Mechanism
Integrity field portability is the mechanism by which a semantic agent carries its integrity state with it when the agent migrates between substrates. The integrity field is a deterministic, multi-domain data structure that encodes the agent's modeled behavioral consistency, and when the agent moves to a new execution substrate that state is serialized, transmitted with the agent as part of the agent's portable state, and validated by the receiving substrate before the agent is permitted to operate. The integrity record does not reset at a substrate boundary, and it does not stay behind on the originating substrate. It travels with the agent so that the agent's accumulated behavioral consistency, and the conditions that produced it, remain in force after migration.
This matters because the integrity field is not a cosmetic label. It is the same structure that drives deviation evaluation, self-esteem, confidence modulation, and trust slope validation throughout the agent's operation. If integrity did not port, an agent could shed an unfavorable behavioral record simply by moving substrates, and a freshly arrived agent would carry no evidence of how it had behaved before arrival. Portability closes that gap by making the integrity state part of what is carried and what is checked at every migration.
What Is Carried
When the agent migrates, the integrity field that is serialized and transmitted includes the complete three-domain integrity scores, the current deviation function state, the self-esteem value, the empathy weighting configuration, the active coping state if any is present, and the recent deviation log window. These are the components that together determine how the agent will evaluate deviation pressure and resistance after arrival, so all of them travel as a unit.
The three-domain scores are the personal, interpersonal, and global integrity values described elsewhere in the integrity disclosure, each carrying its own current score, trajectory, baseline, and policy-defined bounds. The deviation function state is the current standing of the deterministic deviation computation, whose terms are the need vector, the ethical threshold, the empathy weighting, and the self-esteem score. The self-esteem value and the empathy weighting configuration are carried explicitly because they are the deviation resistance terms, and an agent that arrives without them would compute deviation likelihood incorrectly. The active coping state is carried when the agent is in an intercept mode at the time of migration, so the receiving substrate inherits an accurate picture of the agent's current regulatory condition rather than a reset one. The recent deviation log window is the slice of the deviation record needed to keep the integrity trajectory continuous across the boundary.
Validation On Arrival
The receiving substrate's governance infrastructure validates the integrity field against the agent's lineage upon arrival. The lineage is the agent's complete, cryptographically grounded history of state evolution, and the integrity field is computed from the pattern of actions recorded in that lineage. Because the two are linked, the receiving substrate can check whether the integrity state that arrived is consistent with the behavioral record that produced it.
If the integrity field is inconsistent with the lineage, indicating potential tampering or data corruption during transit, the receiving substrate rejects the agent or places it in quarantine pending integrity reconstruction from the lineage. Reconstruction is possible precisely because the integrity scores are derived from the lineage rather than asserted independently of it: the receiving substrate can recompute the integrity state from the carried behavioral record and compare the result against the integrity field that was transmitted. A divergence between the asserted state and the lineage-derived state is the signal that something was altered or damaged in transit, and it is handled as a validation failure rather than admitted silently.
Admission Control
Beyond consistency checking, the receiving substrate's policy configuration may impose minimum integrity requirements for agent admission. An agent whose composite integrity score falls below the receiving substrate's admission threshold is denied operational authority until its integrity is restored. The composite integrity score here is the deterministic, policy-weighted combination of the three domain scores, computed using the domain weights specified by the applicable policy configuration.
Restoration of operational authority follows the same mechanisms the integrity subsystem uses everywhere else. The agent's integrity may be restored through the redemption mechanisms that generate restorative semantic mutations following deviation, or through a governance-authorized integrity reset event. Until one of those paths restores the agent's integrity above the admission threshold, the agent does not gain operational authority on the receiving substrate. Admission is therefore a governed, integrity-conditioned decision, not an automatic consequence of arrival.
Relation to Lineage and Trust Slope
Portability works because the integrity field and the lineage are bound together. The lineage records the agent's actions, the integrity engine evaluates those actions against the agent's declared values, and the evaluation results are recorded back into the lineage. An agent cannot present an integrity state that is inconsistent with its auditable lineage without producing a detectable trust slope discontinuity. That property is what makes migration safe to check: the receiving substrate is not asked to trust the integrity field on its face, it is able to test the field against the carried history.
This is also why integrity-aware trust slope validation extends naturally across a migration. Standard trust slope validation verifies that the lineage is continuous, authentic, and consistent. The integrity-aware extension additionally requires that the integrity trajectory derived from the deviation log entries follow a plausible path given the agent's operational history. A migration that delivered a manipulated integrity field, for example deviation log entries that had disappeared or severity classifications that had been systematically downgraded, would surface as an integrity trajectory discontinuity at the receiving substrate.
Behavioral Continuity Across Substrates
Because the deviation function state, self-esteem value, empathy weighting, and active coping state all travel with the agent, the agent's behavioral regulation is continuous across the migration boundary. An agent that was under elevated deviation pressure before migration arrives under the same evaluated conditions. An agent that was in a coping intercept arrives in that intercept rather than in a falsely reset baseline. An agent whose self-esteem had been reduced by recent poorly justified deviation arrives with that reduced self-esteem, and therefore with the same elevated deviation resistance, intact.
The effect is that migration is not an escape hatch from the coherence loop. The empathy, integrity, and self-esteem mechanisms that constitute the agent's self-correcting control loop continue to operate on the same carried state after migration as before it. The agent that arrives is the same agent, behaviorally, that departed, subject to the receiving substrate's validation and admission decisions.
Failure Handling
Portability defines specific handling for the cases where migration cannot be trusted. The first case is inconsistency between the transmitted integrity field and the lineage, which is treated as evidence of tampering or corruption during transit, and which causes the receiving substrate to reject the agent or place it in quarantine pending integrity reconstruction from the lineage. The second case is an arriving agent whose composite integrity score is below the receiving substrate's admission threshold, which causes denial of operational authority until integrity is restored through redemption or a governance-authorized reset.
In both cases the failure response is structural rather than discretionary. The receiving substrate does not extend operational authority to an agent whose integrity state cannot be validated or does not meet the admission requirement. Quarantine is the same supervised posture the integrity subsystem applies elsewhere, an operational environment in which the agent's activity is constrained pending resolution. The agent is admitted to normal operation only once its integrity field is both consistent with its lineage and sufficient under the receiving substrate's policy.
Disclosure Scope
Integrity field portability for agent migration, comprising the serialization and transmission of the integrity field, including the three-domain integrity scores, the current deviation function state, the self-esteem value, the empathy weighting configuration, the active coping state, and the recent deviation log window, as part of the agent's portable state; the receiving substrate's validation of the integrity field against the agent's lineage upon arrival; the rejection or quarantine of an agent whose integrity field is inconsistent with its lineage, pending integrity reconstruction from the lineage; and the denial of operational authority to an agent whose composite integrity score falls below the receiving substrate's admission threshold until integrity is restored through the redemption mechanisms or a governance-authorized integrity reset event, is disclosed in the cognition filing (U.S. Application No. 19/647,395 and its international counterpart). This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The scope extends to embodiments in which the receiving substrate's policy configuration specifies different admission thresholds or different reconstruction and reset procedures, provided the integrity field is carried with the migrating agent, validated against the carried lineage, and admission remains conditioned on integrity.
