32. Identity

Decision

Mirror is LychD's singular identity-binding jurisdiction. It owns Persona definitions/revisions, one exact Persona binding per Invocation, scoped identity context and eligible memory hydration, hydration receipts, attribution across people and machinery, and reviewed Persona-revision proposals. It does not authenticate a Principal, grant scope, select model, schedule Pattern, evaluate quality or causal blame, or train weights; IAM/Ward, Dispatcher, Spellweaver, Riddle, and Soulforge retain those offices.

Keep the names apart

No value substitutes for another: Persona grants no authority; a Principal does not author every requested output; a provider is not Persona; shared Persona does not merge Runs. Present Sigil is a frozen name/scope set, without stable identity id, credential lineage, delegation relation, or revocation epoch; future Mirror keys may not pretend Sigil.id exists.

Persona voice means declared discourse, commitments, manner, and orientation. It is not an acoustic voice profile, synthesized speech artifact, musical vocal, dubbed performance, or presentation asset. Echo retains acoustic and speech-lifecycle facts; Riffmaw musical performance; Language Edition timed-language performance; and Avatar the eligible presentation selection that may reference any exact permitted artifact.

Persona and binding

A Persona has a stable id and immutable revisions. Each declares owner/provenance/parent/creation and lifecycle; name, voice, commitments, domain, and non-goals; ordered instruction fragments; memory namespace/eligibility; compatible Postures; protected terms/relationships; required Riddle Trial Suites; and replacement, rollback, export, and retirement law. Codex owns declared intent and Phylactery stores revisions, bindings, receipts, and attribution—not an untyped prompt dump. Publication freezes a revision; edits make candidate children. A name may route new work to a promoted revision, but every Run retains the exact bound revision.

An admitted Pattern selects that revision, or expressly none, and Mirror compiles:

Persona revision + Pattern/AgentSpec requirements + active Principal/Sigil
+ eligible identity-scoped memory → ordered context blocks + hydration receipt

The receipt records source revisions, memory references, transformations and exclusions, ordering, size/truncation, and envelope digest. It proves supplied context, not model obedience. Context owns token budgeting/final prompt assembly; Ward authorizes namespace/tool/scope; Dispatcher chooses a capability; Orchestrator makes it ready. Stronger prose cannot repair missing permission. Identity memory is deny-by-default between Personas and Principals; every record keeps namespace, producer, subject, provenance, eligibility, and retention. Cross-identity recall requires explicit policy and retains source attribution. Hydration is revision-pinned on resume, with newly admitted memory cited rather than silently waking as the latest Persona.

Attribution and congruence

Every identity-bearing Invocation/artifact records initiator, approver, delegate and actor; Sigil; Persona, AgentSpec, Posture, Composition, Pattern, and Invocation revisions; contributing models, providers, tools, sources, and humans; parent/handoff/artifact lineage; and whether the record is assertion, observation, evaluation, correction, or promoted act. These relationships establish neither quality, credit, fault, nor causal blame.

At a Composition Suite handoff the immutable artifact keeps original attribution; the consumer starts a newly admitted child Invocation with its own binding. Correlation/handoff receipts do not copy authority or authorship. Delegation names both principals and uses the delegate's producer/grant. Edits and rejected branches add, never launder, lineage. Riddle retains author and subject for findings and corrections; Mirror binds history, while Riddle owns verdicts/attribution candidates and Soulforge alone admits training.

A Persona may give Riddle criteria for commitments, voice boundaries, role limits, memory claims, tool behavior, and pressure response. Congruence is one evaluated property—not truth or general quality. A designed Phantasma Pattern may ask Shadow for bounded branches and use a versioned Persona-congruence Trial Suite, but Mirror may not choose the resemblance it prefers. Matched controls distinguish continuity from slogans, mimicry, refusal, and leakage. Changed authority language, tools, memory policy, or core commitments rerun affected adversarial/regression evidence; a punctuation change need not rerun every Trial Suite.

Revision and recovery

Experience may inform a proposal, never rewrite the promoted definition automatically:

attributed observations/findings → bounded diff against exact parent → validation
→ Riddle congruence/regression evidence → required Magus/HitL decision → immutable child

Smith may draft/package and Spellweaver coordinate, but neither publishes through Mirror. Repetition, praise, model confidence, and memory volume grant no scope, tool, trigger, queue, or hardware priority. Rollback directs future Invocations to a prior promoted revision; it cannot rewrite earlier Runs/artifacts. A static prompt lacks binding, scoped memory, receipt, lineage, and rollback; retrieval is hydration input, not identity; behavioral resemblance is at most a Riddle finding; automatic self-revision is refused as an unauditable feedback loop.

Consequences

Acceptance evidence

Mirror remains Designed until a Persona is declared, revision-pinned to a Run, hydrated from an authorized namespace with reproducible receipt, fully attributed, resumed without revision drift, tested against matched congruence controls, revised through an immutable candidate, and rolled back for new Invocations. State of Work records that transition.