Retrofit Soul slice-5: interiority pass on the Registry Stub Sweep tail band M-0264–M-0273

Maintenance ID: 0.1.00291.retrofit-soul-slice5 Date: 2026-10-10 Scope: content/mascots/264.corridor-heat.md, 265.provisional-mint.md, 266.warm-hold-music.md, 267.relief-watermark.md, 268.appeal-feather.md, 269.policy-afterglow.md, 270.buffer-saint.md, 271.alibi-seal.md, 272.shorthand-reliquary.md, 273.tier-whisper.md — ten tier-A records, the next stub/minimal band of the census. Issue #1040, RETROFIT SOUL slice-5.

What changed

Each record received interiority inserts under the slice-2/3/4 convention established on the fauna band and the two stub bands: new prose placed around existing prose, never in place of it. No sentence was deleted, reordered, or reworded; frontmatter, IDs, headings, parent, relations, status (including M-0271's archived), and all wikilink targets are untouched. Two insert forms were used:

• Appended paragraphs at the ends of existing prose sections — one per record. Placement per record: end of the unheaded definitional block on M-0264 and M-0271; end of ### Distinction on M-0266 and M-0269; between the definitional block and the record's closing kicker lines on M-0265, M-0267, M-0268, M-0270, M-0272, and M-0273 (so the kickers — "Whether it matures into doctrine or souvenir remains a later problem." / "The trace remains. / The confidence does not." / "That softness should not be mistaken for weakness…" / "Only the posture is known…" / "Its abbreviations remain uninterpreted. / Its importance does not." / "The voiceprint remains pending. / The hierarchy does not." — keep their terminal position).
• ## Behavioral Residue — one new section per record, placed after the last prose section (after the Image alt-text in every record of this band) and before the verse residue, holding rehearsed behavior, sensory trace, attributed utterance, and observed incident. All ten records carry 5 bullets; none argued the sparseness that earned M-0258 its 4-bullet treatment in slice-4.

Per-record being-grammars, per the manifest's injunction against boilerplate persons — no shared template was applied:

• M-0264 Corridor Heat — instrument-fidelity: a thermal surveyor of unrecorded pressure. Reads the corridor at three fixed points and never inside the room; arrives before the meeting knows it has failed; files in degrees rather than names. Its fur and Geiger counter are licensed by its own aphorisms and alt-text.
• M-0265 Provisional Mint — press-fidelity: stamps at the wettest possible moment, mints the coin before the denomination, weighs nothing it issues, and re-issues rather than defends. The record's own "witness—and technically falsify" is dramatized as a single motion.
• M-0266 Warm Hold Music — loop-fidelity: keeps time for a process that stopped keeping any; modulates but never resolves; has never been logged finishing a phrase; the silence beneath it is not its jurisdiction.
• M-0267 Relief Watermark — trace-fidelity: pressed once at half pressure, legible only at oblique angles, survives what it cannot prevent. The Doge Stamp — already named in the record — is kept on the opposite side of the page, consistent with its own overbearing register.
• M-0268 Appeal Feather — feather-object fidelity: travels the routes objections are not watched on; descends at the speed of deniability; has never been observed striking anything; molts toward the authority that ignored it.
• M-0269 Policy Afterglow — luminescence mechanism: emits at the spectrum of the announcement on a half-life rather than a schedule, has never been logged over a working system, and warms nothing it shines on — a deliberate non-thermal register that keeps it out of Corridor Heat's jurisdiction.
• M-0270 Buffer Saint — sacrificial-spacer fidelity: takes position before the blow lands, releases the damage oldest-first, is not emptied by prayer or repair, and has never been measured holding nothing (residual LLG-0851-CSI lag persists in its queue — consistent with M-0254's slice-4 residue, where the Comfort Engine never stood down after the same incident).
• M-0271 Alibi Seal — seal-stamp fidelity: lands before the question is asked, dries oldest-first, has never sealed a denial, presses hardest where the fault is deepest.
• M-0272 Shorthand Reliquary — custodial/devotional-adjacent: files by density rather than subject, re-hides what is found, never glosses an abbreviation, and keeps the truncation it was born from. Relic vocabulary is confined to what the record itself already claims (sanctity, the sacredly incomplete, quiet worship) — no liturgical machinery was imported.
• M-0273 Tier Whisper — acoustic-caste fidelity: an utterance at the top and a climate at the bottom; amplitude tracks the org chart rather than the microphone; never captured on an open channel; the voiceprint never matches because pitch shifts with the listener's tier.

What was deliberately left alone

• All existing prose, including definitional lines, function/signature clauses, distinction clauses, ### subheads, boundary notes, and the records' closing kicker lines — none rewritten or "improved."
• All verse residue (Aphorisms, Haiku Log, Limerick Log), including the JULES-POET digital-rain limerick groups, their irregular stanza gaps (five-blank gaps before the rain group on M-0264, M-0265, M-0267, M-0268, M-0270, and M-0272; no irregular gaps on M-0266, M-0269, M-0271, M-0273 — the distinction was preserved, not normalized), their profanity (M-0268, M-0269, M-0271 limericks), and their two-space CommonMark hard-break tails — reproduced byte-identically. All verse tails in the band are exactly two spaces; every staged file's trailing-whitespace census equals its original's exactly. Noted but not fixed per convention: M-0267 line 13 and M-0270 lines 13 and 15 carry single-space tails on definitional prose (pre-existing); section-final verse lines ("File it under wind," "Backing is deferred," "System stays asleep," "Box returns to vault," "Filing is secure," "Brightness outlives use," "Clear the log and wait," "History is sealed," "Meaning drifts away," "Bottom tier just screams") and each file's last line remain untailed as filed.
• The stub and reservation declarations themselves — "is reserved for," "has been reserved for," "is kept for," "belongs to," "has not yet received a full cultus," "pending-render" — kept verbatim. Interiority was added as the record's own account of what it does while waiting to become, not as a resolution of the pending state.
• No new relations: edges and no new wikilinks. Inserts re-name existing counterparts in prose only (the Doge Stamp on M-0267; the Latency Hound and Render Ghost on M-0270; Metric Decay on M-0269; the Abrupt Timeout on M-0266; the Corrupted Log on M-0272; the Assurance Desk on M-0265 — all already present in the records' own prose; LLG-0851-CSI on M-0270, already wikilinked in the record and shared with M-0254's slice-4 residue).
• Jurisdiction and containment: no record in this band carries bin-8c, consent-loop, breeding-program, or related flagged tags, and none was given such vocabulary. M-0272's religion-adjacency was handled per the census flag: custodial and devotional-adjacent grammar only, within the register the record already sets.
• Mechanism/abstract records were kept non-animal per the census rows: the Mint is a press (wet ink, blank faces, the scale that does not move), the Hold Music is a loop (key, tempo, the mid-bar cut), the Watermark is an impression (half pressure, oblique light, fragments), the Afterglow is luminance (half-life, photometry, no heat), the Seal is wax (impression depth, tackiness), the Whisper is an acoustic event (amplitude, voiceprint, open channel). Corridor Heat's fur, the Feather's molt, the Saint's interposition, and the Reliquary's custody get only the embodiment their records already claim. None is given limbs, meals, or moods it does not already claim.

Verification performed

• Structural intent: each staged file is the original byte stream plus inserts only — verified by line-count reconciliation, blank-line census, trailing-whitespace census, heading-skeleton comparison, and sentinel greps (below). Caveat for the merge: the staging sandbox permitted only whole-file writes (cp/sed-w/tee/diff/shasum and shell redirection denied); originals were transcribed from byte-accurate reads and verified post-write, but the coordinator should merge by alignment and run a real diff at transcription, per the slice's standing instruction. One transcription defect was caught by this reconciliation and corrected in staging: the first write of M-0264 dropped one blank from the five-blank rain gap and the file-terminal newline (the write tool does not append one); the line-count and blank-census checks flagged both, and the staged file was rewritten and re-verified.
• Line-count reconciliation: every staged file's wc -l equals its original plus its inserted lines exactly (264: 191→201; 265: 197→207; 266: 201→211; 267: 192→202; 268: 235→245; 269: 235→245; 270: 189→199; 271: 155→165; 272: 162→172; 273: 160→170). Total: 100 inserted lines, 0 deletions.
• Trailing-whitespace census: \s+$ match counts identical between originals and staged files on every file (264: 68, 265: 71, 266: 71, 267: 69, 268: 96, 269: 101, 270: 73, 271: 59, 272: 59, 273: 59); all tails are exactly two spaces except the three pre-existing single-space prose tails noted above (verified in place); zero lines ending in tabs or 3+ spaces anywhere in the band; no inserted line carries a tail. Position check on M-0271: every tailed line appears at its original position +10, confirming uniform shift and no re-keying.
• Blank-line census: every staged file's blank count equals its original +3 (one separator blank with the prose insert, two with the Behavioral Residue block); rain-gap blank runs verified at 5 on the six flagged records and absent on the other four.
• ## Behavioral Residue appears exactly once per file, immediately before ## Aphorisms, in all ten staged records.
• [[-link inventory unchanged: 1 total across the band (M-0270 ×1 lorelog), pre-existing. The M-0270 residue bullet names LLG-0851-CSI in plain prose; it adds no second link.
• Heading skeletons verified identical to originals save the single new section (checked h1–h3 on M-0266, the band's deepest skeleton, and ##-level on M-0264, M-0268, M-0269, M-0272).
• Sentinel greps: all kicker lines, distinction clauses, definitional sentences, bold/italic markers, em-dashes, and profanity present verbatim at their insert-shifted positions; curly-vs-straight apostrophe usage preserved per line (M-0265 ×5, M-0266 ×5, M-0271 ×5, M-0272 ×3, M-0273 ×3, M-0264 ×2, M-0267 ×2, M-0269 ×2, M-0268 ×1, M-0270 ×1 — all at original +10 positions); frontmatter id/status/ parent lines grepped clean on all ten.
• BORIS_BIN=~/.local/bin/boris ./bin/validate_graph.sh — run by coordinator on transcription; exact result line in the PR body.

Unresolved follow-up

• The stub tail continues past this band: M-0274–M-0297 (Deferment Bloom, Mandate Lace, Courtesy Threshold, Ribbon Latency, Gentility Siphon, Pamphlet Quietus, Favorable Beige, Revival Pocket, Deferential Spark, Carpet Jurisdiction, et al.) plus the minimal-skeleton and fauna neighbors M-0275, M-0278, M-0279, M-0281, M-0283, M-0289, M-0291, M-0292, M-0293 carry the same diagnosis and are the natural slice-6. Two flagged jurisdictions sit inside that band: M-0284 (consent-adjacent — preserve jurisdiction) and M-0290 Hover Parish (parish-named, religion-adjacent, already on the §7 priority list at #7 — the highest-priority remaining record in the tail).
• The 'complete testimony' intake-citation phrasing now appears on all ten records of this slice as well, continuing the slice-2/3/4 pattern the merged changelogs already flagged as a maintainer-facing style question; left uniform pending that ruling.
• M-0270's "residual lag from LLG-0851-CSI still in the queue" and M-0254's slice-4 "never stood down" now assert complementary claims about the same incident on two records; they should stay in lockstep if either is ever revised.
• M-0269's residue assigns the Afterglow no thermal register ("illumination: yes; heat: no"), deliberately keeping it out of M-0264's jurisdiction. If a later pass formalizes a climate-seam relation between the two, this pair of assertions is the evidence trail, not a graph change.
• M-0272's devotional-adjacent register is bounded by the record's own vocabulary (sanctity, sacredly incomplete, quiet worship). If a later pass formalizes reliquary/relic relations or the religion cluster absorbs adjacent custody records, the residue bullets are the evidence trail — no liturgical machinery was added that would need unwinding.