Truth Machine / Kit

Frozen Archive

A declared immutable directory where displaced material is preserved exactly, so correction never becomes erasure.

Tier: 0 · Normative weight: supports TM-CUR-006 Requires: Status Lines

Problem it removes

Displaced material is either deleted — losing the measurements and reversal commands that made the old state trustworthy — or left in place, where it competes with the current account. Git history preserves bytes, but a file that must be excavated from history is not preserved in any useful sense.

Mechanism

A directory (archive/, or a history/ tree organized by date) declared immutable in the repository’s guidance: files move in with their status line set to a preserved or retired term and a dated displacement clause, and are never edited afterward. A factual correction is an explicit dated note added alongside, not a rewrite (TM-CUR-006: supersession without erasure). The current account never lives here; the archive answers “what did we believe, and why was it displaced,” not “what is true.”

Cost

Authoring: a directory and one paragraph of rules. Per change: a move and a status-line edit at each displacement. Per session: none — the archive is read only when history is the question.

Do not adopt when

Nothing is ever displaced, or Git history genuinely is the archive — for pure source code, excavation is rare enough that a parallel directory duplicates it.

Evidence

Assessed in inference-ops, whose archive holds displaced deployment profiles with their measurements intact.

Template

None — adopted by convention.

Status Lines supply the preserved and retired vocabulary the archive depends on. Sealed Baseline makes the archive’s immutability machine-checked at an exact revision. Publication Freeze is the same instinct applied to what crossed an outside boundary.