Paper VII conformance remediation (tracking) #891

Tracking container (not an executable PR). Groups the remediation from the Paper VII conformance audit (AIΩN Paper VII, WARP: Optics, Holograms, and Worldlines over Shared Causal History), recorded below with the owner ruling. Child issues are filed separately with their own acceptance checks and dependency edges.

Audit summary (2026-10-16)

Three read-only audits (Echo transport and settlement, Echo identity and retention, Continuum c33caa3e) classified each Paper VII obligation. The answer: Continuum today delivers identified occurrences; it does not establish comparable causal claims for replica-scale lowering, and Echo only stages imports. Most findings are incomplete implementation, consistent with both repos' own design docs. Four contradictions:

1. Echo: settle_strand (warp_kernel.rs:1115 → SettlementService::settle, settlement.rs:959) appends provenance outside intent admission, contrary to docs/architecture/continuum-transport.md:108-122 (Causal Mutation Rule).
2. Echo: dispatch_intent (warp_kernel.rs:975-997) always targets DefaultWriter { default_worldline }, ignoring the import request's target_worldline_id, and records Staged without the library's identity checks.
3. Echo: submit_intent_inner admits submissions into AuthorOnly strands without any posture or principal check (Paper VII §6.3).
4. Continuum: SettlementDecisionKind { IMPORT, CONFLICT } cannot express Plural or Obstruction (contradicts Continuum Inv. 12).

Owner ruling, 2026-10-16 (verbatim, abridged to the decisions)

APPROVE the audit. APPROVE local identity hardening. REJECT the existing direct settlement commit path. REQUIRE a proper Continuum transport contract before further import implementation.

Implementing the full retention/folding machinery can remain staged. What cannot remain unspecified is which guarantees a shell actually makes.

Wired import: fail closed. Until transport and explicit receiving-context dispatch are implemented, the wired import should return a typed UnsupportedImport or equivalent obstruction without recording a misleading Staged result. Do not silently substitute a default worldline.

Settlement: preserve the existing settlement implementation as a candidate evaluator if it can be made pure and deterministic; remove its ability to commit authoritative history directly; its result becomes a proposed operation subject to ordinary admission. Not every lawful outcome necessarily advances a canonical worldline.

Transport: Continuum defines what a lawful transported causal claim means; Echo implements how it is admitted. Comparability must be demonstrated, never assumed; it need not be literal shared ancestry (an explicit translation or correspondence witness may establish it). Source identity and receiving coordinate are different facts.

Protected strands: a security boundary. AuthorOnly: only an authorized principal can submit or explicitly delegate. Scratch: no automatic admission of live external crossings. Shared: the applicable shared authority policy. Unknown principal, missing authority evidence or ambiguous target posture fail closed. Synthetic fork provenance is not authentication.

Frozen PRs: #885 and #888 directionally approved after normal CI and review. #890 directionally approved provided inherited occurrence decisions are stable at the fork basis, post-fork parent decisions do not leak, and existing receipts remain unchanged. Do not describe any of these as replica-scale conformance.

Execution rules: keep changes atomic and separately reviewable; record dependencies; do not invent Echo-specific protocol semantics in Continuum; no second admission law; fix immediate correctness violations first, then define Continuum's shared transport contract before implementing further replica-import behavior; report concrete implementation evidence separately from design-only claims.

Incomplete: we haven't implemented comparable-basis transport. Incorrect: we claim to import into an explicit worldline but actually dispatch to a default worldline. The former needs a plan. The latter needs a fix.