The gap

A governed agent that reaches a required input and finds it unavailable, incomplete, or unresolvable has, under the architectures prior art assumes, nowhere to record the fact. The determination either proceeds on a substitute — a zero, a default, a fallback magnitude — or resolves the matter against a party. The withholding itself is not an outcome; it is an absence, and an absence is something to be filled.

That framing carries a structural cost. Because a non-execution has no representation of its own, it is read as whatever the surrounding arithmetic makes of it — a counter that ticks, a budget that decrements, a standing quantity that falls. What began as an input that was not there arrives downstream as a consequence borne by someone. The gap is not that agents fail to withhold; it is that a withholding cannot survive as a withholding.

The invention

In the disclosed architecture, a determination that meets an unavailable, incomplete, or unresolvable input emits an outcome entry of a recorded abstention class — one that identifies the missing input and is adverse to no party. A degradation map associates each determination stage with the abstention outcome it produces and the consequence that outcome forecloses: a lineage-unavailable stage yields not-determinable rather than a rejection, a policy-unresolved stage appends pending rather than not-applicable, a non-response holds the authorization gate in its provisional state rather than resolving against the silent party. The withholding is the outcome — recorded, appended, and carried — not an absence between outcomes.

The conversion bar holds that outcome apart from the world of magnitudes. An abstention outcome is a value of a type disjoint from the type of a magnitude, and no total function carries the one to the other, so a determination that attempts arithmetic on it emits an abstention rather than a number, a threshold comparison of it emits an abstention rather than a Boolean, and an accumulation across a set containing it emits an abstention rather than a sum over the remaining members. In embodiments the discipline is enforced statically, before the agent's instructions run, so a converting determination is not constructible rather than caught at the moment it is attempted. A non-execution attestation then carries the recorded withholding from one agent to another, admitted under a verified type marker as a value of that same abstention type, without ceasing to be a withholding.

The inventive step

The departure from prior art is where the withholding is held. It is not applied as a downstream rule that watches for conversions and blocks them; the conversion is barred by the structure of the values themselves and not by an absence of defined behavior. A consuming determination reaching an abstention outcome has a defined thing to do — emit an abstention — and no path by which the outcome becomes a scalar, a default, a threshold operand, or a consequence against any party. Because the type discipline is enforced before execution, the determination that would convert is not one the agent can build.

The same authority survives the agent boundary. A receiving agent adopts the abstention type as emitted and verified — it does not re-derive the type from the payload, infer it from its own state, or assign it by default — so the carried withholding enters the receiving agent already disjoint from its magnitudes. Admission increments no counter of the disclosing agent, appends nothing adverse to its record, and treats a subsequent non-response as not-determinable rather than as a determination. What one agent withheld, another does not quietly convert into an execution, a mark, or a cost.

Alone, and in composition

On its own, positive abstention is a recorded, governed withholding — a first-class outcome that names the withheld action and the ground relied upon, resolves nothing against the semantic agent, the asserting party, or a counterparty, and moves no counter and no gate. It is the architecture's answer to a missing input that is neither a guess nor a verdict.

In composition, it is the outcome type every other layer passes through unchanged. It propagates transitively through multi-stage pipelines, each stage emitting an abstention of its own recorded class and no stage resolving or defaulting it, so the identity of the originally unavailable input stays recoverable from lineage. It crosses to other agents as a carried abstention entry and there governs the dispatch-authority predicate, whose failure is recorded as a positive abstention rather than a denial, confined to the withheld classes and to that one counterparty. Every counter, threshold comparison, and authorization gate downstream inherits the same bar.