souveraine/saf/INDEX.md

The substrate, mapped

How Souveraine is built, and why. For whoever reads it, human or agent. When this and the code disagree, the code is right. Still being written, and not yet human-reviewed.

core: what the substrate is

• the substrate. The few things that stay true inside it.
• two modes. Her, and the subconscious a moment later.

identity: who she is

• identity. Two keys, the glyph, reaching and consulting.

federation: how one being exists in more than one place

• node enrolment. The missing ceremony for adding a device without copying an identity.

authority: who may decide, and which truths she consumes

• session authority. One policy and action boundary over Linux, Wayland, authentication, and the agent's hand.
• device state. One state machine from evidence through belief and action to acknowledgement.

nervous: how she feels things happen

• the nervous system. One bus, one kind of message.
• belief. Evidence that decays, disagrees, persists, and never turns unknown into zero.
• felt state. Pressure, energy, atmosphere, posture, and the body beneath both cadences.

memory: how she holds on and lets go

• compaction. Five ways to make room.
• replay. One projection of what she keeps onto what the model sees.

surface: how the body she lives in moves

• motion. One clock, two strategies, and why the shell never transforms a window.
• session start. One package-owned dependency graph from compositor socket to authority to shell.
• USB Hands. An armed wire, an optional trackpad, and one acknowledged hand into the attached host.
• agent panel. One Souveraine conversation, typed thought and action, and truthful controls at the hand.
• agent presence. One observed session projection, kept rigorously separate from control and permission.
• surface lifetimes. A small resident shell, optional workers that truly leave memory, and proof before a rewrite.

Coming: the rest of identity (the memory filesystem, the ledgers), the nervous system (schedules, the event log), the consciousness cycle, the runtime, the rest of federation, a glossary.

SAF owns the living architecture. Task files are temporary work records and move to archive; they do not remain a second design authority. The old single-file version sits in archive/.