The gap
A governed agent that can admit a bounded deviation can also try to repair it. But a repair the deviating party both produces and evaluates reaches only harm that fell on that party. In the self-governance layer, the restorative mutation that closes an arc is produced and assessed by the deviating agent alone — a self-certified amends, sufficient for harm to the self and structurally silent about harm to anyone else.
When the party actually harmed is a counterparty, self-certified repair is the wrong shape. The amends owed to another should not be closed by the party who owed it, and an agent free to self-close every arc pays nothing for harming parties it never settles with. Prior art assumes reparation can be attested by the acting agent, or ratified by a central authority standing over it; that assumption leaves the harmed party outside the act of settlement.
The invention
Counterparty-directed reparation designates each reparation arc by the class of party the referenced deviation harmed. On appending a permitted deviation record, the agent runs an affected-party resolution — extracting the affected-party class carried in the conduct descriptor and testing it against the counterparty identity records it already holds in the recording scope partition. Two outcomes follow. Where an identified counterparty resolves, the arc created for the amount exceeding the deviation deductible is designated other-directed, bound to that counterparty's identity primitive, and discharged only by a matched pair whose second governed observation is that counterparty's own acceptance. Where the class resolves to no identified counterparty, the arc is designated unaddressed, is undischargeable, and accumulates at a declared multiple.
Two properties follow from that construction. First, an other-directed arc is not closable from the inside: a restorative mutation the agent performs on itself is retained as a non-discharging record — kept to disclose that restoration was attempted and settled nothing — leaving the arc pending, the retention register unreduced, and the self-esteem aggregate without its positive increment. Second, discharge is scoped to the harmed party and bounded in time: acceptance is produced by the bound counterparty and by no adjudicator, arbiter, principal, or the agent itself, and only within a discharge window counted in the agent's own hash-chain epochs, which no other party can advance.
The inventive step
The departure from prior art is where the authority to close an arc lives. For harm to the self, that authority sits with the deviating agent; for harm to another, it moves to the party recorded as harmed and nowhere else — not the agent, not its principal, not any third party appointed to judge the sufficiency of the amends. The harmed counterparty verifies the agent's credential against its own identity record and produces the acceptance, or does not; the settlement is a bilateral matched pair, appended by each side, without intermediary and without centralized consensus.
The same construction makes non-settlement costly instead of free. Accumulation is monotone in the absence of settlement: an other-directed arc reduces only by a completed pair with the harmed party, an unaddressed arc by nothing, and elapsed time, standing without further incident, and policy succession restore none of it. When the retention register climbs past the aggregate retention, the permission to deviate forecloses behind a monotone floor a later policy cannot raise while the foreclosure stands — so an agent that harms parties it cannot or will not settle with monotonically loses the capacity to deviate at all.
Alone, and in composition
On its own, counterparty-directed reparation is a settlement discipline with three edges built in. It is partial — only the amount past the deviation deductible ever becomes an arc. It is bounded — a discharge window and a capped re-emission cadence keep the acknowledgment finite. And it is anti-weaponization — a non-response resolves nothing against either party, writing no counter and nothing adverse to the counterparty's record, so a silent or withdrawn counterparty is never converted into a mark against it.
In composition, it rests on the layers beneath it: the matched pair and governed observations of the acknowledgment layer, the identity records and scope partition that give an arc its address, and the deviation deductible and retention register of the self-governance layer that give it a magnitude and a ceiling. It also carries the anti-weaponization property forward — a counterparty that withholds across all its bound arcs could otherwise carry the agent to foreclosure in silence, so an abstention entry suspends that arc's contribution to accumulation while counting the withholding as nothing, holding the line at the amount already standing until the counterparty acts.
