Every retained offering starts in The Archive — tier I, a meaningful encounter that left the machine unchanged. The pieces on this page went further. Residency Candidates have begun to recur: their vocabulary turns up in later readings, or a disagreement about them will not close. Permanent Residents demonstrably changed how the archive reads or operates. Systemic Code changed the rules by which everything after it is processed, and carries the gold mark, Foundational Myth.
None of these rungs is a quality ranking. An extraordinary poem can hold at tier I because the machine had a procedure ready for it. An irritating, badly made artifact can climb because it exposed a defect nothing else reached.
Tier IV
Systemic Code
Tier II