alpha 9.10.2 — The latch was narrower than the answer

Three audit workflows against two stated conventions: ask the model broad
questions and make the latch wide enough to catch the answer, and feed each
stage only what the present scene holds. Twenty-five defects, and nearly all of
them were the first convention — the model was right and the engine could not
catch what it said.

The comms channel was dead end to end

The spatial hand owns comms_ops and was never shown scene["comms"], while
its own chunk makes set a complete replacement snapshot demanding an id. So
every maintenance op ever written — 4 of 4 in the corpus — named an id the
establishing beat had not used. Chats 78 and 84 still carry two live PA channels
each, and chat 78 turn 8's prose says "She then releases the PA button" while
the close hit an unknown id and flipped nothing.

Fixed on five surfaces: the payload, director_establish's output shape, the
changes_asserted vocabulary, the reconcile auditor, and the delegation list.
Measured A/B on the real beat — with the ledger visible the Director emitted
comms_ops: [], correctly recognising nothing needed doing; with it stripped,
a third invented id.

A sentence spliced in half, in all twelve specialist cores

"Omit resolved_events entirely when you were given no numbered events." had
another block pasted into its middle, orphaning the word events. two
paragraphs later. English was repaired by relocation alone, not one word
changed. Japanese could not be — it had been translated from the spliced
English, so the sentence's object was simply absent, and ja/offscreen had
swallowed the heading entirely: that block opened mid-thought with nothing ever
saying an event might not be yours.

And the defect nobody looked for: ja/body had translated three of six
reroute_to roster values and ja/objects all six. reroute_to is matched
by identity (target in SPECIALISTS), so on a Japanese session the objects
hand could address nobody — every forwarding address dropped, routing falling
back to the category map, which is the re-ask that block exists to prevent.

Stale authority: the author told to write what it cannot write

prose_author_sheet/08.txt is ungated core and instructed the prose author
to write state_diff.entities and state_diff.rooms on every beat — against
12.txt and 27.txt stating those exist in no field of its output and are
discarded unread. 09_transit.txt was literally {{fragment:transit_note}},
the same fragment director_establish and mapping_stage include: right for
those two, wrong for the hand that cannot write those channels, and gated on
sc["contained"] alone so not rare. Routed rather than deleted — what the
author still judges stays with the author.

Latches widened, vocabularies published

drive_shift was erased by any silent later round (merged = dict(new) and a
sixteen-name tuple it was not on). Two channel lists in director_evidence had
drifted from StateDiff. travel_interrupted, thoughts_omitted and
CourierOp.freight were asked for in prose and absent from the shape. Five
engine-owned vocabularies were graded on and never published — room size
among them, six values read against three published.

Two failed toward concealment, where blank would have been safe:
inventory_ops.relation copied verbatim into a containment mode hides an object
from the room, and a tell's channel offers six body regions where perception
recognises two sense modalities, so four of them are sight-only and a listener
in the dark loses the tell.

Three caps ended fiction in silence

_MAX_OVERLAY_ENTRIES, OBLIGATION_CAP and WORLD_PRESSURE_CAP each drop the
oldest entry by list position, with no record — and in the two ledgers age
is exactly the must-discharge signal, so the cap preferentially deleted the
entry the next beat was about to be forced to act on. The evictions are now
legible. The values are unchanged and remain an open question.

From live play

The charter bridge asks which bodies are near by handing a room id to a
filter that matches on place, inside a bare except that hid its own
failures. 37 simulated people in one chat were unreachable for fourteen turns,
and the whole subsystem read as unexercised. It now says when it is certainly
dead, and the swallow reports.

Six copies kept, deliberately

The six specialist cores are 8-of-10 paragraphs byte-identical in English and a
shared fragment would collapse them — but the Japanese renderings measure
0.70–0.93 pairwise, so one fragment would impose one hand's Japanese on the
other five. Pinned by test instead, and the guard was proven to bite by
restoring the pre-fix files: six failures. The pre-existing agreement test
passed at HEAD, correctly — both defects were uniform pastes, which is exactly
why nothing saw them.

11,069 tests pass, up from 11,010. project_check clean, compileall
clean over sixteen roots, nothing reverted.