Mechanism

The integrity subsystem disclosed in the cognition filing records every change to an agent's state in the agent's lineage field. Every mutation, delegation event, governance decision, deviation event, and integrity recovery event is written to the lineage, subject to policy validation, and auditable by governance infrastructure. Because the lineage is the evidentiary basis from which integrity scores are computed, and because the integrity engine writes its own evaluations back into the lineage, the lineage accumulates a complete and ordered record of what the agent did, when, under what conditions, and with what consequences. Reconstruction, as described here, is the recovery of the agent's historical behavioral and integrity state, and the policy that governed it, from that immutable record.

The chapter states the reconstruction property directly: deviation events are recorded in the lineage with full provenance so that the agent's integrity trajectory can be reconstructed from the lineage with complete fidelity. The lineage does not merely note that a deviation occurred. Each deviation log entry records the deviation function values at the time of deviation, the specific action that constituted the deviation, the domains affected, the severity classification, the projected and observed harm, the self-esteem impact, the affective state at the time, and whether any coping intercept was active. Reconstruction reads these entries back to reproduce the state the agent occupied at the recorded time.

Reconstructing the Policy in Force

Integrity is evaluated against the agent's policy reference field, which defines the declared value set for personal integrity, the relational norms for interpersonal integrity, and the systemic constraints for global integrity. Policy is therefore the standard against which every recorded action was judged. The chapter establishes that an agent cannot unilaterally modify its own integrity policy to relax constraints, lower thresholds, or expand the deviation-class mutation set. Changes to integrity policy require governance authorization, are recorded in the agent's lineage, and are subject to trust slope validation.

Because policy changes are themselves lineage entries, the policy that governed the agent at a past time is recoverable from the same record as the behavior it governed. A deviation recorded at a given time was evaluated against the ethical threshold, the domain weights, and the declared value set that the policy specified at that time. Reconstruction recovers both the action and the normative standard against which it was assessed, so that a recorded deviation is interpreted under the policy that produced it rather than under a policy adopted afterward.

Mutation Traceability

The deviation log provides mutation traceability: the ability to trace any deviation event back to its causal chain and forward to its consequences. The causal chain comprises the sequence of events that led to the deviation, including the need accumulation pattern, the threshold evaluation history, and the empathy and self-esteem trajectories that preceded it. The consequence chain comprises the events that followed, including the integrity field updates, the self-esteem adjustments, the affective state changes, any coping events, and the restorative mutations generated by the redemption engine.

This bidirectional traceability is what makes reconstruction more than a list of past events. An auditor can recover not only that a deviation occurred but the structural conditions that produced it, expressed in the recorded values of the need vector, the ethical threshold, the empathy weighting, and the self-esteem score that together determined the deviation function output. The deviation log is implemented as an indexed, queryable view of the lineage rather than a duplicate store, so traceability operates over the same immutable entries that the integrity engine evaluated.

Tamper Evidence and Trust Slope Validation

Reconstruction is defensible because the underlying record resists silent alteration. The chapter states that the agent cannot selectively omit integrity events, retroactively alter its integrity record, or present an integrity state inconsistent with its auditable lineage without producing a detectable trust slope discontinuity. Integrity entries are written through the same cryptographic provenance mechanisms that govern all lineage entries, and an integrity entry cannot be retroactively altered without producing such a discontinuity.

Integrity-aware trust slope validation extends standard provenance checking with an integrity trajectory continuity criterion: the requirement that the agent's integrity trajectory, derived from the deviation log entries in the lineage, follows a plausible path given the agent's operational history. This criterion detects an agent that reports high integrity while its lineage contains deviation events with no corresponding self-esteem impacts or redemption efforts, an agent whose deviation log entries suddenly disappear or whose severity classifications are systematically downgraded, and an agent whose self-esteem scores remain constant despite a pattern of deviations. Each of these is named in the chapter as an integrity trajectory discontinuity, an integrity trajectory manipulation, or a self-esteem decoupling, and each is what a reconstruction must surface rather than smooth over.

Reconstruction Under Governed Forgetting

The chapter introduces a governed forgetting mechanism in which specific lineage entries are deprioritized rather than deleted. Governed forgetting is relevance decay, not data loss: the computational weight assigned to a lineage entry in integrity computation, self-esteem evaluation, and trajectory analysis decreases over time according to a policy-defined decay function, while the lineage entry itself remains immutable and complete within the lineage record. Reconstruction is unaffected by forgetting, because forgetting modulates only the weight an entry receives in live cognitive computations, not its presence in the record.

The forgetting event is itself a first-class governance event, evaluated by the composite admissibility evaluator and recorded in the lineage with the specific entry deprioritized, the reason, the decay function applied, the authorizing policy authority, and the conditions under which the deprioritization is reversible. If a deprioritized entry becomes relevant again, a governed reversal event restores its computational weight, again recorded with full provenance. The chapter states the design goal explicitly: the agent's cognitive computations prioritize recent and relevant history without losing the ability to reconstruct the complete lineage for audit purposes.

Relational and Decision Reconstruction

The same recording discipline supports reconstruction of the agent's relationships and decisions. The per-entity relational state field records each relational dimension update and the interaction observations from which each update was derived, which the chapter states enables forensic reconstruction of the relational trajectory between the agent and any specific entity. The integrity-aware multi-agent negotiation mechanisms are likewise auditable: every instance in which an agent's integrity trust score influenced a group decision, delegation acceptance, quorum computation, or conflict resolution is recorded in the lineage of all participating agents, enabling post-hoc analysis of how integrity modulated the collaborative outcome.

The Deviation-Activated State produces a comparably complete record. Each deviation-class mutation executed under the state is recorded with a marker identifying it as such, together with the deviation function output at entry, the values of the need vector, ethical threshold, empathy weighting, and self-esteem that produced the activation, the mutations executed, their projected and actual consequences, and the conditions under which the state was exited. The chapter states that this augmented record ensures deviation events are fully auditable and that the agent's integrity trajectory can be reconstructed from the lineage with complete fidelity.

Composition

Reconstruction composes with the predictive and corrective mechanisms of the integrity subsystem. Moral trajectory forecasting extrapolates the agent's current integrity trajectory from the recent evaluation windows recorded in the lineage, classifying the projected path as a redemption, stabilization, radicalization, or containment arc. The redemption engine reads the deviation log entry for a triggering event, extracts the dimensions of integrity loss, and generates restorative mutations whose own execution is recorded under the same governance and lineage requirements, so that the restoration is as auditable as the deviation that prompted it. Integrity field portability extends the same discipline across substrates: when an agent migrates, its integrity field and recent deviation log window are serialized with it, and the receiving substrate validates the field against the lineage, rejecting or quarantining the agent if the field is inconsistent with the record.

Disclosure Scope

The reconstruction of an agent's historical behavioral and integrity state from the immutable lineage, comprising the full-provenance deviation log and its statement that the integrity trajectory can be reconstructed from the lineage with complete fidelity, the recording of policy changes as governance-authorized and trust-slope-validated lineage entries so that behavior is interpretable under the policy in force at the recorded time, mutation traceability through causal and consequence chains, integrity-aware trust slope validation and its detection of integrity trajectory discontinuity, manipulation, and self-esteem decoupling, governed forgetting as relevance decay over an immutable record with governed reversal, and forensic reconstruction of relational and multi-agent decision history, is disclosed in the cognition filing, United States Patent Application 19/647,395, in the integrity and coherence chapter. This article describes that disclosed mechanism. The scope extends to embodiments in which the reconstructed record serves audit, governance, and migration validation, provided the lineage remains the immutable evidentiary basis from which the historical state and its governing policy are recovered.