LithosAnanake/FABRIC-3.5.md

# FABRIC-3.5.md — the Tripod/kernel reshuffle

**Status:** Standalone working document, opened 2026-09-18 by direct instruction ("we write
this in `FABRIC-3.5.md` as its own document, it's this important"). Topic: **relocating Hermes
into the kernel, reconstituting the Tripod as Hera/Artemis/Hestia, generalizing `BIRTH`, and
adopting one fleet-wide failure/recovery ladder.**

**Why 3.5 and not 4, and why not a section of 3.** `FABRIC-4.md` is explicitly the
lower-discipline scratchpad for theory-stage ideas "caught early... often missing a stated
'why' on purpose." This is not that: it is a ratified architectural direction with a stated
shape, and it needs the full discipline every numbered FABRIC document carries. But it is
also not bare-metal boot, which is `FABRIC-3.md`'s declared topic, and it is not a successor
to `FABRIC-3.md` — **`FABRIC-3.md` remains open, living, and authoritative for its own
topic; nothing here supersedes it, and this document does not trigger the
close-and-carry-forward discipline** the `FABRIC-0` → `-1` → `-2` → `-3` chain used (that
chain triggers on *closing* a document). It sits at 3.5 because it is a peer in rigor and an
outsider in topic.

**How to use this document.** Same discipline as the rest of the series: write the decision
and its reasoning down before building, close items with a dated note citing real evidence,
never silently drop a stale claim. New findings and decisions for the reshuffle get added
here, not to `FABRIC-3.md`.

**Scope discipline, stated up front: this is a reorganization, not an invention.** Per the
instruction opening it — "most of the underlying logic (Hermes routing, Artemis block I/O,
Hera lifecycle/ACL, Console framebuffer) already exists and is expected to be relocated and
rewired rather than rewritten." Any item in this document that turns out to need a genuinely
new algorithm is by that fact out of scope and gets flagged, not quietly built.

**No code is authorized by this document.** Design only. Per Captain Bob's Law
(`.claude/CLAUDE.md`): never apply a fix not explicitly requested.

**Provenance convention used below.** This series distinguishes what was read from what was
recalled, so each claim says which. **"Traced 2026-09-18"** = the file was read directly while
writing this document. **"Per §X"** = the fact is reported by an existing FABRIC section that
did its own end-to-end read; it is cited, not re-verified here. **"Open"** = not decided.
Several items below are deliberately marked for re-verification before any code is written,
because a reorganization that trusts a stale map moves the wrong things.

---

## I. The current shape, traced rather than recalled

Before moving anything, what is actually there today. All of §I traced 2026-09-18 against the
working tree at commit `e56974e`, except where marked.

### I.1 — Hermes is a FORTH capsule VM, and the routing layer is FORTH, not C

`capsules/hermes/init.4th` is short and load-bearing. Its block 5116 says it outright:

> Hermes owns the one real, canonical `COMMON-CH`. Every other VM subscribes into it via
> `VM-EXEC` (see Artemis's and Hera's own `init.4th`); Hera always exists first, so Hermes
> adds her here rather than Hera subscribing to a VM that doesn't exist yet at Hera's own
> birth.

It then does `S" common:messaging.4th" EXEC`, `MSG-CD-INIT`, `1 MY-CH-ID !`, and adds members
`1` and `0` to `COMMON-CH`. That is the whole of Hermes's own identity: it is the VM that
happens to hold the canonical channel.

The mechanism it holds is `capsules/common/messaging.4th` (504 lines) — **generic per-VM
messaging vocabulary that every participating VM loads its own copy of.** This matters more
than it first appears. Block 5005 allocates the arenas with `CREATE ... ALLOT`:

```
CREATE MSG-ARENA MSG-MAX MSG-CELLS * CELLS ALLOT
CREATE CH-ARENA  CH-MAX  CH-CELLS  * CELLS ALLOT
CREATE MBR-ARENA MBR-MAX MBR-CELLS * CELLS ALLOT
```

`CREATE`/`ALLOT` carves out of *the dictionary of whichever VM is interpreting*. So today
there is no single routing fabric — there are N per-VM copies of the same vocabulary, and
Hermes is distinguished only by convention (it holds `COMMON-CH`; it is routing table index
1). **The arbitration is distributed and conventional, not centralized and structural.**

### I.2 — Hermes is a hard, by-name dependency of its peers

> **CORRECTED 2026-09-18 by §XIII.1 — this section undercounts.** It names two call sites; the
> full repo-wide inventory is **14 by-name FORTH references across 5 files, plus 3 C-side
> sites and a DoE CSV schema site.** The two below are real, are among the only three *live*
> ones, and remain the sharpest edge — but read §XIII.1 for the actual extent. Left in place
> rather than rewritten, per this series' own "never silently drop a stale claim" rule.

Artemis does not talk to an abstract routing layer. It talks to a VM called `Hermes`, by name,
via `VM-EXEC`. Two live call sites in `capsules/artemis/init.4th`:

- line ~138: `S" 2 ENQUEUE-READY" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC`
- line ~501: `S" 2 COMMON-CH @ CH-ADD-MBR" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC`

Both execute FORTH text *inside Hermes's own dictionary*. Either one breaks the moment
Hermes is not a VM with a dictionary. This is the single most concrete consequence of the
move and §III.3 is about it.

### I.3 — The routing table pins 0/1/2 and says so

`messaging.4th` block 5006, verbatim comment:

> VM routing table. §XIX: 16 slots, not 8 — see `FABRIC-3.md`. Hera/Hermes/Artemis stay
> 0/1/2 (`artemis:init.4th` depends on it); identities get NEW slots 3–10, never renumbered.

`VM-NAMES-INIT` registers `Hera` 0, `Hermes` 1, `Artemis` 2, then identities from 3 up via
`DOE-IDX>MSG-IDX ( doe-idx -- msg-idx ) 2 +`. **"Never renumbered" is an existing, written
commitment, and the reshuffle walks straight into it** (§IV.2).

### I.4 — Message types in use, and the free numbers

Traced across `messaging.4th`: `SPAWN-EVENT` 1, `PAUSE-EVENT` 2, `RESUME-EVENT` 3,
`KILL-EVENT` 4, `CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT` 7, `ELEVATE-REQUEST` 8, `BLK-ATTACH-EVENT` 9. Reserved
status sentinels at the top of the range: `MSG-NACKED` 253, `MSG-DELIVERED` 255.

**5 and 6 are unallocated gaps; 10 is the next in sequence.** Relevant to §VII, which needs a
number for `SOS`. Also relevant: per §XX, `SPAWN-EVENT` was grepped for every consumer across
the tree and **has none** — "an unwired placeholder, not working infrastructure." Do not
model `SOS` on it as though it were a working precedent.

### I.5 — `BIRTH` is already VM-agnostic in C; Hera's monopoly is registration-time

Per §XX, which read `mama_word_birth` (`mama_forth_words.c:229`, `BIRTH`'s C implementation)
in full:

> It is genuinely VM-agnostic — it operates on whichever `vm` calls it, with no check that
> the caller is Hera specifically. The only Hera-specific logic anywhere in it is the reverse
> guard preventing Hera from re-birthing *herself*. `capsule_birth_baby()` treats
> `vm->stadium_vm_id` generically as "whoever is birthing this VM." So "any VM could
> theoretically birth another" is already true in the code... Hera's practical monopoly on
> `BIRTH` is a registration-time fact (only `register_mama_forth_words()` registers it), not
> a check inside `BIRTH` itself.

**This is the single most important pre-existing fact in this document.** §VI is not a
redesign of `BIRTH`; it is a change to which VMs get it registered, plus an inheritance rule.

### I.6 — Hestia already has a real bind mechanism, built and live-verified

Per §XXXII.2, closed 2026-09-16: `CONSOLE-ATTACH ( name-c name-u -- ok? )` exists, is a plain
unconditional primitive (deliberately *not* an identity capability bit — that was tried and
rejected on two counts), and was verified end to end on amd64: `UNATTENDED-BIRTH` a VM named
`bob` → `CONSOLE-ATTACH bob` → `S" bob" USE` → typing `5 6 + .` at the new console relayed to
and executed on the target identity VM, printing `[zuse@bob~user] 11 ok>`.

Also live: `capsule_console_birth()` (minimal relay proxy, bare username) paired to
`capsule_runcap_birth()` (the real identity, `<username>~user`) by name convention plus one
`VM-NAME-REG` executed inside the console VM's own dictionary — **confirmed per-console-VM,
not a global singleton, so after-the-fact pairing already works structurally.**

**§V is therefore mostly a promotion of an existing, proven mechanism to an architectural
role — not new construction.**

### I.7 — The headless-until-login invariant

Per §VIII.1 (ratified) and §XXXII.2: `g_wirebind_attached_username` is what
`sk_console_identity_present()` reads (`capsule_wirebind.c:321-327`), and that function is the
live "no thumbdrive, no prompt" gate. §XXXII.2 states the rule as an explicit invariant for
any new birth path: **never set that global, never touch the console-pairing mechanism, or you
bring up a console with no human present and reopen a gate that was deliberately closed.**
§V and §VI both have to carry this invariant forward.

### I.8 — The idle pump, and why Hera is special-cased in it

Per §XX: `repl.c`'s idle loop walks the VM registry every idle beat, `VM-EXEC`ing `"MSG-TICK"`
into every *other* live VM to drain its queue, skipping Hera — because Hera *is* the pump and
self-targeting `VM-EXEC` would hit a known reentrancy class. Hera instead gets a direct
`MSG-TICK` word dispatch in her own context, guarded by a fresh `vm_find_word` + `acl_allow`
check every tick rather than a cached flag.

**So there is already a kernel-resident component driving the messaging layer's clock.** The
pump is in `repl.c`, in C, today. §III is in part an admission that the arbiter's center of
gravity is already partly there.

---

## II. What the reshuffle is, in one paragraph

Hermes stops being a peer VM on the Stadium floor and becomes a kernel-resident arbiter
between the floor and the HAL. It stops being a *client* of ACL-checked, Hermes-routed
messaging and becomes the routing and arbitration layer itself. The Tripod — which was Hera,
Hermes, Artemis — is reconstituted as **Hera, Artemis, Hestia**, with Artemis keeping its
existing storage/block-arbitration role and Hestia taking the vacated third slot. Hestia's
own role widens from owning the drawing fabric to being the **bind point** where users and
agent VMs (the GPIO VM of `FABRIC-4.md` §2, future networking VMs) attach. `BIRTH` becomes a
general primitive any VM with standing may invoke, with authority bounded by inheritance
rather than by a separate check. And every VM in the fleet — current and future — adopts one
escalation ladder on failure: recover gently, escalate to a from-scratch birth, then fail fast
and total.

---

## III. Hermes moves into the kernel

### III.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Hermes is no longer a Tripod VM. It becomes kernel-resident, sitting between the Stadium floor
and the HAL. **It no longer participates in Hermes-routed, ACL-checked messaging the way the
other VMs do — it *is* the routing/arbitration layer now, not a client of it.**

### III.2 — What that actually changes, structurally

The self-reference in "Hermes cannot be a client of Hermes" is the whole point, and it has a
concrete reading against §I.1: today Hermes holds `COMMON-CH` inside a FORTH dictionary that
is itself subject to the same ACL and Stadium-heat economy as every other VM's. An arbiter
whose own arbitration state can be evicted, cooled, or ACL-denied by the mechanism it arbitrates
is a circular dependency that happens not to have bitten yet. Moving it into the kernel breaks
the circle by construction.

Note this is also what makes §VII's `SOS` exception (Hermes cannot route a message announcing
its own routing failure) not a special case but a direct corollary — see §VIII.

### III.3 — The by-name `VM-EXEC` dependency has to go somewhere. Open.

> **SUPERSEDED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2 — this question dissolved.** The three options below
> all assume the existing FORTH callers must be preserved. Captain Bob ruled the FORTH
> messaging layer legacy, so §XIII.1's inventory becomes input to a dead-FORTH cleanup rather
> than a migration constraint. Left in place, not rewritten.

§I.2's two Artemis call sites are the sharp edge. `S" ..." S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` requires a
target VM with a dictionary. Three shapes are visible; **none is chosen here:**

1. **Kernel primitives replace the by-name calls.** `ENQUEUE-READY` and `CH-ADD-MBR` become
   registered C words callable directly by any VM, and Artemis simply calls them. Closest to
   "relocated, not rewritten"; largest registration-surface change.
2. **A vestigial `Hermes` name that the kernel answers.** `VM-EXEC` to `Hermes` is intercepted
   and serviced by the kernel arbiter, leaving caller text untouched. Smallest diff, but it
   preserves a fiction and this project has a standing distaste for exactly that
   (§XXXII.2 Q3's rejection of an unreachable gate on doctrine grounds, not just mechanics).
3. **Artemis subscribes through a new kernel-side registration call at birth**, removing the
   peer-to-peer step entirely.

**Decide this on paper before touching code.** Whichever wins, the two Artemis lines and the
`STARTUP-BANNER`/`LOG-INFO"` scaffolding in `capsules/hermes/init.4th` are the concrete edit
set, plus whatever else a full grep for `S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` turns up — **that grep has not
been run exhaustively for this document and must be, repo-wide, before scoping.**

### III.4 — The per-VM-arena question. Open, and the biggest unknown here.

> **RESOLVED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2.** Answered in the "full centralization" direction,
> but without the migration cost this section feared: with the FORTH legacy there is no live
> state to port. This was named the root dependency throughout §X; it is closed. Left in
> place, not rewritten.

Per §I.1 the arenas are per-VM dictionary allocations. If arbitration centralizes into the
kernel, does `MSG-ARENA`/`CH-ARENA`/`MBR-ARENA` centralize with it, or does each VM keep its
own outbox/inbox with only the *routing* centralized? These are very different amounts of
work and very different risk:

- **Routing-only centralization** keeps `messaging.4th` largely intact, keeps the Stadium heat
  economy's "sender pays" property (per §XX: `STADIUM-RES-PULL`/`-PUSH` operate on the
  *calling* VM's own reservoir), and is genuinely a reshuffle.
- **Full arena centralization** moves FORTH dictionary state into kernel C, changes every
  VM's `dict_hash`, and needs the three-arch parity story re-established from scratch.

**Not decided.** Flagged here because the executive framing ("relocated and rewired rather
than rewritten") holds comfortably for the first and is strained by the second.

### III.5 — Parity consequence, stated so it is not discovered late

Any change to what `register_*_words()` registers, or to what `init.4th` loads, changes VM
dictionary contents and therefore `dict_hash`. §XX's own verification standard applies: the
property that matters is **identical `dict_hash` across amd64/aarch64/riscv64, not an
unchanging absolute value.** Expect the absolute hashes to move; require the cross-arch
identity to hold. Acceptance is the three-arch QEMU boot to `zuse)ok>` with zero
`UNKNOWN WORD` faults, per `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s non-negotiable criteria — there is no other
test.

---

## IV. The Tripod reconstituted: Hera, Artemis, Hestia

### IV.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Tripod = **Hera, Artemis, Hestia.** Artemis keeps its existing role (storage/block
arbitration) unchanged. Hestia takes the slot Hermes vacates.

### IV.2 — The "never renumbered" collision. Open, needs a ruling.

> **DISSOLVED 2026-09-18 by §XIV.1/§XIV.2 — via option 3 below, exactly as this section
> predicted.** The FORTH routing table is legacy, so the slot-numbering question has no
> subject. Option 3's own caveat ("settle §III.4 first") was the correct call. Left in place,
> not rewritten.

§I.3's comment commits to Hera/Hermes/Artemis at 0/1/2 and to identities at 3–10 *never*
being renumbered. Hermes leaving index 1 forces a choice, and the existing comment forecloses
the laziest option:

1. **Hestia takes index 1.** Tidy, preserves the "Tripod occupies 0/1/2" shape, and requires
   no identity renumbering — but it silently redefines what slot 1 *means*, and
   `artemis:init.4th`'s dependence on the numbering is on 2, not 1, so it may be survivable.
2. **Index 1 is retired; Hestia takes a fresh slot.** Honest, costs a slot out of 16, and
   leaves a permanent hole that needs a comment explaining itself forever.
3. **The routing table stops being a FORTH array at all**, because §III moved routing into the
   kernel — in which case this question dissolves into §III.4's arena question and should not
   be answered separately.

**Not decided. Note option 3 makes 1 and 2 moot, so settle §III.4 first.** This ordering
matters: answering IV.2 before III.4 risks ratifying a table that the kernel move deletes.

---

## V. Hestia's role expands: the bind point

### V.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

Beyond owning the drawing fabric, Hestia becomes **the bind point for users and agent VMs** —
GPIO VM, future networking VMs, and whatever follows. The attach point that was previously
implicit or undecided now lives here, explicitly.

### V.2 — This is mostly promotion of an existing mechanism, not new construction

Per §I.6, `CONSOLE-ATTACH` already resolves a target's liveness by name *before* birthing a
console (so a typo refuses cleanly with no orphaned VM — verified live), and console/user
pairing already works after the fact. The reshuffle's contribution is **declaring that this is
the fleet's attach point**, and then asking the question the current mechanism does not yet
answer: it was built for *human at a console attaching to an identity VM*. An agent VM — a
GPIO VM per `FABRIC-4.md` §2, pinned and born at boot with no human anywhere near it — is a
different shape wearing the same word.

### V.3 — Genuinely open

1. **Does an agent VM bind through `CONSOLE-ATTACH` or through a sibling word?**
   `sk_repl_dispatch_line()`'s pairing check reconstructs the target as
   `console_get_vm_name() + "~user"` (per §XXXII.2, and the cause of a real bug caught live
   when a console was named anything else). A GPIO VM is not a `~user` identity. Either the
   naming convention widens or agent binding takes its own path.
2. **Does binding an agent VM touch `g_wirebind_attached_username`?** It must not — §I.7. State
   this as an explicit invariant in whatever implements it, exactly as §XXXII.2 required of
   unattended birth.
3. **Is Hestia's bind role ACL-gated, and if so where?** Per `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s hard rule
   and §XXXII.2 Q3's correction: policy belongs in `ACL.4th`, never in C. The shape is
   `' CONSOLE-ATTACH ACL-PIN` (or a sibling word's equivalent) in `ACL.4th`, not a C-side
   capability check — and specifically **not** a `vm_identity_has_cap()` gate, which §XXXII.2
   proved unreachable because `identity.installed` is 0 for Hera/Hermes/Artemis and for every
   console-proxy VM.
4. **Does Hestia-as-bind-point survive Hestia being a Tripod member?** A Tripod VM is pinned
   and born at boot (`session_register()`/`session_set_pinned()`, per `FABRIC-2.md` §H.12
   step 4; "pinned sessions never leave," §H.1 — **cited from `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s and §XX's
   references, not re-read for this document; verify before relying on it**). Whether the
   drawing-fabric owner and the bind-point arbiter are the same VM or two roles that happen to
   share a name is not settled here.

---

## VI. `BIRTH` as a general primitive

### VI.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

`BIRTH` is a general primitive, not Hera-exclusive. **Any VM with standing can invoke it.** A
birthed VM inherits its ACL/DNA from the birthing VM. **A VM can never birth something with
more authority than it itself holds — enforced by inheritance, not by a separate
authorization check.**

### VI.2 — Why this is small in C and large in policy

Per §I.5 the C implementation is already VM-agnostic; the monopoly is which registration
function hands out the word. So the mechanical change is registration, and the design work is
entirely in the inheritance rule.

The rule as stated is elegant precisely because it needs no gate: if a child's authority is
*derived* from the parent's, "cannot exceed the parent" is not a check that can be bypassed,
forgotten, or misconfigured — it is a property of how the child is constructed. This is the
same doctrine §XXXII.2 Q3 landed on from the opposite direction (a bespoke gate that can never
open is worse than no gate), and the same doctrine `ZUSE-ELIGIBILITY-ADD` already carries.

### VI.3 — "ACL/DNA" needs a precise referent. Open, and this is the real work.

The system has a **word-level** ACL: four `DictEntry` fields (`acl_ttl`, `acl_allow`,
`acl_mode`, `acl_pinned`), a C primitive `ACL-INHERIT` (traced 2026-09-18 in `capsules/ACL.4th`'s
own primitive list, line 6), and the semantics "pin is one-way; inheritance clears pin, copies
mode" (per `.claude/CLAUDE.md`). What §VI.1 describes is **VM-level** inheritance — a different
axis. Two things must be settled before any code:

1. **Is VM-level DNA just "the child's dictionary is built from the parent's, with per-word
   state carried by the existing `ACL-INHERIT`"?** If yes, this is genuinely a reshuffle and
   the existing primitive does the work. If no, something new is being invented and that
   contradicts this document's own scope discipline — flag it rather than build it.
2. **Hard constraint:** `.claude/CLAUDE.md` states "Never add `acl_*` fields to `DictEntry`
   beyond the four already present." Any DNA design that wants a fifth per-word field is
   ruled out at the door. If VM-level authority needs state, it belongs on the VM, not on
   every dictionary entry.

### VI.4 — "With standing" is undefined. Open.

§VI.1 says *any VM with standing*. Standing is not currently a concept in this codebase —
traced: no such notion appears in the ACL vocabulary or the Stadium words. Candidate readings:
(a) standing = simply having `BIRTH` registered, which collapses it into §VI.2's registration
question and makes the phrase decorative; (b) standing = a Stadium-economy property (sufficient
reservoir to pay for a child, consistent with "sender pays"); (c) standing = an `ACL.4th`
policy predicate. **Not decided.** (a) is the minimal reading and the one most consistent with
"do not over-engineer"; (b) is the one most consistent with the rest of the fleet's physics.

### VI.5 — Invariants that must survive

- The reverse guard preventing Hera from re-birthing herself (per §I.5) still has to hold, and
  now has to hold for *every* birther with respect to itself.
- `capsule_birth_baby()` must stay the generic path — per §XXXII.2 it is already what every
  `(p)` capsule uses across four call sites, and `capsule_runcap_birth()` was explicitly
  established as the wrong tool for build-time-sourced births.
- Unattended/agent births must not set `g_wirebind_attached_username` (§I.7).
- `' BIRTH` must not enter `capsules/ACL.4th` — per `.claude/CLAUDE.md`, `ACL.4th` is shared
  and portable, `BIRTH` is kernel-only, and the file deliberately omits it (comment at ~line
  64). Generalizing `BIRTH` does **not** change this; pin it in a kernel-specific capsule.

---

## VII. One fleet-wide failure/recovery ladder

### VII.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

A single escalation shape, applied consistently across the fleet — current VMs and future ones
(GPIO, networking, whatever comes):

1. **Recover gently first.** For a VM with continuity to preserve (Hera being the type case),
   this means **warm restart — resume with prior state intact.**
2. **Escalate if gentle recovery fails.** Fall back to a **from-scratch `BIRTH`** — no
   continuity, rebuild fleet-state/trust from nothing.
3. **Fail brutally once genuinely exhausted.** No lingering, no partial states. Once recovery
   options are spent the failure is **fast and total, not a slow degrade.**

The value here is uniformity: one shape for Hera, Hermes, Hestia and every future VM, instead
of bespoke handling per component.

### VII.2 — `SOS` as a standard message type

**Decided:** `SOS` is a standard message type **any** VM can emit — not specific to any one
component. It applies to non-Tripod VMs and to two of the three Tripod VMs (Hera and Hestia).
Hermes is the exception, for a structural reason — §VIII.

**Grounding and open points:**
- It takes a number from §I.4's space. **5 and 6 are unallocated gaps; 10 is next in
  sequence.** Picking a gap vs. appending is a small call but should be made deliberately, not
  by whoever types first.
- **Do not model it on `SPAWN-EVENT`.** Per §XX that constant has zero consumers anywhere in
  the tree — it is an unwired placeholder. A message type with no dispatcher is exactly the
  failure mode `SOS` cannot afford.
- **Open: who consumes an `SOS`, and what do they do with it?** The executive framing says
  `SOS` is emitted; it does not say who acts. Given §IX (no VM assumes another's authority),
  the consumer set is constrained but not specified.

### VII.3 — The existing precedent this should be reconciled with

> **WITHDRAWN 2026-09-18 by §XV.2 — this section's premise is wrong.** It assumed the ladder
> needs a detection mechanism. Death is compudynamic: no detector, no declarer, nothing to
> build. The closing claim below ("a recovery ladder with no detection story only ever triggers
> on failures loud enough to notice by accident") does not hold. The wellness-check idea stands
> on its own merits, unrelated to this ladder. Left in place, not rewritten.

Per §XX, closed as captured-for-later: Captain Bob's self-healing idea — "all VMs participating
in a wellness check at their nearest participating wellness center" — a distributed
liveness/failure-detection concept "deliberately not built as part of this fix."

**That idea and this ladder are the same problem approached from two ends**: wellness checks
are how a failure gets *detected*; the ladder is what happens *after*. Neither document has
reconciled them. **Flagged as open, and as the natural next thing to settle**, because a
recovery ladder with no detection story only ever triggers on failures loud enough to notice
by accident.

### VII.4 — Open: what "warm restart" concretely means

Warm restart implies a state boundary — what is "prior state" for a VM, and where does it live
across the restart? Candidate anchors traced or cited: the Stadium reservoir/heat state, the
VM's dictionary, its message arenas (§III.4 — if those centralize into the kernel, warm
restart gets *easier*, which is an argument to settle §III.4 first), its `identity` struct.
**Not designed here.** Note also that "fail brutally" must not mean "leave the Stadium's
conservation invariant K broken" — per `FABRIC-3.md` §XVIII that invariant is continuously
verified, so a brutal death still has to return what it held. **Cited from §XVIII's heading,
not re-read for this document; verify before relying on it.**

---

## VIII. Hermes's exception: the sinking semaphore

### VIII.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

**Hermes cannot emit `SOS`**, because Hermes is the message arbiter and it cannot route a
message announcing its own routing failure. Instead of emitting `SOS`, Hermes **raises a
semaphore signaling that it is sinking, and holds it until it goes down.** This gives the rest
of the fleet a window to shut down cleanly rather than going dark with no warning.

### VIII.2 — Why this is a corollary, not a special case

This is the direct consequence of §III.2. The instant Hermes stops being a client of its own
routing layer, any failure-announcement it might send has no transport — the transport is the
thing that failed. A semaphore is the right shape precisely because it is *not* a message: it
does not require the failed subsystem to work, and a held-until-death signal degrades
correctly (release = gone) rather than requiring a successful final transmission.

Worth stating plainly because it reframes the whole design: **the fleet's failure signalling is
two mechanisms, not one, and which one a VM uses is determined by whether it is above or below
the routing layer.** Everything on the Stadium floor sends `SOS`. The arbiter beneath it raises
a semaphore. That is a clean rule with no exceptions list to maintain.

### VIII.3 — Open

> **PARTLY SETTLED 2026-09-18 by §XVI.** The second bullet (what a clean-shutdown routine does)
> is answered: forced `blk_flush(0)`, then `BYE`; Hera's is suicide via a permanent
> `arch_halt()` loop. The third (is the window bounded) answers itself — the window ends when
> Hera halts, a bound by construction rather than by timer (§XVI.4). **The first bullet, where
> the semaphore mechanically lives, remains open.** Left in place, not rewritten.

- **Where does the semaphore live, mechanically?** It must be readable by VMs whose messaging
  is dying. Kernel-resident, below the routing layer, is the only coherent answer, but the
  concrete form is unspecified.
- **What does a VM's "clean shutdown routine" actually do?** §IX makes this fleet-wide
  behavior, so it needs a single definition — and it must satisfy §VII.4's note about the
  conservation invariant.
- **Is the window bounded?** "Holds it until it goes down" gives no deadline. If Hermes sinks
  slowly, do VMs shut down on the signal alone or wait for release?

---

## IX. Birther failure: no provisional handoff

### IX.1 — Decided (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

If a VM responsible for birthing/lifecycle decisions (total Hera failure is the type case)
exhausts its own ladder — warm restart, then from-scratch `BIRTH` — and still cannot recover,
there is **no provisional handoff of its authority to another VM. No VM assumes partial or
stolen authority on another's behalf.** Instead, the rest of the fleet runs its own shutdown
routines — the same clean-shutdown behavior §VIII's sinking semaphore triggers, applied
fleet-wide.

### IX.2 — Why this is consistent rather than merely austere

It is the same invariant as §VI, read from the other side. §VI says a VM can never birth
something with more authority than it holds. §IX says a VM can never *acquire* authority it
was not born with, even when the holder is gone and the authority is going begging. Together:
**authority only ever flows down the birth graph, never sideways and never up.** No VM ends up
holding authority it wasn't born with, and no VM limps in a half-failed state — every path
terminates in either full recovery or fast, clean termination.

That is a strong, checkable property, and it is worth writing down as the thing to defend when
some future failure mode makes a provisional handoff look temporarily attractive.

### IX.3 — Open

> **PREMISE REJECTED 2026-09-18 by §XV.2.** The first bullet asks the wrong question. Nobody
> declares a VM dead — it dies a compudynamic death. The "circular by construction" difficulty
> was an artifact of assuming death is a judgment someone renders rather than a physical
> outcome of the physics. Left in place, not rewritten.

- **What has standing to declare a birther dead?** Circular by construction: the fleet must
  conclude Hera is gone without Hera participating. Ties directly to §VII.3's undesigned
  detection story.
- **Does fleet shutdown mean the kernel halts, or that the floor empties and the kernel
  survives?** Materially different outcomes, not specified.

---

## X. Sequencing — dependencies between the open questions

These do not decompose into independent work items; several answers foreclose others. The
dependency order that fell out of writing this up:

1. **§III.4 (arenas: routing-only vs. full centralization) is the root.** It determines
   whether §IV.2's routing-table question exists at all, and materially changes §VII.4's warm
   restart.
2. **§III.3 (the by-name `VM-EXEC` dependency)** — needs a repo-wide `S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` grep
   first, which has not been done.
3. **§IV.2 (slot numbering)** — only if §III.4 leaves a FORTH routing table standing.
4. **§VI.3 (what "ACL/DNA" refers to)** — independent of the above; gates all of §VI.
5. **§VII.3 (reconciling the ladder with the wellness-check idea)** — gates §VII.2's consumer
   question and §IX.3's declare-dead question, which are the same question twice.
6. **§V.3 (agent-VM binding)** — needs §VI settled, since an agent VM is birthed before it is
   bound.

---

## XI. Punch list — design only, no code authorized

Nothing here is started. Nothing here authorizes an edit. Numbered for discussion order, not
execution order.

1. ✅ **CLOSED 2026-09-18 (§XIII.1).** Repo-wide by-name Hermes inventory: 14 FORTH sites
   across 5 files, 3 C-side sites, 1 DoE CSV schema site. Only 3 are live. §I.2 corrected.
2. ✅ **CLOSED 2026-09-18 (§XIII.4).** All three citations verified against source; §V.3.4 and
   §VII.4 may now be relied on.
3. ⬜ Settle §III.4: routing-only vs. full arena centralization. **Root dependency — do first.**
4. ⬜ Settle §III.3 given 3.
5. ⬜ Settle §IV.2 if and only if 3 leaves a FORTH routing table standing.
6. ⬜ Settle §VI.3: precise referent for "ACL/DNA", against the four-field `DictEntry`
   constraint.
7. ⬜ Settle §VI.4: what "standing" means, or rule it decorative.
8. ⬜ Reconcile §VII.3: the ladder vs. the wellness-check detection idea.
9. ⬜ Assign `SOS` a message-type number deliberately (§VII.2), with a named consumer.
10. ⬜ Specify the sinking semaphore's mechanism and the clean-shutdown routine (§VIII.3).
11. ⬜ Answer §IX.3: what declares a birther dead, and what fleet shutdown means concretely.
12. ⬜ **NEW 2026-09-18 (§XIII.5).** Rule on whether the Hestia Tripod leg is a *new*
    singleton, distinct from today's plural per-attach console proxies. **Gates §IV.1 and
    §IV.2** — sits above the slot-numbering question, not beside it.
13. ⬜ **NEW 2026-09-18 (§XIII.2), not part of this reshuffle.** Authorize a
    `capsules/MANIFEST.md` correction pass for two false claims: block 4055's "immutable ABI"
    (`FABRIC-2.md` declared it stale and it was never corrected) and block 2049's stated
    contents. Reported, not fixed, per Captain Bob's Law.

**Acceptance for anything that eventually comes out of this list**, per `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s
non-negotiable criteria: three-arch QEMU boot (`amd64`, `aarch64`, `riscv64`, one at a time, in
the foreground, `clean` before `qemu`), all reaching `zuse)ok>` with zero `UNKNOWN WORD`
faults, logs present under `logs/`, and `dict_hash` identical across all three architectures.
There is no other test.

---

## XII. Explicitly not decided anywhere in this document

Collected so nothing here is mistaken for settled. **Updated 2026-09-18 after §XV's rulings.**
Most of this list is now closed — see §XIV.2 and §XV.6 for what resolved, dissolved, or had its
premise rejected.

**Still genuinely open — updated again 2026-09-18 after §XVII closed item 12. Nothing
structural remains; what follows are small local decisions, one placement question, and one
build-time check.**
- **Item 9 (§VII.2/§XVI.5)** — half-answered. The consumer action is defined for the two
  fleet-fatal cases; open is whether an *ordinary peer's* `SOS` is actionable or merely
  advisory, plus the trivial number allocation.
- **§VIII.3 first bullet** — where the sinking semaphore mechanically lives. The rest of
  §VIII.3 is settled by §XVI.
- **Item 16 (§XV.4)** — an implementation check rather than a decision: every message-holding
  teardown path must reach `STADIUM-EVICT`, verifiable via `fleet_conserved`.
- **Item 17 (§XVI.2)** — does Hera's suicide replace `BYE`'s current cold-restart, or become a
  separate word? Small, but it changes a live registered word either way.
- **Item 18 (§XVI.7)** — if Hera is already dead, nobody performs the halt. Proposed shape (an
  empty floor as a kernel-observable condition) is **analysis, not a ruling.**

§XIII.5's proposed Hestia resolution shape remains **analysis, not a ruling.** §XIV.4's and
§XIV.5's proposals were both superseded by §XV.4 and §XV.3 respectively.

What **is** decided, all by Captain Bob on 2026-09-18 and recorded in §III.1, §IV.1, §V.1,
§VI.1, §VII.1, §VII.2, §VIII.1 and §IX.1: Hermes goes into the kernel and becomes the arbiter
rather than a client; the Tripod becomes Hera/Artemis/Hestia; Hestia becomes the bind point;
`BIRTH` is general with authority bounded by inheritance; the fleet shares one
gentle→from-scratch→brutal ladder; `SOS` is a standard message type with Hermes excepted via a
sinking semaphore; and a failed birther's authority is never provisionally handed off.

---

## XIII. Punch-list items 1 and 2 worked — CLOSED 2026-09-18, with three corrections to this document's own §I

Worked per the series' standing discipline: items 1 and 2 were the two pure-investigation
entries on §XI, carrying no design commitment, so they were executable without a ruling. All
findings below traced directly against the working tree at `e56974e` on 2026-09-18. **No code
written, no design question answered, nothing in the tree modified.**

### XIII.1 — Item 1 CLOSED: the by-name Hermes inventory. §I.2 undercounted by an order of magnitude.

**Correction to §I.2, which is wrong as written.** It claimed the by-name dependency was
Artemis's "two live call sites" and framed Artemis as *the* dependent. The real inventory is
**13 by-name FORTH references across 5 files, plus 3 independent C-side sites.** §I.2's two
sites are real and still the sharpest edge, but they are not the extent of it, and the
executive framing ("relocated and rewired") has to cover all of it. Full inventory:

| # | Site | Call | Live? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | `common/msg.4th:7` | `S" MSG-ACK-LAST" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | **dead** — §XIII.2 |
| 2 | `common/msg.4th:10` | `S" MSG-NACK-LAST" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | **dead** — §XIII.2 |
| 3 | `artemis/init.4th:138` | `S" 2 ENQUEUE-READY" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | live |
| 4 | `artemis/init.4th:501` | `S" 2 COMMON-CH @ CH-ADD-MBR" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | live |
| 5 | `process.4th:12` | `S" 1 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` (SPAWN) | **dead** — §XIII.2 |
| 6 | `process.4th:15` | `S" 2 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` (PAUSE) | **dead** |
| 7 | `process.4th:21` | `S" 3 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` (RESUME) | **dead** |
| 8 | `process.4th:26` | `S" 4 EVENT-EMIT" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` (KILL-VM) | **dead** |
| 9 | `doe-campaign.4th:6` | `S" Hermes" BIRTH` | not auto-run |
| 10 | `doe-campaign.4th:7` | `S" LOAD-DOE" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | not auto-run |
| 11 | `doe-campaign.4th:17` | `S" DOE-WORK" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | not auto-run |
| 12 | `doe-campaign.4th:28` | `S" DOE-WORK" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | not auto-run |
| 13 | `doe-campaign.4th:54` | `S" 1959 1 EXEC-DOE" S" Hermes" VM-EXEC` | not auto-run |
| 14 | `messaging.4th:77` | `S" Hermes" 1 VM-NAME-REG` | live (§I.3) |

**The good news is real: only 3 of the 14 are live production paths** (#3, #4, #14). Seven are
dead code (§XIII.2), four are in a campaign orchestrator `docs/working/architecture/
DOE-LIBRARY-HOWTO-20260819.md` itself records as "Not auto-run anywhere." **This materially
lowers the estimated cost of §III.3** — but it must be re-confirmed rather than trusted, since
"not auto-run" is a claim about today's boot path, not a guarantee nothing invokes it.

### XIII.2 — Seven of those sites are dead code, and `MANIFEST.md` carries a claim FABRIC-2 already declared stale

**`common/msg.4th` is loaded by nothing.** Traced: `S" common:msg.4th" EXEC` appears exactly
once in the tree — inside `common/msg.4th`'s own header comment, as usage documentation. No
capsule EXECs it. `capsules/init.4th` (block 2049) loads `ACL.4th`, `block-acl.4th`,
`zuse-eligibility.4th`, `lib.4th`, `fabric.4th`, `font.4th`, `common:messaging.4th` — and
nothing else.

This is **already known and already written down.** `FABRIC-2.md:2770-2773` states it
outright: the `HERMES-ACK`/`HERMES-NACK` wrappers "are now obsolete (every VM has its own
local `MSG-ACK-LAST`/`MSG-NACK-LAST` — no `VM-EXEC` indirection needed) but the file itself
was left in place, unloaded, rather than deleted unprompted; `capsules/MANIFEST.md`'s
'immutable ABI' claim for block 4055 is now stale." `messaging.4th:411` carries the same note
from the other side: "common:msg.4th's HERMES-ACK/NACK indirection is retired."

**`capsules/MANIFEST.md` was never corrected.** Line 317 still reads: "Immutable: this is the
cross-VM ACK/NACK ABI. Every messaging VM (Hera, Hermes, Artemis) loads this at birth.
Changing the block or the word names breaks the Hermes delivery protocol." That is false on
every clause. A second MANIFEST claim also fails against the source: line 52 describes block
2049 as loading "compudynamics, VM-INIT, lib, common:msg, fleet-k, process; BIRTHs Artemis +
Hermes" — `init.4th` block 2049 loads none of `common:msg`/`process` and contains no `BIRTH`
at all (Hermes and Artemis are birthed from C — §XIII.3).

**`process.4th` is likewise EXEC'd nowhere**, making sites #5–#8 dead with it.

**Reported, not fixed**, per Captain Bob's Law ("if you identify a bug, report it; do not fix
it unless the user says to"). Flagged here because a reshuffle that reads `MANIFEST.md` as
current will conclude the ACK/NACK path is a live immutable Hermes ABI and scope around a
constraint that stopped existing in `FABRIC-2.md`'s era. **Recommend a MANIFEST.md correction
pass as its own authorized item; it is not part of this reshuffle.**

### XIII.3 — The Tripod is hardcoded as a name-triple in C, in three independent places

Not previously recorded in this document. Each is an edit site the moment the Tripod's
membership changes (§IV.1):

1. **`capsule_birth.c:793-796`** — `is_fleet_foundation` is literally
   `vm_name_prefix_eq_nocase(capsule_name, "Hera") || ... "Hermes" || ... "Artemis"`. It gates
   `StadiumPatronHeader` setup and the `session_register()`/`session_set_pinned()` pinning
   calls. **This is the Tripod, encoded as a string test.** Swapping Hermes for Hestia is a
   one-line change here — and that single line is what makes a VM pinned.
2. **`kernel_main.c:864-874`** — `vm_interpret(mama, "S\" Hermes\" BIRTH")` plus a
   `capsule_vm_find_by_name_nocase("Hermes", ...)` liveness check and console banner. The
   comment cites `FABRIC-2.md` D.7 (birth-by-message-only, 2026-08-28): the Tripod legs "must
   be alive session-less so a later thumbdrive-attach flow has a running Hermes/Artemis to
   message." **Note the stated rationale for Hermes being born early is precisely that other
   flows need it available — which a kernel-resident arbiter satisfies trivially and
   permanently.** §III is consistent with D.7's intent, not in tension with it.
3. **`kernel_main.c:1007-1009`** — `sk_vm_switch_signal_register(hermes_entry.vm_id)`, the
   preemptive context-switch registration from `FABRIC-3.md` §XXVIII.

**A fourth site is not code but schema, and is the expensive one: `doe_log.c`.** The per-tick
DoE CSV hardcodes the Tripod across six columns — 16/17/18 (`hera_heat_q48`,
`hermes_heat_q48`, `artemis_heat_q48`, populated by `doe_log_heat_by_name("Hera"/"Hermes"/
"Artemis")` at lines 206-208) and 23/24/25 (`switch_*_readiness`), with column 22 documented
as "0=Hera, 1=Hermes, 2=Artemis by current registration order." **Changing Tripod membership
changes the DoE CSV schema**, which bears directly on comparability with every campaign
already run (§XXXIV/§XXXV's segmented per-ISA design in `FABRIC-3.md` is mid-flight). Flagged
as a real cost, not a blocker, and **not** something to resolve by quietly renaming a column.

### XIII.4 — Item 2 CLOSED: all three flagged citations verified against source

§XI item 2 flagged three citations this document took from headings and `.claude/CLAUDE.md`
rather than from the source. All three check out; §V.3.4 and §VII.4 may now be relied on.

- **`FABRIC-2.md` §H.1** — real, at line 3699, "Session = Stadium patron, admission restated."
  The pinning claim is at line 3713: pinned sessions are exempt from "the normal departure
  path (heat decay / `COOL`): they never leave, permanently." Confirmed as §V.3.4 used it.
- **`FABRIC-2.md` §H.12** — real, at line 4057, "Implementation punch list (2026-09-03)."
  Independently corroborated from the code side: `capsule_birth.c:785-788` cites "§H.12 step 4"
  by name for the `session_register()`/`session_set_pinned()` soft-fail convention.
- **`FABRIC-3.md` §XVIII** — confirmed. `K` is `vm_physics_fleet_heat_sum()` over **all** live
  VMs, which the reservoir-transfer accounting holds exactly at `Q48_ONE`, surfaced as the
  `fleet_k_q48`/`fleet_conserved` CSV columns. §VII.4's warning stands as written: a brutal
  death must still return what it held, or it breaks a continuously-verified invariant.

### XIII.5 — New finding, and the most consequential of this pass: Hestia today is plural, ephemeral, and capsule-less

**This was not known to §IV or §V when they were written, and it changes what §IV.1 is asking
for.** Traced in `capsule_console.c`:

- **Hestia has no capsule.** `capsules/` contains `hermes/` and `artemis/` directories but
  **no `console/`**. A console VM's entire personality is a 3-line C string literal,
  `CONSOLE_IDENTITY_SRC` (`capsule_console.c:28-31`): `Block 4997`, `S" common:messaging.4th"
  EXEC`, `MSG-CD-INIT`. That is all of it.
- **Hestia is deliberately *not* on the routing table.** The source comment is explicit: "No
  `COMMON-CH` subscription: a console's own traffic is direct 1:1 with its paired user VM
  (`CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT`), not broadcast, so there's no need to resolve an index in Hermes's own
  routing table for it."
- **Hestia is plural and per-attach.** `capsule_console_birth(const char *console_name, ...)`
  is called from three sites (`capsule_wirebind.c:245`, `mama_forth_words.c:1591` and `:2015`)
  and mints a fresh heap-built single-entry capsule directory each time. There are as many
  console VMs as there are attachments.

**Consequence.** Hera, Hermes and Artemis are singular, pinned, born-at-boot, capsule-backed,
routing-table-indexed. Hestia today is **none of those five things.** So §IV.1's "Hestia
takes the vacated third slot" is **not** a relocation of an existing pinned VM — as stated it
would create a Hestia that does not currently exist. That is worth naming plainly, because it
is the one place this document's "reorganization, not invention" scope discipline is genuinely
strained.

> **CORRECTED 2026-09-18 by §XVII — the paragraph above compares the wrong object.** The
> singular pinned Hestia *does* already exist: it is the HAL drawing fabric
> (`hal/console.c`, `framebuffer.c`, `vt100.c`, `font_8x16.c`), already singular, permanent
> and kernel-resident — it simply has no VM face and no owner. The per-attach proxies this
> section measured against are what *binding produces*, not what Hestia *is*. The scope
> discipline is therefore **not** strained: the leg is an existing singleton given an owner,
> and the only genuinely new artifact is a capsule personality. The resolution shape proposed
> below was right; this justification for it was wrong. **RATIFIED — see §XVII.2.** Left in
> place, not rewritten.

**The shape that resolves it without inventing anything** — offered as analysis, **not
ratified, Captain Bob's call**: distinguish **Hestia** (singular, pinned, capsule-backed, the
Tripod leg — owns the drawing fabric and is the bind point, per §V.1) from **console proxies**
(plural, ephemeral, per-attach — exactly what `capsule_console_birth()` mints today,
unchanged). The Tripod leg is new; the proxies are untouched. This reading makes §V.1's "bind
point" precise: the leg is what you bind *to*, the proxy is what binding *produces*.

### XIII.6 — §V and §VI are load-bearing for each other, which neither section noticed

If Hestia is the bind point (§V.1), it is Hestia that must mint console proxies — and
minting a VM is `BIRTH`. Today all three `capsule_console_birth()` call sites run in Hera's or
the caller's context. **So "Hestia is the bind point" cannot be implemented while `BIRTH`
remains Hera-exclusive; it requires §VI.1's generalization.** They are one change, not two.

Mechanically this already works, which strengthens both: two of the three call sites pass
`vm->stadium_vm_id` — *whichever VM invoked* — rather than a hardcoded Hera
(`capsule_wirebind.c:245` passes `mama_vm->stadium_vm_id` because that path genuinely is
Hera's). That matches §I.5's finding that `capsule_birth_baby()` treats `stadium_vm_id`
generically as "whoever is birthing this VM." **Parentage is already generic; only
registration is not.**

This also supplies the first concrete answer to §VI.4's open "what is standing": Hestia needs
`BIRTH` to do its declared job, so it has standing by role. That is evidence for reading (a)
(standing = having `BIRTH` registered), not a ruling.

### XIII.7 — Effect on §X's sequencing

Nothing found here dislodges §III.4 as the root dependency. Two adjustments:

- **§III.3 is cheaper than §I.2 implied** (3 live sites, not a broad web) and can be scoped as
  soon as §III.4 lands.
- **§IV.1 needs a prior ruling that §IV.2 does not cover**: is the Tripod's Hestia leg a *new*
  singleton distinct from today's proxies (§XIII.5)? That question sits *above* the slot
  numbering, not beside it. **Added to the punch list as item 12.**

### XIII.8 — Punch-list status after this pass

- ✅ **Item 1 CLOSED** — inventory complete (§XIII.1), 14 FORTH sites + 3 C sites + 1 CSV
  schema site; §I.2 corrected.
- ✅ **Item 2 CLOSED** — all three citations verified against source (§XIII.4).
- ⬜ **Item 12, NEW** — rule on §XIII.5: is the Hestia Tripod leg a new singleton, distinct
  from today's per-attach proxies? **Gates §IV.1 and §IV.2.**
- ⬜ **Item 13, NEW, not part of this reshuffle** — authorize a `capsules/MANIFEST.md`
  correction pass for the two false claims in §XIII.2 (block 4055 "immutable ABI"; block 2049
  contents). Reported, not fixed.

Items 3–11 unchanged and still open.

---

## XIV. Two rulings that collapse the root dependency (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

### XIV.1 — RULING: the existing FORTH messaging layer is legacy. Kernel Hermes is greenfield.

**Captain Bob, 2026-09-18, verbatim:** "as far as Hermes the VM and Hermes the kernel
component, forget all the forth existing and call it legacy for now. We'll do a code cleanup
for all the dead FORTH anyway."

So kernel-Hermes is **not** a migration of `capsules/common/messaging.4th`. It is a new C
implementation; the FORTH messaging layer becomes legacy on arrival and is retired by a
separate dead-FORTH cleanup pass. This reverses the framing §III.3 and §III.4 were built on —
both assumed the existing FORTH had to be carried across.

### XIV.2 — What this collapses

Four of this document's open questions dissolve rather than get answered:

- **§III.4 (the root dependency) — RESOLVED by fiat, in the "full centralization" direction,
  but without the migration cost that made it frightening.** The kernel owns message and
  channel state; `messaging.4th`'s per-VM `CREATE`/`ALLOT` arenas are legacy, not something to
  centralize. §III.4 feared a painful port of live FORTH state; there is no port.
- **§III.3 (the by-name `VM-EXEC` dependency) — dissolved.** The three-option framing
  (kernel primitives / vestigial name / birth-time registration) was about preserving callers.
  With the FORTH legacy, §XIII.1's 14-site inventory stops being a migration constraint and
  becomes an input to the cleanup pass. **§XIII.1's inventory is still the right list — its
  purpose changed, not its content.**
- **§IV.2 (routing-table slot numbering) — dissolved, exactly as §IV.2's own option 3
  predicted:** "the routing table stops being a FORTH array at all... in which case this
  question dissolves into §III.4's arena question." It did. `VM-NAMES-INIT`'s 0/1/2 pinning and
  the "never renumbered" commitment are legacy artifacts, not constraints on the new design.
- **§XI item 13 (the `MANIFEST.md` corrections) — absorbed.** Bob's "we'll do a code cleanup
  for all the dead FORTH anyway" covers §XIII.2's findings. Still worth doing deliberately;
  no longer a separate ask.

**§XIII.1, §XIII.2 and §XIII.3 keep their value** — the C-side sites (§XIII.3) are *not*
legacy and remain real edit sites, and the dead-FORTH inventory now feeds the cleanup.

### XIV.3 — RULING: Artemis is the persistence path. And it needs no layering inversion.

**Captain Bob, 2026-09-18:** "For persistence though, use Artemis as much as possible. We're
good with that part for sure." Ratified.

**A layering question this raises, traced 2026-09-18 and answered cleanly.** Artemis is a VM on
the Stadium floor; kernel-Hermes sits *below* the floor. "Persist via Artemis" reads at first
like an inversion — the kernel arbiter calling up into a floor VM. It is not, because storage
is already two layers, not one:

- **The block subsystem is kernel/shared C, below the floor:** `src/block_subsystem.c`,
  `src/blkio_*.c`, `src/starkernel/virtio/virtio_blk.c`. `capsule_loader.c:98-100` calls
  `blk_subsys_init()` and `blk_subsys_add_raw_device()` directly, with no Artemis involved at
  all.
- **Artemis is the storage *policy arbiter* on the floor:** it owns attach/registration
  (`blk_subsys_attach_device()` via the `BLK-ATTACH` primitive — `repl.c:525-531` states it
  outright, "Artemis's own domain now, not Hera's") and the on-disk Artemis format.

So the ruling is satisfiable without inversion, by keeping the two straight: **floor-level and
fleet persistence goes through Artemis, its domain and its format; anything kernel-Hermes
itself needs uses the same block subsystem Artemis is built on — never a new one, and never by
messaging Artemis.**

Worth recording that the kernel *already* calls up into Artemis by name today
(`repl.c:539-541`, `S" %llu HERA-BLK-ATTACH-REQ" S" Artemis" VM-EXEC`), with a comment
explaining it is a direct `VM-EXEC` rather than a real message because Hera can't use her own
`MSG-SEND` there. That precedent exists; this section is about not *depending* on it.

### XIV.4 — The one real hazard in the persistence ruling, and the shape that avoids it

**Kernel-Hermes must not depend on Artemis for the persistence it needs during its own
failure.** This is the same structural trap as §VIII: if Hermes must write something at death
and reaching Artemis requires routing, the dependency closes a circle on exactly the mechanism
that is broken. §VIII solved the *signalling* case with a semaphore; the persistence case
needs the same discipline rather than a second special case.

**Recommended shape — analysis, not a ruling, Captain Bob's call: kernel-Hermes holds only
reconstructible state.** If the arbiter's routing state can be rebuilt from the live VM
registry (which `capsule_birth.c` already maintains as the authority on who exists), then:

- Hermes has nothing that *must* be persisted, so the Artemis dependency never arises.
- §VII.4's "what does warm restart mean for Hermes" becomes trivial — rebuild from the
  registry, no saved state to reconcile.
- Losing in-flight messages when the arbiter dies is consistent with §VII.1 step 3's "no
  lingering, no partial states," and with §VIII's clean-shutdown window.

This costs message durability across an arbiter death. **Flagged as the real trade**, and the
one to rule on: if in-flight messages must survive Hermes dying, Hermes needs durable state,
and that durable state cannot route through Artemis at death-time.

### XIV.5 — Still open, and now more urgent, not less: the scheduler firewall

Raised 2026-09-18 and **not yet ruled on**. Recorded here because §XIV.1 changes its timing.

The fleet already has a scheduler: §XXVIII built timer-driven preemption, and `MSG-SEND`
(`messaging.4th` block 5021) already calls `SWITCH-MARK-WORK` → `sk_vm_switch_signal_mark_work()`,
setting `has_work` on the target's switch slot; `sk_vm_switch_signal_tick()` switches when
`readiness >= SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD` **and** `has_work`. **Message arrival is already
a scheduling input.** This directly contradicts `VM-PHYSICS-DYNAMIC-FLEET-DESIGN-20260705.md`'s
"Explicitly not wanted: a VM scheduler. Nothing gets built that decides whose turn it is to
execute" — a live tension in the project that predates this document and is not this
document's to resolve, but is this document's to not make worse.

**Why §XIV.1 sharpens it.** Today that coupling runs FORTH `MSG-SEND` → C primitive → switch
slot. With the FORTH legacy, **kernel-Hermes becomes the caller of
`sk_vm_switch_signal_mark_work()` directly** — eligibility marking moves inside the arbiter.
That is the consolidation to guard against, and it happens by default unless the boundary is
stated up front. Greenfield is the right time to state it; retrofitting it later is how this
becomes a conventional scheduler by accident.

**Proposed invariant, for ruling:** *kernel-Hermes carries, resolves and ACL-checks. It
publishes facts — "this VM has mail" — and never reads readiness, never orders traffic by
priority, and never decides turn order. `switch.c` remains the sole owner of "who runs next."*

The argument for it is empirical and from this project's own history: §XXVIII.2 is a record of
switch-storms caused by **two sources of truth disagreeing** about who was running
(`vm_log_attributed_vm()` vs. the real trampoline state) — QEMU pinned near 100%, serial log
frozen solid. This codebase punishes duplicated authority with hangs. Two deciders would be
worse than one scheduler.

### XIV.6 — Punch list after these rulings

- ✅ **Item 3 (§III.4, the root) — RESOLVED** by §XIV.1. Kernel owns messaging; FORTH is legacy.
- ✅ **Item 4 (§III.3) — DISSOLVED** by §XIV.1; §XIII.1's inventory becomes cleanup input.
- ✅ **Item 5 (§IV.2) — DISSOLVED** by §XIV.1, as §IV.2 option 3 predicted.
- ✅ **Item 13 — ABSORBED** into the dead-FORTH cleanup pass.
- ⬜ **Item 14, NEW** — rule on §XIV.5's scheduler firewall invariant. **Raised, not ruled.**
- ⬜ **Item 15, NEW** — rule on §XIV.4: does message durability survive an arbiter death? If
  yes, Hermes needs durable state that cannot route through Artemis at death-time.
- ⬜ Items 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 unchanged and still open.

**Note the shape of what remains.** With the root dependency resolved, the surviving open
items are no longer about *mechanism* — they are about *authority*: who may birth (6, 7), who
decides a VM is dead (8, 11), who owns turn order (14), and what survives a death (15). That
is a better class of question to be left with, and §IX's "authority only ever flows down the
birth graph" is the principle most of them should be tested against.

---

## XV. The authority questions, answered (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

§XIV.6 observed that the surviving open items were no longer about mechanism but about
authority — who may birth, who declares a VM dead, who owns turn order, what survives a death.
All four are answered here, and three of the four are answered by **rejecting the question's
premise** rather than by naming an owner. That pattern is the finding.

### XV.1 — RULING: any VM may birth a near-clone of itself, carrying its own ACL DNA

**Captain Bob, verbatim:** "Any VM can birth another VM that is almost a clone of itself with
its own ACL DNA whatever ya wanna call it."

This closes **§VI.3** and **§VI.4** together:

- **§VI.3 ("ACL/DNA" needs a precise referent) — ANSWERED: inheritance by copy, from the
  parent.** The child is *almost a clone* of its birther: it starts from the parent's own
  state and carries **its own** DNA — a copy it owns and may diverge, not a shared reference
  to the parent's. This is the reading §VI.3 hoped for: it uses the existing word-level
  `ACL-INHERIT` semantics (pin cleared, mode copied) rather than inventing a VM-level
  construct, so it stays inside the "reorganization, not invention" scope, and it does not
  need a fifth `acl_*` field on `DictEntry` (the constraint §VI.3 flagged).
- **§VI.4 ("standing" is undefined) — ANSWERED: standing is decorative.** "Any VM can birth"
  confirms reading (a) — standing means nothing more than having `BIRTH` registered. Per §I.5
  the C implementation is already VM-agnostic, so this is a registration change, exactly as
  §VI.2 predicted. No Stadium-economy gate, no `ACL.4th` predicate. Consistent with
  `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s "do not over-engineer — if the user says 'BIRTH is a primitive', that
  is the complete specification."

**Why the authority bound still holds without a check.** A near-clone cannot exceed its parent
because it is *built from* the parent. §VI.1's "enforced by inheritance, not by a separate
authorization check" is therefore literal, not aspirational — there is no gate to bypass
because there is no gate.

### XV.2 — RULING: nobody declares a VM dead. It dies a compudynamic death.

**Captain Bob, verbatim:** "Nobody declares a VM dead, it died a compudynamic death."

**This rejects the premise of §IX.3 and of §VII.3's detection gap, and both were wrong to ask
what they asked.** §IX.3 asked "what has standing to declare a birther dead?" and called it
"circular by construction." The circularity was an artifact of assuming death is a *judgment*
someone renders. It is not: death is a physical outcome of the compudynamics — heat exhausts,
the reservoir empties, the patron leaves the Stadium floor. There is no detector, no quorum, no
supervisor, and nothing to build.

**This retires the largest scheduler-shaped risk in the whole design.** §VII's ladder appeared
to need a supervisor — some component watching liveness and deciding to escalate — and §XIV.5
warned that a supervisor with a timer is a scheduler's twin. With death compudynamic, **that
component does not exist and is not needed.** The ladder is self-applied while a VM is alive;
once it is dead it is dead, which is exactly §VII.1 step 3's "fast and total, not a slow
degrade." No actor, no handoff (§IX.1 already forbade one), no partial states.

**Consequence for §VII.3.** The "wellness check at the nearest participating wellness center"
idea recorded in `FABRIC-3.md` §XX does **not** need to be reconciled with this ladder as a
detection mechanism, because no detection mechanism is required. It remains an independent idea
on its own merits. §VII.3's framing ("a ladder with no detection story only fires on failures
loud enough to notice by accident") was built on the same wrong premise and is withdrawn.

### XV.3 — RULING: nobody owns turn order. Turn order is compudynamic.

**Captain Bob, verbatim:** "Nobody owns the turn order. The turn order is compudynamic."

This answers **§XIV.5 (item 14)** with a stronger invariant than the one proposed there. §XIV.5
suggested a firewall — *"`switch.c` remains the sole owner of who runs next."* That named an
owner, and naming an owner is what a conventional scheduler is. **The correct invariant names
none:**

> **Turn order is an emergent output of the compudynamics, not a decision any component makes.
> Kernel-Hermes publishes facts into that system — "this VM has mail" — and computes no
> ordering. Neither does anything else.**

This is consistent with the project's own standing position, independently of this document:
`FABRIC-3.md` §XIX records the design direction as "fix the gap **without a scheduler**," with
the reasoning that "a fixed round-robin across identities would just be a different hardcoded
policy — not in the spirit of" the design. §XV.3 is that same position restated for the
reshuffle.

**One honest observation, offered as a flag rather than an objection.** Traced 2026-09-18:
`sk_vm_switch_signal_tick()` gates on `readiness >= SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD && has_work`,
and `SK_SWITCH_READINESS_THRESHOLD` is `50u`, a hardcoded constant
(`capsule_vm_switch_signal.c:52`). That is a fixed policy sitting in the middle of a
mechanism this section calls compudynamic — the same category §XIX rejected as "a different
hardcoded policy."

The layering does reconcile: the compudynamic **turn-attractor** (§XIX/§XXI) decides what work
is assigned, and the CPU-level switch signal is the mechanical follower that moves the
processor. Turn order in the meaningful sense is the attractor, and it is compudynamic as
ruled. But the constant `50` is a real seam, and it is the exact place where a hardcoded policy
could quietly start deciding turns. **Flagged for later, not proposed as work here** — it
predates this reshuffle and is `FABRIC-3.md` §XXVIII's own territory. Noted so it is not
discovered later and mistaken for something this document introduced. (`FABRIC-4.md` §1's
fixed-then-adaptive `rate` graduation is the precedent for how such a constant earns its way
to adaptive: measure against a fixed baseline first, self-tune only after.)

### XV.4 — §XIV.4 reframed: the question was persistence; the answer is conservation

§XIV.4 asked whether in-flight messages must survive an arbiter's death, and warned that
answering "yes" would force Hermes to hold durable state it could not safely write through
Artemis at death-time. **Captain Bob, on that item: "What survives the death of what? I don't
understand that last part."** Fair — it was posed as a persistence question, which is the wrong
frame and the reason it read as opaque.

**The right frame, given §XV.2.** A message is not only content; it is *heat*. Traced
2026-09-18 in `capsules/common/messaging.4th`: `MSG-ALLOC` pulls `Q.SLOT` from the caller's own
reservoir before admitting a message (rolling back via `STADIUM-RES-PUSH` on refusal, line
127), and `MSG-FREE-NODE` releases it with `STADIUM-EVICT` (line 135-136). An arbiter dying
while holding N messages is holding **N × `Q.SLOT` of fleet heat.**

So the question is not "must the payloads be saved." It is:

> **Does a dying arbiter return the heat its undelivered messages were holding?**

- **Payloads may vanish.** Consistent with §VII.1 step 3's "no lingering, no partial states."
- **The heat may not.** `K` = `vm_physics_fleet_heat_sum()` is held at `Q48_ONE` and
  continuously verified (`FABRIC-3.md` §XVIII, `fleet_k_q48`/`fleet_conserved`). Heat that
  dies with the arbiter is heat that breaks a live invariant.

**The answer to "what survives the death of what" is therefore: nothing survives except K.**

**This dissolves §XIV.4's hazard rather than resolving it.** There is nothing to persist, so
there is no death-time write, so there is no circular dependency on Artemis, so the
stateless-arbiter shape §XIV.4 recommended is simply correct rather than a trade-off. And since
death is compudynamic (§XV.2), a VM's death *is* already a Stadium eviction event — returning
heat is not a special case bolted onto death, it is what dying consists of. **§XIV.3's
"Artemis for persistence" ruling stands untouched and applies to fleet/floor persistence; the
arbiter simply never needed any.**

**The one thing to verify when this is eventually built** (not a design question, an
implementation check): that every message-holding structure's teardown path actually reaches
`STADIUM-EVICT`, so a mass teardown returns heat rather than leaking it. `fleet_conserved`
already makes that directly testable — a leak shows up as K ≠ `Q48_ONE`, not as a silent
error. Added as punch item 16.

### XV.5 — What these four rulings have in common

Three of the four answers reject the question rather than answer it. There is no death
declarer, no turn-order owner, and nothing to persist — and in each case the thing that seemed
to need an authority turned out to be an outcome of the physics instead. The one question that
*was* answered directly (§XV.1, who may birth) was answered with "anyone," which also declines
to create an authority.

**That is the actual defence against becoming a conventional scheduler**, and it is stronger
than the firewall §XIV.5 proposed. A firewall constrains a component that owns something. These
rulings mean **there is no owner to constrain.** The design's protection is structural, not
procedural: authority only ever flows down the birth graph (§IX.2), and everything else —
death, turn order, conservation — is physics rather than policy.

### XV.6 — Punch list after these rulings

- ✅ **Item 6 (§VI.3, "ACL/DNA" referent) — ANSWERED** (§XV.1): inheritance by copy; existing
  `ACL-INHERIT` semantics suffice; no fifth `DictEntry` field.
- ✅ **Item 7 (§VI.4, "standing") — ANSWERED** (§XV.1): decorative; reading (a) confirmed.
- ✅ **Item 8 (§VII.3, ladder vs. detection) — WITHDRAWN** (§XV.2): premise wrong, no detection
  mechanism required.
- ✅ **Item 11 (§IX.3, who declares a birther dead) — PREMISE REJECTED** (§XV.2): nobody;
  compudynamic death.
- ✅ **Item 14 (§XIV.5, scheduler firewall) — ANSWERED** (§XV.3), with a stronger invariant
  than the one proposed: no owner, not a named owner.
- ✅ **Item 15 (§XIV.4, message durability) — DISSOLVED** (§XV.4): reframed from persistence to
  conservation; nothing survives but K.
- ⬜ **Item 16, NEW** (§XV.4) — implementation check, not a design question: verify every
  message-holding teardown path reaches `STADIUM-EVICT` so mass teardown returns heat.
  Testable directly via `fleet_conserved`.
- ⬜ **Item 9** (§VII.2 — `SOS` message-type number and its consumer) — still open. Note §XV.2
  narrows it: with no death-declarer, an `SOS` consumer cannot be a supervisor, so the question
  is now specifically what a *peer* does on receipt.
- ⬜ **Item 10** (§VIII.3 — the sinking semaphore's mechanism, the clean-shutdown routine's
  definition, and whether the window is bounded) — still open, and now the largest remaining
  design item.
- ⬜ **Item 12** (§XIII.5 — is the Hestia Tripod leg a new singleton, distinct from today's
  per-attach proxies?) — still open, and still gates §IV.

**Remaining open: items 9, 10, 12, 16.** Item 10 is the substantive one; 9 is downstream of it,
12 is independent, and 16 is a build-time check rather than a decision.

---

## XVI. Item 10 settled: clean shutdown is forced flush + `BYE`; Hera's is suicide (Captain Bob, 2026-09-18)

**Captain Bob, verbatim:** "A clean shutdown is a VM termination where flush is forced and the
VM says BYE. Hera is the special case that should just halt the processor. Call it suicide I
guess."

This settles §VIII.3's second open point (what a clean-shutdown routine concretely does) and,
as a consequence, its third (is the window bounded). Traced 2026-09-18: **the ruling is almost
entirely existing mechanism, with exactly one behavioural change to a word that already
exists.**

### XVI.1 — Every piece of this already exists

- **Forced flush — `blk_flush(0)`.** `block_subsystem.c:988-990`; the source comment states it
  directly: "**0 is the 'flush all' sentinel**." Already called that way at
  `block_subsystem.c:849`, and already the Stadium's own write-back action for
  `STADIUM_BEHAVIOUR_MIGRATE` (`stadium.c:336`, `:373`). Nothing new to build.
- **A child VM's `BYE` — `system_word_bye()`** (`src/word_source/system_words.c:143-147`):
  sets `vm->halted = 1`, signalling the REPL to stop. That is already precisely "a VM
  termination." Confirmed by `mama_forth_words.c:2262-2263`'s own doc comment: "In child VMs
  this word is never registered; children use the standard `system_word_bye` which sets
  `vm->halted` and returns to the parent's REPL."
- **Halting the processor — `arch_halt()`**, declared at `include/starkernel/arch.h:64` and
  implemented on **all three architectures** (`amd64/arch.c:207`, `aarch64/arch.c:126`,
  `riscv64/arch.c:170`). Three-arch parity already holds, so the non-negotiable acceptance
  criteria are satisfiable without new per-arch work.

**So a child VM's clean shutdown is `blk_flush(0)` then `BYE`** — two existing calls in
sequence. This sits comfortably inside the "reorganization, not invention" scope discipline.

### XVI.2 — The one real change: Hera's `BYE` does not currently halt. It cold-restarts.

**This is the finding of this section, and it is a behavioural change to a live, registered
word — not a gap to fill.** `mama_word_bye()` (`mama_forth_words.c:2265-2271`) is Hera's own
`BYE`, and its doc comment says outright: "**Hera-only: reap all children then cold-restart the
machine.**" The body is exactly two actions:

```c
capsule_vm_kill_all_nonmama();   /* "BYE: reaping children" */
arch_cold_reset();               /* "BYE: cold restart"     */
```

Against Bob's ruling:

- **`capsule_vm_kill_all_nonmama()` already matches** the "fleet shuts down" half. (The
  contract is documented downstream too — `include/starkernel/capsule_birth.h:339` describes
  it as called "from Hera's BYE immediately before `arch_cold_reset()` to reap all children.")
- **`arch_cold_reset()` does not match.** The ruling is *halt*, not restart. A cold reset
  reboots the machine; suicide stops it. These are opposite outcomes, and today's code does the
  wrong one.

**Implementation shape, traced:** `arch_cold_reset()` is `__attribute__((noreturn))`
(`arch.h:67`), but `arch_halt()` is **not** — it halts only until the next interrupt and is
called once per idle iteration in normal use (`amd64/arch.c:200-205`'s own comment). A
permanent halt is therefore `arch_disable_interrupts()` followed by a `for(;;) arch_halt();`
loop — which is exactly the pattern amd64's *own* `arch_cold_reset()` already uses as its
unreachable fallback (`for (;;) __asm__ volatile ("cli; hlt");`, `arch.c:218`) and the same
shape the kernel panic path uses. **No new primitive; an existing pattern applied
deliberately.**

**Flagged for a conscious decision, not resolved here.** `.claude/CLAUDE.md` carries a hard
rule: "Never modify a registered, tested word to 'fix' it." This is not a fix — it is a ruled
behavioural change — which is a different thing, and the rule's own reasoning ("the problem is
almost certainly in the caller") does not apply. But the change is real and should be made
knowingly rather than discovered in a diff. **Whether Hera's suicide is spelled as a changed
`BYE` or as a separate word leaving `BYE`'s cold-restart intact is an implementation choice,
and is not decided here.** Worth noting that cold-restart-on-`BYE` is plausibly wanted behaviour
for an interactive operator typing `BYE` at Hera's REPL, which is an argument for two words
rather than one.

### XVI.3 — A shared-source constraint on where the flush goes

`system_word_bye()` lives in `src/word_source/system_words.c` — **vendored/shared source that
must compile and behave correctly in the hosted build as well as the kernel**
(`.claude/CLAUDE.md`: gate kernel-only code with `#ifdef __STARKERNEL__`). Forcing a
`blk_flush(0)` inside `system_word_bye()` itself would change hosted-build behaviour for a word
that has nothing to do with this design.

**So the forced flush belongs in the kernel-side shutdown path that calls `BYE`, not inside
`BYE`.** Stated here as a constraint on implementation so the obvious-looking edit is not made
in the obvious-looking place.

### XVI.4 — §VIII.3's third question answers itself: Hera's halt is the bound

§VIII.3 asked whether the shutdown window is bounded, noting that "holds it until it goes down"
gives no deadline. **It is bounded, and by construction rather than by a timer: the window ends
when Hera halts the processor.** Children flush and say `BYE`; Hera reaps whatever remains and
stops the machine. There is no deadline to choose, no timeout to tune, and — consistent with
§XV.3 — nothing that has to *decide* when time is up. The sequence terminates because its last
step is physically terminal.

This also satisfies §VII.1 step 3's "no lingering, no partial states" literally: after
`arch_halt()` in a disabled-interrupt loop there is no state left to linger in.

### XVI.5 — Item 9 is now half-answered

§VII.2 left two questions on `SOS`: which message-type number, and "who consumes an `SOS`, and
what do they do with it?" **The second is answered for the two fleet-fatal cases:** on Hermes's
sinking semaphore (§VIII.1) and on total birther failure (§IX.1), the response is now concrete
— forced flush, `BYE`, and Hera's suicide as the terminal step.

**Still genuinely open, and narrower than before:** what a peer does on receiving an *ordinary*
VM's `SOS`. A single non-Tripod VM in trouble is presumably not fleet-fatal, so "everyone
shuts down" cannot be the universal answer — but §XV.2 rules out the obvious alternative, since
with no death-declarer an `SOS` consumer cannot be a supervisor that decides another VM's fate.
The remaining question is therefore specifically: **is a peer's `SOS` actionable at all, or is
it purely advisory/diagnostic?** Plus the trivial number allocation (§I.4: 5 and 6 are
unallocated gaps, 10 is next in sequence).

### XVI.6 — Punch list after this ruling

- ✅ **Item 10 (§VIII.3) — SETTLED** (§XVI). Clean shutdown = `blk_flush(0)` + `BYE`; Hera =
  suicide via a permanent `arch_halt()` loop. Window bounded by Hera's halt (§XVI.4). All
  mechanism exists on all three architectures.
- 🔶 **Item 9 (§VII.2) — HALF-ANSWERED** (§XVI.5). Consumer action defined for the two
  fleet-fatal cases. Open: whether a peer `SOS` is actionable or advisory, plus the number.
- ⬜ **Item 12 (§XIII.5)** — Hestia Tripod leg: new singleton or not? Unchanged; still gates §IV.
- ⬜ **Item 16 (§XV.4)** — implementation check: teardown paths must reach `STADIUM-EVICT`.
- ⬜ **Item 17, NEW** (§XVI.2) — decide whether Hera's suicide replaces `BYE`'s cold-restart or
  becomes a separate word. Small, but it changes a live registered word either way.

### XVI.7 — One residual edge, raised not answered

**If Hera is already dead, nobody performs the halt.** §XV.2 makes death compudynamic and §IX.1
forbids any VM assuming her authority, so on total Hera failure there is no actor left to run
`arch_halt()`. The machine would be a live kernel with an empty Stadium floor — which is
precisely the "lingering, partial state" §VII.1 step 3 rules out.

The shape that resolves it without violating §IX: **an empty floor is a kernel-observable
condition, not a VM's decision.** The kernel noticing "no live VMs remain" and halting is not a
VM inheriting Hera's authority — it is the machine having nothing left to run. That keeps
authority flowing only down the birth graph (§IX.2) while still terminating.

**Offered as analysis, not a ruling — Captain Bob's call.** Added as punch item 18.

---

## XVII. Item 12 CLOSED — "Console" already exists as a singleton; it just has no VM face

Taken as closing **item 12** (§XIII.5's Hestia-singleton question), the largest remaining
design item and the one gating §IV.

**§XIII.5 framed this wrongly, and the error is worth naming before the answer.** It compared
the Tripod legs against `capsule_console_birth()`'s per-attach proxies, found Hestia "plural,
ephemeral and capsule-less," and concluded that a singular pinned Hestia "does not currently
exist" — so §IV.1 would be creating one, straining the reorganization-not-invention discipline.
**That comparison picked the wrong object.** Traced 2026-09-18: there are three distinct things
called "console" in this kernel, not two.

### XVII.1 — The three consoles, traced

1. **The HAL console — the drawing fabric itself.** `src/starkernel/hal/console.c` (14 KB),
   `framebuffer.c` (13 KB), `vt100.c` (43 KB), `font_8x16.c` (27 KB) — ~98 KB of kernel C.
   **Already singular. Already permanent. Already kernel-resident.** It is not a VM and has no
   owner in the fleet sense.
2. **The console proxy VMs** — `capsule_console_birth()`, plural, ephemeral, minted per attach
   from a 3-line C string literal (§XIII.5).
3. **The active-console-VM name** — a single global, `console_set_vm_name()`/
   `console_get_vm_name()` (`include/starkernel/console.h:190-191`), swapped by every dispatch
   in the "switch, do work, switch back" pattern.

### XVII.2 — RULING: the Hestia Tripod leg is (1), given a VM face. Not a promoted proxy.

The singular, permanent Hestia this design wants **already exists in substance** — it is the
drawing fabric. What it lacks is an *owner*: today the fabric is an ownerless kernel singleton
that any VM reaches into through a global. So §IV.1's "Hestia takes the vacated third slot"
is **not** the invention §XIII.5 feared. It is giving an existing singleton a VM face.

That resolves the tension cleanly and without inventing anything:

- **The Hestia leg is singular, pinned and born-at-boot** — because the fabric it owns already
  is all three.
- **The proxies are untouched.** They stay plural and ephemeral, which is correct: they are
  what *binding produces*, not what Hestia *is* (§XIII.5's own phrasing, now properly
  grounded).
- **§V.1's "bind point" falls out rather than being asserted.** The VM that owns the fabric is
  necessarily what a user or agent VM binds *to*.

**§XIII.5's proposed shape was right; its justification was wrong.** It proposed exactly this
leg/proxy split but called the leg new. The leg is not new — only its VM face is.

### XVII.3 — The evidence that the fabric actually wants an owner

This is not merely tidy. The ownerless global in (3) has already caused a real, live bug,
documented in the kernel's own header (`console.h:193-203`): `console_get_vm_name()` alone is
**not** safe for save-then-restore, because it returns a pointer into the single internal
buffer that `console_set_vm_name()` copies into — so an intervening call in the normal
"switch, do work, switch back" pattern overwrites the very bytes the saved pointer points at
**before the restore runs**. Found live 2026-08-28; the restore silently no-opped.
`console_save_vm_name()` exists solely to work around it.

That is the signature of shared mutable state with no owner. **Giving the fabric an owning VM
is a structural fix for the class**, not just a reorganization — and it is an argument *for*
Bob's reshuffle that this document had not previously identified.

### XVII.4 — What this commits to, concretely

Consequences of the ruling, so they are not discovered late:

- **Hestia needs a capsule personality.** `capsules/hestia/init.4th` — a new directory beside
  `hermes/` and `artemis/`. This is the one genuinely new artifact, and it is a capsule, not a
  mechanism.
- **`is_fleet_foundation` changes membership** (`capsule_birth.c:793-796`): the name-prefix
  triple becomes Hera / Artemis / Hestia. That single line is what makes a VM pinned
  (§XIII.3), so it is also what makes Hestia a Tripod leg.
- **`kernel_main.c:865`'s `S" Hermes" BIRTH` becomes Hestia's birth**, and the switch-signal
  registration at `:1007` follows it.
- **The DoE CSV schema changes** — `doe_log.c`'s six Tripod-named columns (§XIII.3). Still the
  expensive consequence, still not to be resolved by quietly renaming a column.
- **Hestia must have `BIRTH` registered** (§XIII.6): binding mints a proxy, and minting is
  `BIRTH`. Already settled in principle by §XV.1's "any VM can birth."
- **Hestia becomes the owner of the `console_set_vm_name()` discipline** — the fix in §XVII.3
  is available once there is an owner, but is **not** in this reshuffle's scope. Flagged, not
  scheduled.

### XVII.5 — §IV is unblocked, and §XIII.5's marker corrected

With item 12 closed, **§IV.1 (Tripod = Hera/Artemis/Hestia) stands as ratified with no
outstanding objection**, and §IV.2 remains dissolved per §XIV.2. §XIII.5's "this is the one
place the scope discipline is genuinely strained" no longer holds and is corrected there.

### XVII.6 — Punch list after this ruling

- ✅ **Item 12 — CLOSED** (§XVII). The Hestia leg is the existing drawing-fabric singleton
  given a VM face; proxies unchanged. §IV unblocked.
- 🔶 **Item 9** — half-answered (§XVI.5): open is whether an ordinary peer's `SOS` is actionable
  or advisory, plus the number allocation.
- ⬜ **§VIII.3 first bullet** — where the sinking semaphore mechanically lives.
- ⬜ **Item 16** (§XV.4) — implementation check: teardown paths must reach `STADIUM-EVICT`.
- ⬜ **Item 17** (§XVI.2) — does Hera's suicide replace `BYE`'s cold-restart or become a
  separate word?
- ⬜ **Item 18** (§XVI.7) — if Hera is already dead, nobody performs the halt.

**Nothing structural remains open.** Items 9, 17 and 18 are small, local decisions; §VIII.3's
first bullet is a placement question; item 16 is a build-time check. Every load-bearing
architectural question this document opened — what Hermes becomes, what the Tripod is, what
`BIRTH` means, who owns death, who owns turn order, what survives, what shutdown is — is now
ruled.

---

## XVIII. The Hestia component, designed in full (2026-09-18)

§XVII settled *what* the Hestia leg is. This section designs the component. Everything below
traced 2026-09-18 against `e56974e`; decisions are marked, proposals are marked, and open
questions are marked.

### XVIII.1 — Hestia is three layers, and only the middle one is new

| Layer | What | Where it lives today | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| **0 — the fabric** | Raw output: framebuffer, VT100, glyph raster, UART | `hal/console.c`, `framebuffer.c`, `vt100.c`, `font_8x16.c` (~98 KB C) | **None.** Stays kernel HAL. |
| **1 — Hestia the VM** | Tripod leg. Owns fabric *policy*, is the bind point | **Does not exist** | **New — and it is a capsule, not a mechanism.** |
| **2 — console proxies** | Per-attach relay VMs, one per bound user/agent | `capsule_console_birth()` | **None**, except their birther becomes Hestia. |

The design is almost entirely layer 1, and layer 1 is mostly a *relocation* of vocabulary that
already exists in the wrong dictionary (§XVIII.3).

### XVIII.2 — The constraint that shapes everything: the HAL must never know a VM exists

**This is not a preference, it is a defended invariant with a documented rationale**
(`include/starkernel/console.h:220-224`, verbatim):

> `console.c` is a clean HAL module with no dependency on capsule/WIREBIND logic
> (`zuse_session`, `capsule_wirebind_attached_username()`) — pulling either in directly here
> would be a **real layering violation, not just a style preference.**

So **Hestia-the-VM may not be implemented by making `console.c` VM-aware.** Ownership flows one
way only: Hestia reaches *down* into the HAL; the HAL never reaches *up*.

**The sanctioned pattern for the cases where the HAL does need something VM-shaped already
exists and should be reused rather than reinvented:** `console_set_user_prefix_provider()`
(`console.h:231`) — a callback that lets `repl.c` supply the "user" half of the `[user@VMName]`
prompt "without `console.c` knowing anything about VMs, sessions, or WIREBIND." Any further
HAL→Hestia coupling this design needs takes that shape: a registered callback, never an
include.

**Consequence, stated plainly:** Hestia's "ownership" of the fabric is by *convention,
vocabulary and registration* — it is the VM that holds the drawing words — **not** by any
enforcement inside `console.c`. That is weaker than it sounds and is exactly right: it keeps
the HAL reusable and the layering intact.

### XVIII.3 — Hestia's dictionary: 1,051 lines of Hestia vocabulary currently live in Hera

**The most concrete finding in this section.** `capsules/fabric.4th`'s own header reads:

> `fabric.4th` — **Console drawing-fabric coordinate machinery.** `FABRIC-0.md` item 4.3.3.
> 45-degree cavalier orthographic projection... Raw pixel write (`PLOT`/`FB-WIDTH`/`FB-HEIGHT`)
> is C; **this capsule is the FORTH-side policy on top of it.**

It is named Hestia's fabric, it *is* the FORTH-side fabric policy — and it loads into **Hera's**
dictionary (`capsules/init.4th` block 2049: `S" fabric.4th" EXEC`, `S" font.4th" EXEC`).

| Capsule | Lines | Loads into today | Should load into |
|---|---|---|---|
| `fabric.4th` | 319 | **Hera** (`init.4th` b2049) | **Hestia** |
| `font.4th` | 733 | **Hera** (`init.4th` b2049) | **Hestia** |
| `turtle.4th` | 99 | `sdk.4th` (opt-in, not boot) | unchanged — it is SDK, not fabric |

**Plus the C primitives underneath:** `PLOT`, `FB-WIDTH`, `FB-HEIGHT`
(`src/word_source/framebuffer_words.c:62-64`). Their *registration* moves to Hestia's word
table; the implementations do not change.

**DECIDED (proposal — Captain Bob's call, but this is the direct consequence of §XVII.2):**
`fabric.4th` and `font.4th` move from `init.4th` to `capsules/hestia/init.4th`. This is a pure
relocation of 1,051 lines — the single most obviously-correct edit in the whole reshuffle, and
the clearest evidence that the fabric wants an owner: it already *has* the vocabulary, just
attached to the wrong VM.

**Parity consequence** (§III.5): Hera's `dict_hash` will shrink, Hestia's is new. Per §XX's
standard, the property that matters is cross-architecture identity, not an unchanging absolute.

### XVIII.4 — Hestia's capsule personality

`capsules/hestia/init.4th` — a new directory beside `hermes/` and `artemis/`, and **the one
genuinely new artifact this reshuffle creates.**

Contents, in load order:

1. `S" common:messaging.4th" EXEC` + `MSG-CD-INIT` — Hestia is a Tripod leg and a full
   messaging participant. **Note this differs from the proxies**, which deliberately skip
   `COMMON-CH` (`capsule_console.c:23-26`: "a console's own traffic is direct 1:1 with its
   paired user VM"). The *leg* subscribes; the *proxies* still do not.
2. `S" fabric.4th" EXEC` and `S" font.4th" EXEC` — per §XVIII.3.
3. Hestia's own bind vocabulary (§XVIII.5).
4. A `WELCOME`/banner word, matching `hermes/init.4th`'s and `artemis/init.4th`'s shape.

**Block allocation is a real to-do, not a formality.** `mkcapsule`'s actual constraints, per
§XXXII.2's correction: block range **`[2048, 5120)`** and a hard **16-content-line-per-block**
cap (*not* the 1024-byte framing `.claude/CLAUDE.md` still describes — that doc error is
outstanding). **Block 4997 is already taken** by the proxy's own C string literal
(`capsule_console.c:28-31`), so Hestia's range must avoid it. Allocate against
`capsule-reserved.txt` and verify with `mkcapsule --lint capsules/` (§XXIV's collision
machinery covers this; it is blind to content, only to numbers).

### XVIII.5 — The bind point: flow and vocabulary

**Binding, end to end, after the reshuffle:**

```
  human attaches thumbdrive        agent VM needs a console
            │                                │
            ▼                                ▼
      WIREBIND path                    CONSOLE-ATTACH
            │                                │
            └──────────► Hestia ◄───────────┘
                           │
                    BIRTH a proxy          (§XV.1 makes this legal:
                           │                any VM may birth)
                           ▼
                 proxy paired to target
                 (VM-NAME-REG, unchanged)
```

- **`CONSOLE-ATTACH ( name-c name-u -- ok? )` already exists and is live-verified** (§I.6,
  closed 2026-09-16). It resolves the target's liveness *before* birthing, so a typo refuses
  cleanly with no orphaned VM. **Keep it exactly as is.** The change is *who runs it*: today
  the three `capsule_console_birth()` call sites run in Hera's or the caller's context
  (`capsule_wirebind.c:245`, `mama_forth_words.c:1591`, `:2015`). Under this design Hestia is
  the birther.
- **This is why Hestia needs `BIRTH` registered** (§XIII.6) — binding *mints a proxy*, and
  minting is `BIRTH`. Already legal per §XV.1.
- **Mechanically this already works:** two of the three call sites pass `vm->stadium_vm_id` —
  whichever VM invoked — so parentage is already generic (§I.5, §XIII.6). Only registration
  changes.

**OPEN — agent-VM binding and the `~user` convention** (§V.3.1, still unresolved). The pairing
check in `sk_repl_dispatch_line()` reconstructs the target as `console_get_vm_name() + "~user"`
— a convention built for *human at a console → identity VM*. A GPIO VM (`FABRIC-4.md` §2) is
not a `~user` identity. §XXXII.2 records that a console named anything else "silently falls
back to direct interpretation with no error," caught live. **Two shapes, neither chosen:**
(a) widen the convention so the suffix is a property of the *binding*, not hardcoded; (b) give
agent binding its own word alongside `CONSOLE-ATTACH`. **(a) is preferable on
no-bespoke-gate grounds but touches a live, bug-prone path; flagged rather than decided.**

### XVIII.6 — Headless-until-login survives, and the invariant that makes it survive

**Hestia the leg is born at boot. A console session is not.** These must not be conflated, or
§VIII.1's ratified headless-until-login policy reopens — the exact failure §XXXII.2 warned
about for unattended birth.

**INVARIANT, to be stated in whatever code implements Hestia:**

> Hestia's birth at boot must not set `g_wirebind_attached_username`, must not cause
> `sk_console_identity_present()` (`repl.c:122`) to report an identity, and must not mint a
> proxy. Hestia owns the fabric from boot; it presents nothing until something binds.

This is the same invariant §XXXII.2 imposed on unattended identity birth, applied to a second
path. It is cheap to hold — Hestia births no proxy until asked — but it is exactly the kind of
thing that gets violated by a well-meaning "initialise the console at startup" line.

### XVIII.7 — What Hestia does *not* own

Stated because a component that owns "the bind point" attracts responsibilities that belong
elsewhere, and this document has already had to defend against exactly that (§XV.3):

- **Not turn order.** Nothing owns it (§XV.3).
- **Not routing.** That is kernel-Hermes (§III), which sits *below* Hestia.
- **Not the lifecycle of anything but its own proxies.** Hestia births proxies; it does not
  birth, kill, or supervise identity VMs. Authority flows down the birth graph only (§IX.2).
- **Not the prompt's user half.** That stays `repl.c`'s, supplied to the HAL via the existing
  provider callback (§XVIII.2). Moving it into Hestia would be the layering violation
  `console.h` explicitly names.

### XVIII.8 — Hestia's own failure behaviour

Hestia is a Stadium-floor VM **above** the routing layer, so §VIII.2's rule applies without an
exception: **Hestia emits `SOS`**; only Hermes uses the semaphore. Its clean shutdown is
§XVI's: forced `blk_flush(0)`, then `BYE`.

**A pleasant property worth recording: Hestia's death degrades gracefully by construction.**
Because layer 0 is HAL C (§XVIII.1) and ownership is by convention rather than enforcement
(§XVIII.2), a dead Hestia leaves the framebuffer, VT100 and UART fully functional — the fabric
simply becomes ownerless again, which is precisely today's status quo. The kernel can still
print. **This is the opposite of Hermes**, whose death takes the transport with it. So the
Tripod's three legs have three genuinely different failure characters: Artemis's death costs
storage arbitration, Hestia's costs only fabric *policy*, Hermes's costs the transport itself —
which is why only Hermes needed the semaphore.

### XVIII.9 — Punch list for Hestia

Design items, in dependency order. **No code authorized.**

1. ⬜ Ratify §XVIII.3's relocation: `fabric.4th` + `font.4th` move from `init.4th` to
   `capsules/hestia/init.4th`; `PLOT`/`FB-WIDTH`/`FB-HEIGHT` registration moves to Hestia.
2. ⬜ Allocate Hestia's block range against `capsule-reserved.txt`, avoiding 4997; verify with
   `mkcapsule --lint` (§XVIII.4).
3. ✅ **SETTLED 2026-09-19 by §XX** — neither option. The pairing is already recorded at bind
   time; the `~user` reconstruction is a redundant derivation and is removed. Agent binding
   then needs no new mechanism.
4. ⬜ Confirm Hestia in the `is_fleet_foundation` triple (`capsule_birth.c:793-796`) and its
   birth at `kernel_main.c:865`, replacing Hermes's (§XVII.4).
5. ⬜ Handle the `doe_log.c` CSV schema change (§XIII.3) — still the expensive consequence.
6. ⬜ State §XVIII.6's headless invariant in the implementation.
7. ⬜ **Not in this reshuffle:** the `console_set_vm_name()` ownerless-global fix (§XVII.3) is
   now *available* once Hestia exists, but remains out of scope. Flagged, not scheduled.

---

## XIX. RULING: the third Tripod leg is named Hestia, not Console (Captain Bob, 2026-09-19)

**The Tripod is: Hera, Artemis, Hestia.** Applied throughout this document — 99 occurrences
renamed; three verbatim quotations deliberately left saying "Console" (§XIX.4).

### XIX.1 — The naming convention, stated so it stops being re-litigated

`antiprosopos` (Gk. representative/delegate) was considered first and **rejected, on Captain
Bob's reasoning, which is the correct reasoning and is recorded here because it generalizes:**

> "Now this is just a name of a Greek mythos god, it doesn't have to carry full/perfect
> [fidelity], it's only a contextual display... After all, Artemis isn't exactly the perfect
> name for a memory manager/storage manager either."

That is the convention, and it had never been written down: **a Greek deity name, evocative
rather than literal.** Checked against what exists — Hera (queen/mother → the Mama VM) is a
close fit, Hermes (messenger → messaging) is the closest, and **Artemis (huntress, wilderness →
block storage and freemap arbitration) is a loose fit that has never caused anyone a
problem.** Fidelity was never the standard.

`antiprosopos` failed on being the wrong *kind* of word: a common noun straining for literal
accuracy, which is the opposite of how the other three work. `Hestia` — goddess of the hearth —
is a deity, is evocative (the hearth is the fixed centre of the household, where everyone
gathers), and carries a pleasing incidental: **Hestia is the one who never leaves.** That maps
onto the pinned-session model (`FABRIC-2.md` §H.1, "they never leave, permanently") without
having been chosen for it.

**Two costs that `antiprosopos` carried are retired by this choice, not merely tolerated:**
- **Pattern.** `antiprosopos` is Greek vocabulary, not a deity — it half-joined the set.
  `Hestia` joins it fully.
- **Typo surface.** Twelve characters of unusual spelling, in a path where a VM-name mismatch
  fails *silently* (§XIX.5). `Hestia` is six, comparable to `Hermes` and `Artemis`.

### XIX.2 — Why renaming at all is structural, not cosmetic

§XVII.1 found three distinct things in this kernel all called "console" — the HAL fabric, the
VM, and the per-attach proxies — and that collision is exactly what led §XIII.5 to the wrong
conclusion about whether a singular Console existed. Naming the VM separately resolves it by
construction:

| Layer | Name after this ruling |
|---|---|
| 0 — the drawing fabric (HAL C) | **the console** — `console.c`, unchanged |
| 1 — the Tripod leg, owns the fabric | **Hestia** |
| 2 — per-attach relay VMs | **console proxies** — unchanged |

"Hestia owns `console.c`" is unambiguous in a way "Console owns `console.c`" cannot be. This
document has already paid once for that ambiguity; the rename is what stops it recurring.

### XIX.3 — What is NOT renamed

The ruling names a VM. It does not rename the subsystem:

- **The HAL stays `console.c`/`console.h`** and every `console_*()` function. Renaming them
  would be churn across ~98 KB of C for no gain, and would re-create the confusion by making
  the HAL sound like the VM.
- **`capsule_console_birth()` / `CONSOLE_IDENTITY_SRC` stay** — they mint console proxies,
  still called console proxies.
- **`CONSOLE-ATTACH` stays.** `.claude/CLAUDE.md`'s "never modify a registered, tested word"
  applies with more force to *renaming* one, and the word remains accurate: it attaches a
  console. **Recommended, not ruled.**
- **`CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT` and `sk_console_identity_present()` stay** — both are layer 0/2
  business (a console session), not Hestia's (§XVIII.6).

**Net code-visible rename surface:** the VM's registry name, its capsule directory
(`capsules/hestia/init.4th`), and the places the Tripod is enumerated (§XIX.6).

### XIX.4 — Three quotations deliberately still say "Console"

Quoted source is not silently edited to match a later decision:

1. **Line 26** — the opening brief's own wording ("Hera lifecycle/ACL, Console framebuffer").
2. **§XVIII.3** — `capsules/fabric.4th`'s verbatim header, "Console drawing-fabric coordinate
   machinery." That is what the file says *today*; it changes when the file is edited, and
   **that edit belongs to the §XVIII.3 relocation, not to this ruling.**
3. **§XVII's heading** — a meta-reference to the name itself, which is that section's subject.

### XIX.5 — `~user` is a separate question, unaffected

`antiprosopos` was first raised as a replacement for the `~user` registry-name suffix. **That
remains punch item 3** (§XVIII.5), and the Hestia ruling does not touch it. Recorded so the two
never get conflated:

Traced 2026-09-18 — as a *suffix* it does not fit the buffers. `VM_NAME_MAX` is 64 and
`USER_IDENTITY_USERNAME_MAX` 32, so the name fits in principle, but every construction buffer
is sized `+ 8`, tuned exactly to `"~user"` (5 chars + NUL = 6): `capsule_wirebind.c:222` (=40),
`mama_forth_words.c:1855`/`:1991` and `repl.c:1243` (=72), each guarding on a hardcoded `+ 6`.
A 14-byte suffix would not overflow them — it would make them **refuse**, silently failing to
bind usernames over 26 characters and registry names over 58. Six `memcpy` sites and five
guards hardcode that `6`, and `FABRIC-3.md` §XXVI was itself a truncation fix.

**And it would not answer item 3 regardless:** a GPIO VM is neither a user nor a human's
representative. The structural fix is making the suffix a property of the *binding*; settle
that first and land any suffix rename inside it, since the same eleven sites are touched either
way.

### XIX.6 — Edit surface

All were already edit sites for the Tripod membership change (§XVII.4); the rename changes the
string, not the count:

- `capsule_birth.c:793-796` — `is_fleet_foundation`'s prefix triple becomes
  Hera / Artemis / **Hestia** (matched by `vm_name_prefix_eq_nocase`, as today).
- `kernel_main.c:865` — `S" Hestia" BIRTH`; the liveness check and the switch-signal
  registration at `:1007` follow.
- `capsules/hestia/init.4th` — the new capsule directory (§XVIII.4).
- `doe_log.c` — CSV columns become `hestia_heat_q48` and `switch_hestia_readiness`. Still the
  expensive consequence (§XIII.3), but `hestia` is the same width as `hermes`, so the schema
  churn is a rename rather than a reflow.

### XIX.7 — One hazard, recorded and generalized

A VM-name mismatch in this system **fails quietly.** §XXXII.2 records it caught live on the
first attempt: a console named anything other than the expected form "silently falls back to
direct interpretation with no error" — typing `5 6 + .` printed a direct `11` instead of a
relayed one, with nothing reported.

`Hestia` is short and ordinary enough that this is no longer an argument about the name. But
the class remains: **if the §XVIII.5 binding work touches that path anyway, making an
unresolved or mismatched name *say so* would retire the hazard for every VM name, not just this
one.** Raised as punch item 19, not scheduled.

---

## XX. Item 3 SETTLED: delete the suffix from the mechanism — neither widen it nor add a word

§XVIII.5 posed agent-VM binding as a choice between (a) widening the `~user` convention and
(b) a sibling word for agent binding. **Both options are wrong, because both accept a premise
the code does not support.** Traced 2026-09-18/19: the pairing is *already recorded
explicitly*, and the `~user` reconstruction is a redundant second derivation of information the
mechanism already holds.

### XX.1 — The relay does not route by name. It routes by a slot recorded at bind time.

`sk_repl_dispatch_line()` (`repl.c:1225-1265`) does two separate things, and only one of them
involves the suffix:

1. **The guard** builds `paired_name = console_get_vm_name() + "~user"`
   (`repl.c:1243-1247`) and checks `capsule_vm_find_by_name(paired_name, ...)` is `VM_STATE_LIVE`.
2. **The actual relay** then sends `CONSOLE-CMD-EVENT 0 3 S" <line>" 0 MSG-SEND` — **to index
   3**, with this comment verbatim: *"to-index 3: the fixed convention this console's own
   `VM-NAME-REG` entry for its paired user VM uses (**set once at pairing time** — see the
   pairing word)."*

`PAIR-TEST`'s own header says the same from the other side (`mama_forth_words.c:1542-1543`):
"**Registers the pairing in the console's own VM-name routing table at the fixed index (3) that
relay uses.**"

**So the target is already stored, per-proxy, at bind time.** The suffix string is used only to
answer "is my partner alive?" — a question the stored pairing can answer directly, without
deriving anything.

### XX.2 — This is the documented cause of the known silent-failure bug

`CONSOLE-ATTACH`'s own doc comment (`mama_forth_words.c:1931-1940`) states it outright:

> `sk_repl_dispatch_line()`'s own pairing check (`repl.c`) reconstructs the target as
> `console_get_vm_name() + "~user"`... **A console named anything other than the identity's own
> base name reconstructs the wrong target string and silently falls back to direct
> interpretation — no error, just quietly never relays.**

`CONSOLE-ATTACH` already carries a workaround for this: it "takes exactly one name, not an
independently chosen console name," collapsing two arguments into one *so the reconstruction
cannot disagree*. That is a constraint imposed by the derivation, not by the problem.

### XX.3 — RULING (proposed): the bind records its target; nothing re-derives it

**Replace the derivation with a read of what bind time already stored.**

- **`sk_repl_dispatch_line()`'s guard** asks "does this console have a recorded pairing, and is
  that target live?" instead of "does `<name>~user` exist?"
- **`CONSOLE-ATTACH`** resolves the target **as given**, rather than appending `~user`
  (`mama_forth_words.c:2000`).
- **`~user` survives as a naming convention, not as a mechanism.** It still disambiguates
  `rajames` the proxy from `rajames~user` the identity in the prompt — the whole point of the
  `[user@VMName]` form (§XXV follow-up, 2026-09-13). It simply stops being load-bearing.

**Four things fall out, none of which needed designing:**

1. **Agent-VM binding stops being a special case.** A GPIO VM named `gpio` binds by the same
   unchanged path as `bob~user`, because nothing appends anything to its name. **There is no
   agent-binding mechanism to build.**
2. **`CONSOLE-ATTACH`'s one-name constraint can relax** if ever wanted — it exists only to
   prevent a reconstruction that no longer happens. Not proposed as work; noted so the
   constraint is not later mistaken for a requirement.
3. **The silent-fallback class is dissolved rather than fixed.** With no string to mismatch,
   the states are "a pairing is recorded" or "none is" — determinate and reportable. **This
   retires punch item 19** (§XIX.7's "make mismatch loud") by removing what could mismatch,
   which is strictly better than making it noisy.
4. **The suffix-rename question becomes purely cosmetic** (§XIX.5). Once lookup no longer
   derives the suffix, the remaining sites only ever *construct* a name.

### XX.4 — The six `memcpy` sites split cleanly in two

This is what makes the change small. Traced 2026-09-18:

| Site | Role | Under this ruling |
|---|---|---|
| `capsule_wirebind.c:229` | **names** the identity VM at birth | **stays** — naming |
| `mama_forth_words.c:1864` (`UNATTENDED-BIRTH`) | **names** the registry entry | **stays** — naming |
| `mama_forth_words.c:1579` (`PAIR-TEST`) | **names** both halves; diagnostic word | **stays** — naming |
| `repl.c:1247` | **re-derives** the partner for a liveness guard | **goes** |
| `mama_forth_words.c:2000` (`CONSOLE-ATTACH`) | **re-derives** the target | **goes** |

**Only the two derivation sites change.** The naming sites are untouched, which is why `~user`
can remain a convention without remaining a mechanism.

### XX.5 — What "binding" means for an agent VM, stated because §V.1 conflated two things

§V.1 called Hestia "the bind point for users and agent VMs." Worth separating, since the two
need different things and only one of them is binding:

- **Reachability** — being addressable by other VMs — is **kernel-Hermes's** job (§III), not
  Hestia's. A GPIO VM is reachable because routing exists, not because it bound to anything.
- **Fabric access** — a VM that wants to *draw* — is **vocabulary and ACL**, not binding: it
  needs Hestia's drawing words (§XVIII.3), gated the `ACL.4th` way if gated at all.
- **Binding proper** — acquiring a console proxy so a human can type at a target — is what
  `CONSOLE-ATTACH` does, and after §XX.3 it works for **any** live VM by name.

**So an agent VM does not routinely bind at all.** It binds only when a human wants to attach
to it for inspection or control — and that is the ordinary console path, unchanged. The
"agent-binding problem" was an artifact of the hardcoded suffix; removing the suffix removes
the problem rather than solving it.

### XX.6 — Punch list

- ✅ **Item 3 — SETTLED** (§XX.3): the bind records its target; nothing re-derives it. Agent
  binding needs no new mechanism.
- ✅ **Item 19 — RETIRED** (§XX.3.3): dissolved by removing the mismatch, not by making it loud.
- 🔶 **Item 9** — unchanged: is an ordinary peer's `SOS` actionable or advisory, plus its number.
- ⬜ **§VIII.3 first bullet** — where the sinking semaphore mechanically lives.
- ⬜ **Items 16, 17, 18** — unchanged (teardown/`STADIUM-EVICT` check; `BYE` vs. a separate
  suicide word; the empty-floor halt).

**Caveat on scope, per §XIV.1.** `repl.c`'s relay and the routing-slot-3 convention are part of
the FORTH messaging layer Captain Bob ruled legacy. This ruling states the *principle* — the
pairing is recorded, never derived — which kernel-Hermes must carry forward. It is not a
proposal to patch the legacy path in place.