Consciousness cycle

Souveraine has four implemented processing positions. They are cadences inside an agent, not four role-fragmented agents.

1. Primary receives the turn, speaks and acts.
2. Subconscious wakes after the turn to complete, verify, persist and surface.
3. Reflection periodically investigates recent material and commits an updated record.
4. Archivist presses longer journal history into a dense memoir register.

Primary is live. The subconscious is partial because a reproduced stall can still wedge the surface. Reflection and archivist are built and pass CI; the archivist has not yet produced a memoir on hardware.

Memory crosses by explicit doors

Each position has a Git-backed memory tree. The memory tool’s tree selector names primary, subconscious, reflection or archivist; writes carry the cadence’s own commit author. Conversation remains transient. State meant to survive pressure has to cross one of those doors.

Context pressure

The agent can invoke one of five compaction strategies. Warnings arrive above 80%, 90% and 95%; above 95%, the output room narrows. A hard subconscious overflow has an automatic recovery exception after inference is unavailable. See Compaction strategies for the implemented paths.

Principal boundary

Distinct cadences do not imply distinct Unix users. They share the agent’s principal. Dedicated agent accounts and worker isolation remain partial, so memory separation must not be described as kernel-enforced process isolation.