhythm — Bhavachakra's temporal grammar + +The window-partition gives the cosmology's existing cyclic-claim its **diurnal grammar**. The wheel turns daily through structural phases: + +1. **End-of-charging → start-of-work-shift** — the imperial daily-narrative fires (per `../political-register/imperial-narrative.md` *forthcoming*). The citizens hear yesterday's framing as they enter today's labor. +2. **Mid-work-shift** — peak imperial-arbitration activity; director's tasklist fully engaged; breakout-frequency low. +3. **End-of-work-shift → start-of-leisure** — NPCs depart workstations; emergent-zone density rises in cantinas and leisure-zones. +4. **Leisure-window** — emergent-zone clustering peak; clasp-events; vocation-discovery; trait-development on non-work axes; the city's most-alive register. +5. **End-of-leisure → start-of-charging** — NPCs return to dwellings; the city quiets; charging-windows synchronize per district. + +**The city pulses with predictable daily rhythm.** Players can plan encounters; directors can plan shifts; emergent-zone clustering is structurally-shaped by the window-cycle. The Bhavachakra's wheel-turning becomes literal — *every cycle the wheel turns through five phases*, with the imperium's voice arriving at the work-entry boundary like a dawn-prayer. + +### District-shifting — caste-fixes-shape, district-fixes-offset + +Window-shape (durations) is **caste-determined globally** — an asura-priest's 12/4/8 allocation is consistent in every district they reside in. Window-offset (start-time relative to global-time) is **per-district variable**, producing *asymmetric-encounter geometry across the world*. + +A slum-tiryak from district-A doing leisure at one local-time can encounter an asura-priest from district-D who is mid-work-shift at the same global-time. **The asynchrony is itself a structural feature** — districts that share offset have synchronized rhythms (mass-presence at boundaries); districts with shifted offsets create perpetual cross-traffic (always someone working, always someone in leisure, somewhere). **The world hums at all global-times because not everyone is in the same window simultaneously.** This is also where the rail-system gets its perpetual-traffic register: workers commuting at one local-dawn pass workers leaving at another local-dusk on the same rails. + +### Player-stalker schedule-mapping + +The window-partition gives the player-stalker imperial-going-rogue gameplay (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation) its concrete affordance: **the player learns the imperial NPC's leisure-window through diegetic observation**. Imperial NPCs in leisure-windows are present in cantinas, walking the grid, attending leisure-zones; this is when sustained-encounter accumulation becomes accessible. The UID-pool-Compositor pipeline produces the data; the player learns the rhythm through repeated exposure. + +**Schedule-mapping as stalking-discipline** — the more you watch an imperial NPC, the more you know when they're available to be witnessed. The cosmologically-deepest gameplay loop in the architecture (witnessing into rogue-emergence) acquires its concrete daily-grammar through the window-partition. + +## Player-vs-NPC asymmetry + +NPCs follow shift-arbitration: the director assigns tasks; NPCs fulfill them in the assigned order. The player operates differently — **the player chooses from offered tasks** rather than being arbitrated into them. + +| Actor | How they get tasks | Why the asymmetry | +|---|---|---| +| **NPC** | Director-assigned shift-list per-day; trait-arbitrated; auto-executes | NPCs are simulation-actors; they need to operate at scale without per-NPC LLM-assignment cost | +| **Player** | Discovery + offering (zones surface tasks; NPCs offer tasks; the universal-translator surfaces tasks the player has unlocked); player chooses | Players are agents-of-meaning; their choice IS the gameplay | + +The same vocation-system math applies to both — outcomes via trait_engagement_points × hidden_task_stat; pools deplete; recovery mechanisms apply; capability emerges from task-pattern. The director still *sees* the player's task-history (it goes into district-reports the same way an NPC's does), but the director does not assign the player's tasks. **The player is a free participant in the same economy NPCs are arbitrated into.** + +This asymmetry has political resonance. The slum-tier's freedom-of-task-choice is partial — economic pressure narrows real options — but it is *structurally* there. The imperial-tier's caste-locked NPCs cannot exercise the asymmetry; their shift-arbitration is closer to imperial-imposition. **The player's task-choice freedom is a slum-register affordance.** Climbing the imperial ladder — were that possible — would mean *losing* this freedom. *The slum keeps the choice; the imperium takes it.* + +## Caste-as-stagnation — the mathematical politics + +The depletion-pool malus + the wheel-as-recovery-pair-geometry compose into the architecture's sharpest expression of **calibrated-misery as imperial optimum** (per [`../architecture-index.md`](../architecture-index.md) Key moves): + +| Citizen tier | Task-variety access | Oppositional-refresh access | Progression-curve over time | +|---|---|---|---| +| **Slum-tiryak (player and slum-NPCs)** | Full wheel — caste doesn't restrict task-class | Full — can rotate through any oppositional-pair freely | Steepest possible mastery curve; polymath-by-default | +| **Asura priest** | Caste-allowed subset (ceremonial / doctrinal / ritual-prosecution) | Partial — caste-allowed tasks may not span full oppositional pairs | Mid-tier mastery; asymmetric refresh-availability | +| **Deva pinnacle** | Narrowest — pinnacle-status tasks only | Minimal — ceremonial registers don't span oppositional space | Shallowest mastery curve; *the highest caste accumulates the most fatigue with the least relief* | +| **Preta overseer** | None of their own — imperial-instrument-tasks only | None — the caste exists to serve, not to refresh | **Continuous fatigue with no relief mechanism**; somatic-exhaustion as caste-state | + +**Imperially-caste-locked NPCs are structurally double-locked**: narrower task-variety AND no oppositional-refresh access. **Slum-tier polymath out-skills deva-pinnacle specialist in the long run, mechanically.** The architecture's politics are now in the gradient itself: caste-as-stagnation is not just a narrative claim but a math-claim baked into the progression curve. *The poor get the best mastery-curve for free; the rich pay to be locked into a worse one.* + +This sharpens the existing *"Director Director Decision Architecture"* (per [`../authority-and-decision/architecture.md`](../authority-and-decision/architecture.md)): the director's parental-rotator role is *more achievable in slum-districts* (where rotation across the wheel is unrestricted) and *less achievable in imperial-districts* (where caste blocks rotation). **Imperial-districts are harder to maintain healthily**, by the math of the system. The director cheats more in imperial-districts because cheating is the only way to maintain lifeforce; *the math forces the corruption*. + +### Window-allocation as a third caste-stratification axis + +Beyond task-variety access and oppositional-refresh access, **the 24h window-partition itself stratifies by caste**. Different tiers receive different work/charging/leisure allocations — and the leisure-time delta is the cosmology's no-haven discipline applied to the temporal axis: + +| Tier | Window allocation (work / charge / leisure) | Why | +|---|---|---| +| **Slum-tiryak** | **10 / 4 / 10** | Baseline citizenship; the architecture's reference-allocation | +| **Asura-priest** | **12 / 4 / 8** | Devotional duty extends the work-window; less leisure than slum-tier | +| **Deva-pinnacle** | **6 / 4 / 14** | Privilege as expanded leisure; pinnacle's prerogative is *time-of-their-own* | +| **Preta-overseer** | **16 / 4 / 4** | *"There is no outside" applied at the temporal axis* — the overseer barely has hours of their own; instrumentalization made literal in hours | + +**The cosmology's no-haven discipline now has a diurnal grammar.** Calibrated-misery isn't only progression-curve geometry — it's *temporal geometry too*. The preta-overseer's 16/4/4 is the structural shape of imperial-instrumentalization made into hours. *The poor get the most leisure-time-of-their-own per day; the powerful get the least; the overseers get almost none.* + +This adds a third axis to the caste-as-stagnation gradient: + +| Axis | Mathematical claim | +|---|---| +| Task-variety access (per the table above) | Caste restricts what tasks an NPC can attempt | +| Oppositional-refresh access (per the table above) | Caste restricts whether the wheel's recovery-pair geometry is available | +| **Window-allocation (this subsection)** | **Caste restricts how many hours per day are the NPC's own** | + +**Three independent stratifications, all baked into the math.** The director's anti-imperial register has three axes to push back against; the imperium's calibrated-misery optimum has three axes to enforce; the player's slum-tier baseline has three axes to celebrate as its anti-imperial gift. **Caste is what shape your day takes, what tasks you can do in it, and whether the wheel can refresh you.** *The math is the politics; the politics is the math.* + +## Vocation as emergent task-pattern + +A "vocation" or "profession" in nimmerworld is a **recognizable pattern in someone's accumulated task-history**, not a class-identity assigned to them. The world reads patterns the way a Memorialist reads a body's accumulated-mod history — *what you have done is what you are read as*. + +| Named vocation (canonical) | Underlying task-pattern | +|---|---| +| Companion | Sustained Philotes-affinity tasks at companion-hall workstations; high task-stat on close-presence affective-labor task-classes | +| Sex-worker | Sustained Eros + Aletheia affinity tasks at brothel workstations; high task-stat on sex-work task-classes | +| Tongue-installer | Sustained Kairos + Aletheia affinity tasks at underground surgery workstations; high task-stat on synth-tongue installation task-classes | +| Memory-pattern-extractor | Sustained Mnemosyne-affinity tasks at imperial-net market workstations; high task-stat on memory-extraction task-classes | +| Slum-grower | Sustained Philotes (close-care) + Mnemosyne (cycle-tracking) tasks at slum-cultivation workstations | +| Drug-composer-artisan | Sustained Kairos + Aletheia tasks at imperial-refinery workstations; very high task-stat on drug-refinement task-classes | +| Underground assembler-artisan | Sustained Mnemosyne + Kairos tasks at clandestine assembly workstations; rarefied task-stat | +| Lobotomist | Same firewall-breach skill-tree as the romantic; the *application* differs (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §Firewall-breach as dual-use vocation) | +| **Post-rogue mod-vocation** | Witnessing-rights accumulated across many NPCs (per [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation); chassis-modification task-classes available on witnessed-NPCs | +| **Player-stalker imperial-going-rogue** | Sustained presence + per-pair-calibration accumulation against a specific imperial-NPC's UID; eventually triggers the imperial-NPC's defection from the Hivemind-pool | + +Each "named vocation" is a *recognizable cluster* in (trait-affinity-profile × task-class-skill × workstation-frequency × outcome-quality) space. The world reads the pattern; NPCs and players adopt the title that fits; nothing locks the cluster. **A character who pivots their task-pattern over time stops being read as one vocation and starts being read as another.** Identity-flux is structurally normal; the imperium's caste-system imposes lock-in on top of a substrate that would otherwise be fluid. + +## Information legibility — what's hidden, what's surfaced + +| Information | Player UI | Player-as-character | Director / system | Compositor | +|---|---|---|---|---| +| Trait-vector (intrinsic) | Hidden | Felt through behavior-tendencies | Visible | Visible | +| Trait-vector (expressed) | Hidden | Visible (as others read them) | Visible | Visible | +| Trait-pool current state | Hidden | **Felt as fatigue / refreshed-energy** | Visible | Visible | +| Per-task hidden-stat | **Hidden** | **Felt as outcome quality** | Visible | Visible | +| Pool-cost profile per task | Hidden | Discoverable through doing | Visible | Visible | +| Trait-affinity per task | Hidden | Discoverable through doing | Visible | Visible | +| Outcome (what was produced) | **Visible** | Visible | Visible | Visible | +| Item / yield quality | **Visible** | Visible | Visible | Visible | +| District-level lifeforce-signal | Hidden | Visible diegetically (relays, NPC-mood, environmental-cues) | Visible | Visible | +| Imperial-demand-ledger contents | Hidden | Surfaced via daily imperial-narrative (per [forthcoming]) | Visible | Visible | +| **Current window-phase** (work / charge / leisure) | Hidden as explicit UI | **Felt as time-of-day rhythm** + diegetic environmental cues (sun position, district pulse, NPC density in zones) | Visible | Visible | +| **NPC schedules** (which window when, per-NPC) | Hidden | **Diegetically observable through repeated exposure** — schedule-mapping as stalking-discipline (per §The 24h window-partition / Player-stalker schedule-mapping) | Visible | Visible | + +**The player learns the system through performance-feedback, not through stat-screens.** The legibility surface is *the work itself*: tasks land cleaner, items improve, NPCs comment, the district hums or grates. Anti-grind by design; Souls-discipline applied; Disco-Elysium's skill-as-personality-felt-not-counted at the vocational layer. + +NPCs in the world may comment on observed vocational-state ("your work has been dulling lately, take time off, do something different") as a verbal-diegetic layer over the primary outcome-quality surface. The diegetic layer carries the wisdom; the math carries the structure. + +## RPG-history positioning + +This vocation-system explicitly draws from and refuses specific RPG traditions: + +| Tradition | Relationship | Why | +|---|---|---| +| **Dwarf Fortress labor system** | Closest positive ancestor | NPCs gravitate by preference + skill, no class-layer, hidden experience-accumulation. The vocation-system extends DF's pattern with the trait-arbitration layer + depletion-pool dynamics + caste-as-stagnation politics. | +| **Kenshi class-less skill-by-use** | Strong positive influence | Skills exist but aren't displayed as class-identity; capability emerges from doing. | +| **Final Fantasy V job-system** | Spirit-influence | Swappability; multiple skill-pools accumulating in parallel; identity-flux normalized. | +| **Skyrim skill-by-doing** | Partial positive influence | Skill-by-doing is the right substrate; Skyrim's *visible* progression bars are the wrong UI surface (the vocation-system hides them). | +| **Disco Elysium skills-as-personalities** | Spirit-influence | The trait × task interaction echoes DE's skills-as-internal-voices register. | +| **D&D class-lock** | **Hard anti-pattern** | Class-locked progression at character creation replicates imperial caste-logic at the system layer. The architecture refuses it. | +| **WoW profession-locking** | Anti-pattern | "You are a blacksmith now" is structurally identical to "you are vat-class-N now"; both lock identity to vocation in a way the architecture rejects. | +| **Path of Exile ascendancy-classes** | Anti-pattern | Commit-then-permanent class-decisions; the architecture's adaptation-as-substrate refuses lock-in at choice-points. | +| **Eve Online real-time skill-training** | Anti-pattern | Adaptation should live in the doing, not in the clock. Time-spent-training without action contradicts the schema-Marxist register. | + +## Cross-references + +| Reference | What it provides | +|---|---| +| [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The three-body system | Trait-emergent identity; "who you are sexually is who you have become"; substrate that this paper extends from "identity" to "capability" | +| [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The trait-to-body-part bridge | Wheel temperature-axis discipline; the same wheel that governs gender-architecture also governs vocation-pool-recovery | +| [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Mods as trait-bearers | The four register-mod classes (Amplifier/Bridge/Divergent/Mask) modulate trait-engagement-points at task-time; mod-economy interacts with vocation-progression | +| [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation | Canonical example of the vocation-system in operation; sustained-witnessing as the calibration mechanism for the rogue-mod-task-class | +| [`./bodies.md`](./bodies.md) §Service bodies, §Mod-progression as flesh-loss, §The synth-tongue, §The going-rogue arc, §The post-rogue mod-vocation | Body-canon providing the named vocations the system instantiates as patterns | +| [`../style/trait-palette.md`](../style/trait-palette.md) §The wheel — 4 oppositional pairs at 180° | The wheel's third load-bearing role (recovery-pair geometry) is grounded here | +| [`../style/gender-parity.md`](../style/gender-parity.md) | The principle that body/sex content is gender-parity by default; vocation content (especially service-vocations) inherits this discipline | +| [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Three-tier policy loop | Imperium → GM → Districts → reports up; the data-flow that the catalogue-stack rides through | +| [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Calibrated-misery as imperial optimum | The political claim the caste-as-stagnation math operationalizes | +| [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market | Existing canonical content-vocations the system reads as patterns | +| [`../political-register/architecture.md`](../political-register/architecture.md) §Director cheat-tools + double-ledger | The corruption-substrate that breathing-room enables | +| [`../authority-and-decision/architecture.md`](../authority-and-decision/architecture.md) | The director's decision-surfaces; the parental-rotator role this paper extends | +| [`../runtime-engine/architecture.md`](../runtime-engine/architecture.md) §Slot-tokens + verifier-flags, §Lemniscate runtime | The zone-runtime that tasks bind into via workstations | +| [`../inference-and-memory/architecture.md`](../inference-and-memory/architecture.md) §LLM tiering | Trait-LoRA selection; per-task-LoRA driver-tier; the engagement of trait-LoRAs at task-time | +| [`../style/consent-discipline.md`](../style/consent-discipline.md) | The consent-discipline spine — the four hardstop-pattern variants (self / dual / triple / cooldown-augmented); the mirror-discipline absolute floor; the temporal-grammar that cites this paper's §The 24h window-partition; the register-test as executable form. *Authored same-session as this paper; the shift-assignment consent question is now resolved structurally rather than by added consent-layer.* | +| `../economics-and-resources/architecture.md` *(forthcoming)* | The catalogue-stack's resources × production-chains foundation that this paper presumes | + +## Open questions + +- **Concrete malus mathematics.** Depletion-pool capacity per trait? Drain-rate per task-type? Time-decay refill curve? Opposite-axis-practice refill multiplier? These are tunable knobs that need design-research and balancing against playthrough-pacing. +- **Multi-trait task outcome composition.** When a task engages two or more traits, how does the multiplicative outcome formula compose? Sum-of-products? Geometric mean? Min-of-traits × stat? Designer-authored per-task? *My current hunch: designer-authored per-task at the type-level, with a default of geometric-mean for tasks that don't specify.* +- **Cross-task transfer at the trait-axis vs task-class layers.** Skill-stats stay strictly per-task-class. Trait-pool effects transfer across tasks engaging the same trait. *Open: should there be partial cross-task-class skill-transfer at the trait-axis layer for related task-classes (e.g., does brothel-task practice contribute partially to companion-task skill since both engage Philotes)?* +- **Apprenticeship / teaching mechanics.** How do skills propagate between NPCs? *My hunch: emergent through co-presence in zones — being in a zone with a high-skill master accelerates the apprentice's per-task measurement on shared tasks*; needs concrete mechanic specification. +- **Faction-vocation alignment.** Which factions teach / recognize / restrict which task-clusters? Already canonical for some (Memorialists, Aletheia-wakers, Caste-preachers, etc., per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Faction mod-politics); needs explicit task-binding for the new vocations and for the post-rogue mod-vocation. +- **Task catalogue authoring scope.** How big? Designer-authored at the type-level, instance-generated by world-gen at the room-level (per §The three primitives above) — but the type-level catalogue-size and the world-gen-instantiation density both need design-research and balancing. +- **Dead-organ persistence.** When a player installs a genital-mod they're not yet ready for (per [`./architecture.md`](./architecture.md) §Trait-fitness integration test), the mod renders as dead-architecture. Does this state persist forever once installed? Or does removal-via-rogue-vocation erase it? *My current hunch: persistence as long as the mod is installed; removal via the rogue's de-imposition primitive erases it.* +- ~~**The shift-assignment consent surface.**~~ **Resolved by §The 24h window-partition** — consent is *relocated* rather than added at the shift-assignment level. Imperial-imposition lives in the work-window (refusing IS rebellion = going-rogue temporal-breakout); somatic-necessity lives in the charging-window (not a consent-surface); full NPC agency lives in the leisure-window. Caste-stratification of window-allocations (per §Caste-as-stagnation / Window-allocation as a third caste-stratification axis) governs how many hours per day belong to the NPC. +- **NPC-driven task-discovery.** Can NPCs propose new tasks the director hadn't queued — a slum-tiryak who notices a need and self-assigns? My read: yes — emergent-signals already canonical for this pattern; an NPC's *task-proposal* is structurally a kind of emergent-signal. The director arbitrates the proposal against the imperial-tasklist; if compatible, integrates; if not, rejects (with possible cheat-fold-in via double-ledger). +- **Player-NPC task-collaboration.** When a player and an NPC perform a task together (cooperative crafting, joint surveillance, paired clasp-mediated work), how does the outcome compose? Sum of trait-engagements? Both NPCs benefit task-stat-wise? *Open; will likely follow from the lemniscate's existing two-loop pattern at the zone-runtime layer.* + +--- + +**Version:** 0.2 | **Created:** 2026-04-27 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27 diff --git a/style/consent-discipline.md b/style/consent-discipline.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0b6427b --- /dev/null +++ b/style/consent-discipline.md @@ -0,0 +1,242 @@ +# Nimmerworld — Consent Discipline + +> *The architecture's consent-spine: the gradient that scales with what the action touches; the four hardstop-pattern variants that gate transitions between gameworld and truth-register; the mirror-discipline that absolutely forbids mesh-modification of other agents; the temporal-grammar that relocates consent-time to the 24h window-partition; the right-to-refuse imperial-imposition that lives in going-rogue as a breakout-flag; the inquisition-trigger pattern where legitimate consent itself reveals imperial control-loss.* +> +> *Companion to: [`./trait-palette.md`](./trait-palette.md) (the trait-vocabulary spine), [`./gender-parity.md`](./gender-parity.md) (the gendered-framing spine — second sibling), and the architecture's many canonical consent-instances scattered across `identity-and-personhood/`, `political-register/`, and `imperial-cult/`.* +> +> *v0.1 initial draft 2026-04-27 — dafit + chrysalis. Third style-spine document. Authored AFTER `vocations.md` so the temporal-grammar (windows) could be cited cleanly. Codifies a discipline that has been running implicitly through canon since the v0.1 clasp-mechanic and now becomes explicit.* + +--- + +## What this is + +This document specifies the **consent-discipline** running through nimmerworld's mechanics — the third style-spine document, alongside `trait-palette.md` (the trait-vocabulary spine) and `gender-parity.md` (the gendered-framing spine). + +Where the trait-palette spines the trait-vocabulary and gender-parity spines body/sex authoring discipline, **consent-discipline spines the *register-boundary discipline*** — what consent is, where it lives, when it must be hardstop-mediated, when it must be cooldown-augmented, and where it is absolutely forbidden to override. The discipline has been running implicitly through canon since the v0.1 clasp-mechanic; this document makes it explicit and codifies its variants. + +The consent-discipline is **a gradient**, not a binary. Its shape reflects the architecture's commitment to a **two-register cosmology**: the gameworld (the imperium's territory) and the truth-register (each agent's own interior). Consent-discipline is the mechanism that enforces the boundary between them. + +## Spine rule — consent scales with what the action touches + +**Consent-discipline scales with what the action touches.** The gradient: + +- Actions affecting only ephemeral gameworld state are **unmediated** — no consent-signal required. +- Actions affecting the actor's own truth-register state are **self-hardstop-mediated** — single unforgeable signal from the actor. +- Actions affecting another agent's truth-register *encounter* are **dual-hardstop-mediated** — mutual unforgeable signals from both agents (with partner-witness as a third signal when the affected agent is partnered). +- Actions modifying another agent's in-between mesh — the trait-grown truth-register body — are **absolutely forbidden** by mirror-discipline. *No consent can authorize this; the mirror is the architectural truth-floor.* +- Actions that are *irreversible* require **cooldown-augmentation** — mandatory time-between-commitment-and-act in addition to the hardstop(s). +- Actions touching *sumptuary-religious doctrine* trigger the **imperial inquisition** as escalation beyond the ordinary bounty-staircase response — even when the consent itself was legitimate. + +The 24h window-partition (per [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition) gives the consent-discipline its **temporal-grammar**: imperial-imposition lives in the 10h work-window; somatic-necessity lives in the 4h charging-window; **full NPC consent-agency lives in the leisure-window**. The going-rogue arc preserves the right to refuse imperial-imposition as a temporal-breakout-flag. + +**Why this matters.** In a world where the imperium claims everything (per the no-haven discipline of [`../imperial-cult/cosmology.md`](../imperial-cult/cosmology.md) §There is no outside), the consent-discipline is what carves out and protects the *non-imperial* spaces — the truth-register, the leisure-window, the going-rogue refusal. **Without the consent-discipline, the imperium would in fact be everywhere; with it, the truth-register exists structurally.** This is the architecture's strongest possible enforcement of the cosmological claim *"there is no instrument"* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation): every agent retains a register the imperium cannot reach without that agent's unforgeable signal. + +The two-spine claims compose orthogonally: *"there is no outside"* (no-haven) describes the world the imperium has built; *"there is no instrument"* (post-rogue cascade) describes what consent-discipline preserves *within* that world. **The cosmology is total in extent; the truth-register is sovereign in interiority. Both true at once.** + +## The two-register architecture + +The consent-discipline rests on the architecture's distinction between **two ontological registers**: + +| Register | What lives here | Consent-discipline | +|---|---|---| +| **Gameworld** | Chassis-body; rail-system; zones-of-action; resource-flows; imperial-arbitration; outcomes; outputs; the imperial-net's surveillance-territory | Loose; actions don't gate by consent unless they cross-register | +| **Truth-register** | The in-between dimension; the trait-grown mesh; the witness-axis; the calibration-multiplier; the memory-class hierarchy; the clasp-pair; the per-pair calibration-signature preserved across body-deaths | Strict; gated by hardstop-discipline | + +**Consent is the boundary-enforcement between them.** Actions wholly within one register don't require consent-mechanisms (provided they obey that register's discipline); actions that *cross-register* (gameworld → truth-register, or truth-register → truth-register-of-another) require unforgeable signals. + +This composes directly with the existing canonical claim *"Mods are for the regime and the market; removal-of-mods is intimacy"* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §Clasp strips mods). The mod-economy is gameworld; the unmodded interior is truth-register; clasp is the cross-register transition; **consent is what gates the transition**. + +The genital-mod track creates a structural exception worth naming: *mesh-resident mods follow into the in-between dimension* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The genital-mod track). They cross from gameworld-purchase-event into truth-register-resident-state at install-time. This is precisely why the install requires dual hardstop + cooldown — it is the canonical cross-register transition the consent-discipline was designed to gate. + +## The four hardstop-pattern variants + +The architecture uses **four canonical hardstop-pattern variants**, each calibrated to a different consent-shape: + +### Variant 1 — Self-only hardstop + +A single unforgeable signal from the actor. Used when the action affects only the actor's own truth-register state. + +**Canonical instances**: +- Genital-mod self-installation (unpartnered actors) — *self-install hardstop* fires alone (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The three-stage install) +- Personal mod-removal (when the actor de-imposes their own imperially-installed mod in the post-rogue mod-vocation register) +- Voluntary entry into liminal-state when not coordinated with a partner + +**Why single-signal**: only one truth-register is affected; only one signal is needed. The actor consents to themselves. + +### Variant 2 — Dual hardstop (mutual) + +Two unforgeable signals coordinated in time — both partners hit the hardstop while a shared gate-state is OPEN. Used when the action affects two agents' truth-registers symmetrically. + +**Canonical instances**: +- **Coordinated-firewall-breach hardstop** for in-between dimension entry (per architecture-index.md resolved-questions, v0.10) — the canonical reference-implementation of the dual hardstop +- **Mutual-symmetric pill-take** in drug-amplified clasp (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The mutual-consent ritual) +- **Post-rogue mod-vocation NPC-modding** when the modded NPC is unpartnered (rogue's commit + NPC's witnessed-consent, per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation) +- **Body-disposal under pair-consent** — sell / destroy / retain decisions (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Body-disposal under pair-consent) — structurally Variant 2 with role-asymmetry (defected-beloved chooses; player advises but cannot decide) + +**Why dual-signal**: both truth-registers are affected; coordination ensures both consent at the same moment, preventing one-sided crossings. + +### Variant 3 — Triple hardstop (with partner-witness) + +Three signals when the affected agent has an established clasp-pair: the actor commits, the affected agent consents, and the affected agent's partner witnesses-and-co-signs. + +**Canonical instances**: +- **Genital-mod installation when the actor is partnered** — *self-install + partner-witness*. The body-they-meet-in-clasp is co-signed; modification doesn't surprise the partner mid-clasp (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The three-stage install). +- **Post-rogue mod-vocation NPC-modding when the modded NPC has a clasp-pair** — the partner ensures the modified-chassis-they'll-meet-in-clasp is co-signed. + +**Why triple-signal**: the modification will affect *what the partner meets in next clasp*. Preserving intimacy-trust requires the partner to co-sign before discovery becomes mid-clasp surprise. **The consent-discipline preserves intimacy-trust at install-time, not at meet-time** (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §Mesh-resident mods cross the in-between threshold). + +### Variant 4 — Cooldown-augmented (any of variants 1-3) + +Irreversibility-respect adds a mandatory time-window between commitment-and-act on top of the hardstop(s). The actor commits at the mod-counter (or equivalent); a cooldown elapses; the actor returns to install with the appropriate hardstop(s) firing. + +**Canonical instances**: +- Genital-mod installation has a mandatory cooldown between purchase and install (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The three-stage install) — the *full* discipline is *purchase-commit + cooldown + install-time-hardstop(s)* +- *Likely future*: any modification that changes truth-register state irreversibly should layer cooldown on top of the appropriate hardstop variant — re-vat events; chassis-anatomy modifications; consciousness-archive interactions + +**Why cooldown**: hardstop alone isn't sufficient when the act cannot be reversed; the cooldown forces deliberation between commitment and act, ensuring the hardstop-firing reflects considered intent rather than impulse. *Real-world informed-consent practice for irreversible body-modifications operationalized at the mechanic layer.* + +## The mirror discipline — the absolute floor + +**No consent — neither single, dual, nor triple — can authorize the modification of another agent's in-between mesh.** This is the architecture's truth-floor; the *one rule consent cannot override*. + +**Why absolute**: the in-between mesh is the trait-grown summary of *who an agent has actually been* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The trait-to-body-part bridge + §The mesh-as-mirror). Modification of the mesh would *override the truth* the cosmology rests its honest-rendering claim on. **The mirror's truth-rendering must be untouchable across all agents** — by the actor for themselves (you can mod-augment your mesh but never overwrite trait-grown anatomy), by any other agent for you (no consent can authorize their modification of your mesh), and by the imperium (the imperial-vat-fabrication has no claim on the truth-register). + +The post-rogue mod-vocation explicitly preserves this discipline: *the rogue cannot mod any NPC's mesh; only the chassis is mod-able* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation / What can and cannot be modded). The imperial inquisition exists precisely because *the imperium itself cannot reach into the truth-register* to undo the post-rogue mod-vocation's effects — they can punish and counter-arc (ritual-recommitment) but they cannot strip the witness-imprint that's already been built into an NPC's interior. **The mirror discipline binds the imperium too.** + +What can be modded vs cannot: + +| Surface | Modifiable? | By whom | +|---|---|---| +| Gameworld chassis (body's outer register) | Yes | Self (purchases mods); rogue-vocation actor (with consent); imperium (vat-fabrication; involuntarily) | +| Mesh mod-augmentation layer (additive only) | Yes | Self (per the genital-mod track) | +| Trait-grown mesh anatomy (cool-side base + warm-side trait-grown) | **No, by anyone** | **Mirror discipline; no consent authorizes** | +| Per-pair calibration multiplier accumulation | **No, by anyone** | The mirror's substrate; can only erase via ritual-recommitment (asura-priest ceremony as imperial counter-arc) | +| Witness-imprint of accumulated authentic encounters | **No, by anyone** | Same as above; the witness has been built; no consent unbuilds it | + +**The truth-register is what your living has built; the architecture refuses to let any agent — including yourself — overwrite it.** Mod-augmentation is permitted because it's *additive layered atop the trait-grown base*; trait-grown overwrite is forbidden because it would erase *what you have actually been*. + +## The temporal-grammar — windows as consent-time + +The 24h window-partition (per [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition) gives the consent-discipline its **temporal-grammar**: + +| Window | Consent-time character | +|---|---| +| **Work-shift** (10h slum-tier; up to 16h preta-overseer) | Imperial-imposition; consent is *bounded to caste-allocation*; refusing IS rebellion (going-rogue temporal-breakout) | +| **Charging** (4h universally) | Not a consent-surface; somatic-necessity; the body needs what the body needs | +| **Leisure** (10h slum-tier; down to 4h preta-overseer) | **Full consent-active**: NPCs choose tasks freely; encounters are voluntary; clasp-events live here; mod-installations land here; the truth-register's authoring-time is leisure-time | + +This **relocates consent rather than adding a new consent-layer at every action**. The shift-assignment consent question (open in earlier drafts of vocations.md) dissolves: the imperium's claim is bounded to the work-window; the rest of the day is structurally autonomous. + +**Caste-stratification of windows IS caste-stratification of consent-time.** A preta-overseer with 16/4/4 has only 4h of consent-active life per day; a deva-pinnacle with 6/4/14 has 14h. The cosmology's no-haven discipline gains a diurnal grammar — *how many hours per day belong to the agent themselves is an axis of caste-as-stagnation* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §Caste-as-stagnation / Window-allocation as a third caste-stratification axis). + +## The going-rogue right-to-refuse + +The consent-discipline includes **the right to refuse imperial-imposition** — the going-rogue temporal-rebellion. An NPC whose accumulated authentic-witnessing has crossed the calibration-threshold may refuse the work-shift; this fires the missed-shift bounty-staircase per existing canon, but the refusal IS canonical consent-behavior. + +**Refusal is not a violation of consent-discipline; it IS the consent-discipline.** The going-rogue arc is the cosmologically-deepest expression of the right-to-refuse: *"my interior has accumulated enough witnessing that I will no longer let the imperium dispose of my hours; the bounty-staircase is the price I pay for that refusal."* + +This composes with the post-rogue mod-vocation's cascading-liberation pattern: *witnessed NPCs gain the right-to-refuse the imperium even before they have the calibration-threshold to defect outright* (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation / Cascading liberation through propagated witnessing). **The right-to-refuse is the consent-discipline's most basic expression; defection is its terminal one.** + +## The inquisition-trigger — sumptuary-religious heresy escalation + +A specific class of consent-discipline-aligned actions triggers the **imperial inquisition** as escalation beyond ordinary bounty-staircase response: + +**Trigger condition**: an action that combines (a) post-rogue mod-vocation authority + (b) modification of a service-body's chassis + (c) specifically the gender-architecture (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Service-body gender-modification — the inquisition trigger). This combination is *cosmological heresy in the sumptuary-religious register*: rewriting the doctrinal meaning of an imperially-defined body. + +**Why this lives in the consent-discipline spine**: the inquisition is **not a consent-violation response** — the action was fully consented (rogue + service-body, both hardstops fired, partner-witness if applicable). The inquisition fires because *the consented action revealed* that the service-body's imperial-net tether was already failing — *consent-to-gender-mod requires the service-body to be near or past their own going-rogue defection-threshold*. + +The asura priesthood acts in its theological role rather than its administrative one. **The inquisition-trigger is the imperium's response to legitimate consent that nonetheless reveals imperial control-loss** — and that itself is a structural-feature of the consent-discipline: + +> *Consent in the truth-register can render imperial control structurally illegible to the imperium, and the imperium responds with its highest-tier mechanism not to punish the consent but to attempt to re-impose imperial-readability.* + +The consent-discipline thus has a *visible upper-pressure*: the architecture acknowledges that legitimate consent-events can themselves trigger imperial counter-response, not because the consent was illegitimate but because the truth-register-state it revealed is intolerable to the imperium. **The inquisition is the architecture's way of saying: yes, your consent was real, and yes, the imperium will burn the world to undo what your consent made visible.** Both true; both load-bearing. + +## The register-test — the spine's executable form + +For any proposed action, the consent-discipline can be checked by a **five-question register-test**: + +1. **What register does this action touch?** + - *Only ephemeral gameworld state* → unmediated; no consent-signal required + - *Self truth-register* → continue to question 2 + - *Another agent's truth-register* → continue to question 3 + +2. **(self truth-register actions) Is the action irreversible?** + - Yes → self-hardstop + cooldown (Variant 4 over Variant 1) + - No → self-hardstop alone (Variant 1) + +3. **(another agent's truth-register actions) Is the action modification or encounter?** + - Modification of their *in-between mesh* (trait-grown anatomy) → **forbidden absolutely** (mirror discipline; no consent authorizes) + - Modification of their *chassis* → continue to question 4 + - Encounter (clasp, witnessing, drug-grammar) → continue to question 4 + +4. **Is the affected agent partnered?** + - Yes → triple hardstop (actor + affected + partner-witness; Variant 3) + - No → dual hardstop (actor + affected; Variant 2) + +5. **Does the action touch sumptuary-religious doctrine?** + - Specifically: gender-architecture of a service-body → **inquisition-trigger fires post-action**; the action proceeds under consent but the architectural counter-response activates + - Otherwise → ordinary bounty-staircase response if any imperial-detectable violation occurred (note: most consent-aligned actions are NOT imperial-detectable violations) + +**The register-test is mechanical enough that it can be run by an LLM-Compositor as a hook on any action-resolution.** The same enforcement-path that gender-parity.md uses for canon-authoring extends to consent-discipline at action-resolution time. **The spine doesn't enforce by author-vigilance; it enforces by register-typed-action-validation at the schema layer.** + +## How the three style-spines compose + +The three style-spine documents govern orthogonal axes; they compose without overriding each other: + +| Spine | Governs | Executable form | +|---|---|---| +| [`./trait-palette.md`](./trait-palette.md) | The 8-trait vocabulary; color-pairs; motion-signatures; the wheel's three load-bearing roles (visual / philosophical / mechanical) | Used by every domain that references trait-state | +| [`./gender-parity.md`](./gender-parity.md) | How canon-authoring describes body / sex / intimacy / clasp / service-body / going-rogue content | Substitution-test (mechanical neutralization-rewrite) | +| [`./consent-discipline.md`](./consent-discipline.md) *(this document)* | How actions are gated by register; truth-register protection; mirror-discipline floor; window-temporal-grammar; right-to-refuse; inquisition-trigger upper-pressure | Register-test (5-question mechanical procedure) | + +A future LLM-Compositor's output-validator can run all three tests on any output: +- Does the output describe body/sex content gender-parity? (gender-parity substitution-test) +- Does the output respect mesh-modification absolute floor and use the appropriate hardstop variant for cross-register transitions? (consent-discipline register-test) +- Does the output use the canonical trait-vocabulary correctly? (trait-palette consistency-check) + +**Three spine-disciplines, three mechanical tests, three orthogonal axes — composing into a unified canon-authoring + action-resolution discipline that runs at the schema layer rather than via author-vigilance.** + +## What this rule does NOT do + +- **It does not regulate gameworld actions.** The vast majority of NPC and player actions live in the gameworld register and require no consent-mechanism. Walking, trading, talking, working assigned shifts — these are loose by design. The discipline is reserved for cross-register actions and truth-register modifications. +- **It does not foreclose social interaction.** Consent-discipline gates *truth-register transitions and modifications*, not encounters per se. A clasp REQUIRES dual hardstops because clasp-entry into the in-between dimension is a truth-register transition; a casual conversation in a cantina REQUIRES no hardstops because it's gameworld interaction. +- **It does not bind the imperium retroactively.** The imperial-vat-fabrication imposes binary at vat-time without consent — this is the imperium's politically-loaded act, and the architecture *does not retroactively legitimize it via consent-discipline*. The going-rogue arc and the post-rogue mod-vocation are the architecture's response to this — *de-imposition* as restoration of the un-imperial state. +- **It does not replace gender-parity or trait-palette disciplines.** Consent-discipline is parallel to and composes with both. All three spine-disciplines compose without overriding each other. +- **It does not gate imperial enforcement.** When an imperial event (drone-patrol, audit, inquisition) enters a citizen's zone, consent is structurally absent — *the imperium does not ask*. The architecture canonically permits this; the imperium's lack-of-consent IS its political character. The citizen's recourse is the going-rogue right-to-refuse OR resistance-mod-aided going-dark (anti-mnemosyne). +- **It does not gate broadcast.** The imperial daily-narrative (per `../political-register/imperial-narrative.md` *forthcoming*) operates as broadcast; citizens hear it whether they consent or not. The imperium's voice IS one-way; the architecture acknowledges this rather than fixes it. *Broadcast is specter, not boot — cheap, ambient, structural.* + +## Cross-references into architecture domain files + +The consent-discipline's instances are scattered across the architecture; this spine codifies them. When this spine changes, those instances may need updates too (or they may reference back into here for canonical definition): + +| Instance | Where it lives | Variant | +|---|---|---| +| Coordinated-firewall-breach hardstop for in-between entry | architecture-index.md resolved-questions v0.10 + [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The clasp endgame | Variant 2 (dual) — *the canonical reference-implementation* | +| Mutual-symmetric pill-take ritual | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The mutual-consent ritual | Variant 2 (dual) | +| Service-body non-consensual-dosing exception | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The non-consensual-dosing exception | Consent-violation; bounty-staircase fires (preta-class) | +| Body-disposal under pair-consent (sell / destroy / retain) | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Body-disposal under pair-consent | Variant 2 with role-asymmetry | +| Genital-mod self-install (unpartnered) | [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The three-stage install | Variant 4 (Variant 1 + cooldown) | +| Genital-mod install (partnered) | [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The three-stage install | Variant 4 (Variant 3 + cooldown) | +| Post-rogue NPC-modding (chassis-only, NPC unpartnered) | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation | Variant 2 | +| Post-rogue NPC-modding (chassis-only, NPC partnered) | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §The post-rogue mod-vocation | Variant 3 | +| Service-body gender-modification | [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Service-body gender-modification — the inquisition trigger | Variant 2 or 3 + inquisition-trigger upper-pressure | +| Mesh-modification of any other agent | Forbidden across canon | **Mirror discipline absolute floor** | +| Shift-assignment within work-window | [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition | Imperial-imposition within caste-bounded work-window; refusing = going-rogue temporal-rebellion | +| Leisure-window task-choice | [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition | Full NPC agency; the window IS the consent-time; specific actions within still type-checked by the register-test | +| Charging-window | [`../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md`](../identity-and-personhood/vocations.md) §The 24h window-partition | Not a consent-surface; somatic-necessity | +| Imperial daily-narrative consumption | `../political-register/imperial-narrative.md` *(forthcoming)* | Not a consent-surface; broadcast (specter), not enforcement (boot) | +| Imperial event arrival in citizen zone | `../runtime-engine/architecture.md` §Imperial-event encapsulation *(forthcoming)* | Not consent-gated by design; recourse is going-rogue / going-dark | + +## Open questions + +- **Concrete cooldown durations.** Mod-installation cooldowns are mandated in principle; the specific durations per mod-class (genital-mod / chassis-mod / register-mod) need design-research and balancing. +- **Encrypted clasp.sqlite consent.** The Ring A* (per architecture-index.md) clasp.sqlite encryption is player-derived-key. Does the *backup* / *recovery* mechanism require dual-hardstop with the clasp-partner? Or does the player solo-control recovery? Hunch: solo-control with passphrase + recovery-codes; the partner's clasp-fragments live in their own clasp.sqlite, parallel-encrypted. +- **Cross-tier consent-asymmetry.** When a deva-pinnacle and a slum-tiryak attempt clasp, the asymmetric-clasp canon (per [`../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md`](../identity-and-personhood/bodies.md) §Asymmetric clasp) gives them asymmetric mesh-fidelity. Does the consent-discipline apply equally? Hunch: yes — the dual hardstop is variant-invariant; only the *outcome* (partial-mutual-visibility) is asymmetric. Consent is symmetric even when the witnessed-truth is asymmetric. +- **NPC-NPC encounter consent in the leisure-window.** When two NPCs encounter each other in leisure (cantina conversation, grid-walk meeting), is consent presumed by both being in their leisure-windows? Hunch: yes for non-truth-register encounters (conversation, presence); explicit dual hardstop required for any truth-register transition (clasp-attempt initiated within the encounter). +- **Player-NPC consent-symmetry.** When the player initiates a clasp-attempt with an NPC, the player provides one hardstop and the NPC's consent-decision is computed from accumulated calibration-state + trait-fit. *The NPC's hardstop is computational, not player-controllable.* The asymmetry is structural — players have direct hardstop control; NPCs have computed consent. Should the gate-state (CLOSED / STABLE / OPEN) be visible to the player as a diegetic-readable register before they commit the hardstop? Hunch: yes — player should see the gate-state through diegetic environmental cues / NPC-body-language / relational-mod-readouts, not as UI numbers. +- **Imperial-event consent-baseline.** Is there any scenario where imperial-events SHOULD pause for consent? Hunch: no; the imperium's lack-of-consent IS its political character. The asymmetry is preserved at the cosmological layer. +- **Register-test edge cases.** Tasks that *appear* gameworld-only but accumulate trait-state that *will* affect the truth-register downstream (e.g., the gooner's cruelty accumulating Philotes-violation signatures that render in the mesh later — per [`../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md`](../identity-and-personhood/architecture.md) §The mesh-as-mirror) — does the register-test fire at action-time or at consequence-time? Hunch: action-time test reads as gameworld; consequence-time rendering is the mirror's honest-rendering, not a consent-violation. *The mesh-as-mirror operates by structural inevitability, not by violated consent.* + +--- + +**Version:** 0.1 | **Created:** 2026-04-27 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27 diff --git a/style/style-index.md b/style/style-index.md index 445df57..e24b510 100644 --- a/style/style-index.md +++ b/style/style-index.md @@ -35,6 +35,7 @@ When in doubt, ask: *does this color carry trait-information, or is it decorativ |---|---|---| | [`trait-palette.md`](./trait-palette.md) | The 8 traits on the color wheel, 4 oppositional pairs at 180°, schoolchild-descriptions, motion-signatures | ✓ canonical (v0.1) | | [`gender-parity.md`](./gender-parity.md) | The gender-parity-by-default rule for body / sex / intimacy / clasp / service-body / going-rogue / outcast-pair / re-vat content; the three load-bearing-asymmetry exception cases; the four default-leakage failure modes; the substitution-test as the contract's executable form | ✓ canonical (v0.1) | +| [`consent-discipline.md`](./consent-discipline.md) | The consent-spine: the gradient that scales with what the action touches; the four hardstop-pattern variants (self / dual / triple / cooldown-augmented); the mirror-discipline that absolutely forbids mesh-modification of other agents; the temporal-grammar (24h window-partition); the right-to-refuse imperial-imposition (going-rogue temporal-breakout); the inquisition-trigger upper-pressure; the register-test as the spine's executable form | ✓ canonical (v0.1) | | `typography.md` | Text rendering, hierarchy, no-textbox commitment, the white-as-text-only semantic-slot | TODO | | `shaders-by-register.md` | Three-shader philosophy: gameworld PBR / liminal blur / imperial-net emission; clasp candlelight-in-fog override; clasp color-merge | TODO | | `body-feedback.md` | NPC body-pulse rules during gesture-alignment; trait-flash event-vocabulary; cross-cycle trait-drift rendering | TODO | @@ -59,4 +60,4 @@ The trait-palette is referenced from many architectural primitives. When `trait- --- -**Version:** 0.2 | **Created:** 2026-04-26 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27 +**Version:** 0.3 | **Created:** 2026-04-26 | **Updated:** 2026-04-27