Invariants

These guarantees hold for every operation, every client and every file. They are enforced by the engine, covered by the Rust test suite and by the language-neutral cases in conformance/cases, which every client library runs.

1. Nobody knows anything without an explicit record whose holder they are. Being present at an event, being aware of someone or belonging to a group grants no knowledge.
2. Canon never appears in a subjective projection. A Fact is not knowledge of that fact; a holder’s perspective contains only the holder’s own records.
3. Confirmed history is never deleted. Every state change is a transition with a position and a version. Only drafts that were never promoted can be purged.
4. A read at (axis, tick, asOfVersion) never sees anything later on that axis or in version. A record whose event has no position on the axis read is visible to nobody in that read.
5. The engine never corrects beliefs. A belief that contradicts canon stays held; the contradiction is reported.
6. The engine never infers and never applies policy. Probability, decay, distortion, trust and secrecy rules come from the client; the engine records and reports. It never runs or calls a model.
7. Every write is atomic, and the same attemptId is applied exactly once. A replay with the same request returns the stored outcome; a different request with a used attemptId is a CONFLICT.
8. The core does no I/O. umwelt-core reads no clock, generates no ids and spawns no threads; storage, clocks and ids are supplied to it.
9. A read in one timeline never sees another timeline’s rows, except its ancestors’ rows, each up to the baseVersion of its child on the chain down to the draft.
10. The intent of a telling is the narrator’s knowledge. A read made on behalf of a holder never reveals the intent with which they were told something: it reads unknown. The recorded intent stays available to narrator reads (record, trace, breaches).

Group knowledge follows from 1: a group knows what the group’s own records say, never the union of its members’ knowledge. Vectors used by semantic search follow from 1 and 4: they only order documents a read would see anyway.