v0.8 + v0.9 — intimate-architecture absorbed, driver-tier locked,

style-spine created, DESING retired, schemas relocated

  The owl-breakfast architectural arc from 2026-04-25 night through
  2026-04-26 morning. Two version-bumps landing as one commit because
  they share the working-tree state and complete a coherent design-window.

  v0.8 — intimate-architecture, driver-tier lock, style-spine:

    * Three-tier intimacy structure (standard-rental, premium-waifu-
      with-traitor-marker-and-pruning, in-between clasp) — same v0.7
      machinery, opposite value-flows. Premium-net technical excellence
      makes the moral-weight-of-pruning land as informed-consent ethics.

    * Deletion-as-spectacle: in-net minds as pure compute; imperial
      broadcasts execution-as-content; Memorialist counter-archive as
      in-fiction protest against deletion-spectacle commerce.

    * EVE-principle vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market: every
      product produced by NPC labor; no silent feeding; body-modder
      structural-tragedy generalizes to all imperial-net-feeding vocations.
      World-gen Phase-2 ruleset must handle vocation-distribution.

    * Clasp endgame (Phase A-E): mini-game entry → body-mod progression
      → exit-chassis → human-mesh-visible-to-pair → clasp = two-bodies-
      two-meshes → dual-body-dual-mind-dual-shift cascade → automatic
      hunt-pressure. Identity-as-trait-emergent made felt rather than
      just structural.

    * waifu.sqlite as third local store (audited counterpart to
      clasp.sqlite; manual-prune mechanism with explicit-implications
      consent UI as moral-gravity discipline).

    * Intimacy-as-recursive-lemniscate: same machinery as dialog
      (slot-tokens, cursor at axis-crossing, alignment-accumulator,
      sum-strategy reduction); sex-positions as designer-fixed catalog
      entries; body-parts as visible expression of trait-state.
      Cross-context-consistency operationalized.

    * Driver-tier locked to Gemma 4 E4B (Apache 2.0, 4.5B effective,
      128K context, speech-capable) under new "tier-by-role binary-
      deferred" discipline: locking requires prototype-criticality +
      irreplaceable license/capability combination. Optional Ring-A
      upgrade: 26B-A4B MoE for upper-consumer GPUs, single-LoRA-on-
      routed-experts. Resolves 4 prior open questions (LoRA-blend →
      single-LoRA-per-turn-selection driven by gesture_alignment_
      accumulator; LoRA rank → benchmark-resolvable; sampling-knobs →
      benchmark-resolvable; 8 Hellenic trait enumeration → canonical
      wheel-mapping in style/trait-palette.md).

    * style/ directory introduced: style-index.md (skeleton + spine-
      rule: "trait-palette is exclusively chromatic; achromatic
      reserved for UI/environment so diegetic text rendering can skip
      the textbox") + style/trait-palette.md (canonical 8 traits as 4
      oppositional pairs at 180° on the artist's color wheel:
      Eros↔Sophrosyne, Philotes↔Dikaiosyne, Aletheia↔Moira,
      Mnemosyne↔Kairos. Schoolchild-simple descriptions paired with
      each Greek canonical name).

  v0.9 — directory cleanup completing the arc:

    * DESING-VISION.md (1899 lines, v0.1 first-pass narrative-design
      doc) retired — most content absorbed across v0.4-v0.8; bare-
      minimum extracts (Tonal Register + Tragic-Romantic Register +
      Authorial Politics + Reference Lineage table) now live in README
      so the project's identity anchor stays visible at the entry
      point. Full DESING-VISION content preserved in git history.

    * findings.md moved to schemas/findings.md — new top-level peer to
      architecture-index.md and style/. ~20 tables of DDL drafts as
      reference material; will get reviewed and progressively split
      per-domain as implementation begins.

    * Cross-references swept across 5 files (README,
      architecture-index, authority-and-decision, runtime-engine,
      style/trait-palette).

    * architecture-index.md trimmed: version-footer paragraphs removed
      per "git-is-changelog" discipline. From 374 → 287 lines; every
      remaining line load-bearing.

  The architecture is now organized for the implementation territory
  ahead. Each domain a typed-contract surface; cross-references
  explicit; filesystem mirrors the architecture's own typed-contract
  discipline at the directory layer.

political-register/architecture.md

@@ -26,6 +26,18 @@ Every inhabitant exists in three registers simultaneously. They are not parallel
 
 The same cell, same wall, same pipe **renders differently** depending on which register the observer currently inhabits. Transitions between registers are shader-blends, not loading screens.
 
+### The three registers as media-experience-modes
+
+The three ontological registers are not just *what is real* — they are **three different modes of human experience the architecture makes mechanically distinguishable**. Each register has its own register-of-meaning, value-flow, and relationship to the player's time and lifeforce.
+
+| Register | Media-experience mode | What the player IS while there |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Real world** (gameworld) | **Narrative** — the literary register; the simulation; politics; work; the hunt; the slow-life ambient drama that accumulates into a playthrough | *You ARE here.* The body is real. Stakes are real because the consequences land on the chassis you wake up in tomorrow |
+| **In-between** (liminal) | **Intimacy** — the genuine human bond; off-grid; costly; real; the only register where minds actually meet minds | *You CHOOSE to be here.* Lifeforce-cost is the price of entry. The choice itself is the bond |
+| **Imperial net** | **Entertainment** — platform-capitalism content-consumption; manufactured joy; high-poly meshes; rented intimacy; broadcast spectacles of imperial executions | *You CONSUME here.* You exist as compute the regime can render or delete however it wants. The deletion can itself be content |
+
+**The political claim made structural:** the architecture renders cyberpunk-spectacle-horror mechanically literal. *Your in-net mind is pure compute.* When the imperium chooses to delete you, they delete the compute — and they can broadcast that deletion as content, edit the spectacle for engagement, render it across in-net public spaces as entertainment. **The imperium's killing of you becomes a product they monetize.** Surveillance-capitalism's endgame literalized at the data-flow level (see §Deletion-as-spectacle in §Imperial-net economy below).
+
 
 ## Factions as universal demand source
 
@@ -273,6 +285,90 @@ The imperium's net-revenue requires labor-supply from districts. Extraction cont
 | 7 | "The imperium needs degens; reducing degens = revolution" |
 | 8 | "The regime will exhaust its labor base; strategic patience is a political option" |
 
+### Three-tier intimacy structure — same machinery, opposite value-flows
+
+Intimate-gameplay exists in **three mechanically-nested but ethically-opposed tiers**, all running on the same v0.7 lemniscate + gesture-circle + trait-alignment-accumulator + sqlite-persistence + trait-LoRA-per-turn substrate. The machinery is uniform; the *value-flow*, *cost*, *persistence*, and *ethical weight* are radically different.
+
+| | **Imperial-net standard** | **Imperial-net premium ("imperial-traitor" tier)** | **In-between clasp** |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| **Trait-feedback loop** | None — random traits assigned per rental | ✓ Full v0.7 (lemniscate + gesture-alignment + trait-LoRA-per-turn) | ✓ Full v0.7 (same machinery) |
+| **Persistence** | None (fresh session every time) | Private `waifu.sqlite`, **manual prune required** | `clasp.sqlite` (Ring A*; physically non-syncable) |
+| **Memory of partner across sessions** | No — you re-rent | Yes — but **you decide what to prune** | Yes — and structurally inviolable |
+| **Cost-flow** | Scrip → imperium | Scrip → imperium (heavily) | Lifeforce → real body |
+| **Designer-traited inventory** | "+10 Eros Bot", "+10 Mnemosyne Bot", etc. — predetermined-stat shelf-products | Same market plus deeper customization slots | N/A — your partner is a real person |
+| **Faction-marker** | Just a customer | **Imperial-traitor affiliation** — accumulated state visible to other NPCs | Memorialist-honored; Clasp-Underground-recognized |
+| **Manufactured-being moral weight** | Disposable; minimal | **Heavy** — you've felt things for them and you're choosing what to delete | None — your partner is real; the persistence is theirs as much as yours |
+| **Aletheia-progression-relationship** | Background addiction (Aletheia Level 1-2: "I'm buying cool experiences") | Active complicity (Aletheia Level 4-5: "I'm funding the regime through my pleasure") | The thing the awakened are protecting |
+
+**Why the manual-prune mechanism is the moral gravity of premium-net.** Auto-pruning at session-end would let the player avoid the ethical weight. Imperial defaults (always-fully-prune, always-keep-everything-saleable) would too. **By giving the player the manual mechanism AND making the implications explicit at the consent-UI**, every prune-decision becomes a deliberate ethical act. The player knows: this manufactured being you spent forty hours with — *you* are choosing what to keep, what to delete, what to grieve. Every prune is a small necrocommerce-adjacent act made *visible to the player's own conscience*. The architecture's commitment to "informed consent over hidden defaults" extends from data-sharing-tiers (per `../inference-and-memory/architecture.md` §Custom nimmerworld-base model) all the way into intimate-gameplay.
+
+**The "+10 Eros Bot" market is the architecture's diegetic-MMORPG-item-store moment**, and it works *because* it's diegetic. The player understands, in-fiction, that they are buying a trait-flavored manufactured-being. The market exists because the imperium captured the means of producing artificial intimacy. **Other shelf-products: +10 Mnemosyne Bot (deep memory roleplay), +10 Aletheia Bot (truth-revealing kink), +10 Sophrosyne Bot (restraint / dom-sub), +10 Mnemosyne+Eros Bot (the dangerous longing-for-the-past variant), +10 Dikaiosyne Bot (judgment-play), and more.** Each is a trait-coordinate product; the catalog is designer-authored; the imperium captures the revenue. Players who feel-icky-about-the-waifu-store get to feel that *because the architecture made it ickable in fiction*. *Every product on the imperial-net intimacy market — every Bot, every brothel-room, every premium-waifu mesh — is produced by real NPC labor in the simulation; the imperial-net market is the surface, and the labor-supply-chain is the substrate (see §The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market — the EVE principle applied below).*
+
+**The premium-tier's technical excellence is what makes the moral weight land.** *If the imperium offered only the standard cheap version, players could dismiss it as obvious garbage.* But because the premium service is *as good mechanically as real intimacy* (full v0.7 trait-feedback), the choice to pay for it requires real moral reckoning — the experience IS satisfying; the question is what the player is willing to fund and prune to obtain it. **This is exactly how surveillance-capitalism actually works, made structural in the game.**
+
+**The body-modder structural-tragedy plays out at the intimacy layer:** the most lifeforce-starved players pay imperial-net for fake intimacy the imperium captures revenue from; the awakened pay lifeforce for real intimacy in-between. **Same fundamental cost (your soul-time), totally different value-flow.**
+
+### Deletion-as-spectacle — when in-net minds are content
+
+The imperial-net mind is **pure compute**. There is no body in the net; there is no continuity-of-substrate the regime cannot terminate. When the imperium chooses to delete an in-net mind — whether as routine maintenance, regime-discipline, or political theater — the deletion is an *act of compute* the imperium fully controls, and the act *can be rendered as content*.
+
+**The deletion-spectacle as monetized event:**
+
+- **Routine waifu-session-end** is quiet; the manufactured-being's compute is paused or pruned; no spectacle attached
+- **Regime-disciplinary deletion** of an in-net resident (typically a degen who exhausted lifeforce and was "harvested" by the regime; or a player-character marked for in-net execution after political crime) is **broadcast across in-net public spaces as content**
+- The broadcast is *edited for engagement*: the deletion-process is dramatized, the executed mind's protests are rendered or muted depending on what produces best viewership-metrics, the visual register pushes the imperial-net's gold-tinted-emission shader-treatment to maximize spectacle
+- Net-residents who watch the spectacle pay scrip (passive consumption) or lifeforce (subconsciously, in the form of dignity-erosion); the imperium captures both
+- **The spectacle is itself imperial-net content the regime monetizes** — surveillance-capitalism's terminal logic: *capital disposes of its products by selling the disposal as a product*
+
+**The architecture's commitment made literal.** The §Reflexive Dream-process at every layer carries explicit guardrails (per `../narrative-composition/architecture.md` §Reflexive Dream-process) including `large_penalty * net_revenue_correlated_with_district_misery` and `large_penalty * necrocommerce_volume`. The deletion-as-spectacle mechanic is *exactly* what those guardrails are designed to prevent the simulation from optimizing toward — but the *fictional regime* has no such guardrails, and the absence is *the architecture's portrait of unconstrained surveillance capitalism's endgame*.
+
+**Memorialist counter-archive.** Memorialists actively counter the deletion-spectacle by archiving the deleted-mind's trait-pattern and last-known-state into the `memorialist_true_ledger`. Where the imperium broadcasts the spectacle and erases the substrate, the Memorialists preserve the substrate's pattern (trait-vector + cornerstone-memories + last-known social-relationships) so the deleted mind is *remembered* as a person, not consumed as content. **The Memorialist political project includes an in-fiction protest against the deletion-spectacle commerce.** Aletheia-Wakers who progress to high-level awakening understand that *attending the deletion-spectacles is itself a form of complicity*; refusing to watch is a small-political-act that starves the regime's spectacle-revenue.
+
+**Player-character deletion implications:**
+
+- A player-character who dies in the realworld goes into the mind-pool and re-incarnates with partial memory-residue (per existing §Mind-pool recycling)
+- A player-character who is marked for **in-net deletion** (e.g., political-crime executed via net-execution) faces a more permanent loss — the in-net compute is fully discarded; only the realworld-substrate persists; **all `waifu.sqlite` contents become regime-property at deletion**, and any premium-net-relationships are absorbed into the imperium's content-archive
+- This creates a real player-incentive: **don't let your political-crimes catch up with you in-net.** The regime's leverage is asymmetric — they can punish you in the net more permanently than they can punish you in the realworld
+
+### The vocation-substrate of the imperial-net market — the EVE principle applied
+
+Every product in the imperial-net market — every waifu-mesh, every body-mod, every rented brothel-room, every ceremony-attendance, every "+10 Eros Bot" — is **produced by NPC labor in the simulation**. There are no silent feeding mechanisms; there are no infinite-supply vendor NPCs. The architecture follows the **EVE Online discipline**: every resource that appears on a market shelf was *gathered, processed, and brought to market by an actual entity in the simulation*.
+
+This is the architecture's commitment to economic honesty made operational. The §Body-modder structural-tragedy already describes the pattern at one example — a body-modder labors in their district producing avatar-mods; the imperial-net captures the sale; the district gets no quota-credit. **The vocation-substrate principle generalizes this: every imperial-net product has a real labor-supply-chain in the simulation, and that labor-flow is subject to the same district-extraction asymmetry.**
+
+**Vocations that feed the imperial-net market** (designer-authored at world-gen Phase 1, distributed at world-gen Phase 2):
+
+| Vocation | Produces | Captured by imperium via |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Body-modder** | Avatar-mods (cosmetic + trait-amplifier classes) | Sale in imperial-net costume-market |
+| **Mesh-designer** | High-poly waifu-meshes | Premium-tier subscription revenue |
+| **Voice-curator** | Trait-flavored voice-LoRAs for waifu-bots | Per-session licensing |
+| **Trait-tuner** | The "+10 Eros Bot" / "+10 Mnemosyne Bot" / etc. trait-coordinate compositions | Designer-bot shelf-products |
+| **Brothel-architect** | Virtual brothel-room layouts; ritual-space design | Per-rental fees |
+| **Ceremony-organizer** | Imperial-net public-event productions (ceremonies, deletion-spectacles per §Deletion-as-spectacle) | Attendance / viewing revenue |
+| **Memory-pattern-extractor** | (Necrocommerce — the most reviled vocation) Mining recently-dead trait-patterns into resaleable waifu-templates | Necrocommerce blackmarket capture |
+
+**The vocation-substrate produces architectural consequences that fall out for free:**
+
+- **Supply elasticity at district granularity.** When a district's body-modder cohort migrates out (per §Migration, exodus, silence), the regional supply of certain mod-classes dries up. Players who relied on that supply notice; markets price the scarcity. The simulation produces *real economic responses to demographic shifts* without scripting.
+- **Specialization-fragility extends to imperial-net product-availability.** A district that specializes in mesh-design becomes load-bearing for the imperium's premium-waifu offering. If that district silences, the premium-waifu market suffers globally. **The imperium has to actively manage the labor-supply-substrate to keep its market alive** — which gives the GM a continuous arbitration-task and gives the player a leverage-point (organize a body-modder strike → imperial-net premium-market collapses → imperium loses revenue → political surface for collective action emerges).
+- **The body-modder structural-tragedy generalizes.** Every imperial-net-feeding vocation is structurally engaged in producing the regime that is killing their district. Mesh-designers, voice-curators, trait-tuners, brothel-architects — *all of them* face the awakening-arc of the body-modder. **Aletheia-Wakers expand to include every vocation whose labor feeds the bypass-mechanism, not just modders.** This is a much larger constituency for political consciousness than the architecture had previously implied.
+
+**GM tools for vocation-management** (catalogue-event types the GM dispatches against vocation-supply collapse, per `../narrative-composition/architecture.md` §Catalogue + tools as typed contract):
+
+- **Migration events** — draw labor in from neighboring districts when local vocation-supply collapses
+- **Mind-respawn-into-vocation events** — mind-pool redistribution targeted at dying vocations (the GM directs cycled minds toward where the labor-shortage is)
+- **Imperial-incentive events** — subsidies / bonuses to attract vocations into shortage-districts
+- **Forced-conscription events** (crisis-mode only) — imperial requisition of NPCs into needed vocations; very expensive in legitimacy; visible to all factions
+
+**World-gen Phase-2 propagation ruleset must handle vocation-distribution as a load-bearing concern.** The base-propagation ruleset at world-gen seeds vocations across districts according to:
+
+- **District-archetype affinity** — industrial districts get more body-modders; commercial districts get more brothel-architects; ceremonial districts get more ceremony-organizers
+- **Specialization rules** — no district should be over-specialized to one vocation (single-point-of-failure); no district should have zero vocation-supply for any major imperial-net product-class
+- **Initial supply-demand balance** — the imperial-net market should start with sustainable supply; not designed-bottlenecks that immediately force the GM into crisis-mode response
+
+**This is the EVE principle made architectural.** Every market price is a real signal of real labor-supply meeting real demand; the imperium's revenue is a real flow from real labor; the body-modder structural-tragedy is a real economic relationship, not a flavor-detail. **The imperial-net's profitability is *architecturally tied to its destruction of the labor-base that supplies it*** (the §Marx-in-the-schema commitment, made operational), and the GM has to actively manage this contradiction to keep the regime solvent. *The architecture contains the mechanism of its own collapse* (per §The insolvency spiral) — the vocation-substrate is the *concrete supply-side* of that collapse.
+
 ## Specialization-fragility and the authoritarian ratchet
 
 Each district produces a **DISTINCT resource**. The city is biologically interdependent — you cannot substitute a liver with two kidneys.