bands

Growth is prewritten. The bands are an array of witnessed thresholds stored in the record at deployment and readable now, before any of them has been crossed.¹ Nothing is scheduled, nothing is announced, and nothing is decided later.

Each entry is a quantity of witnessed time. Not elapsed time, not marks, not holders, not volume. Only the total that has been proven by observation moves the ladder.

Because the thresholds are visible in advance, the distance to the next one is a subtraction any reader can perform. The record does not present it as a countdown and does not track progress toward it.

The ladder has a fixed length. Its size is a constant printed on the math page beside the other constants.

When witnessed crosses the next entry in bands, advance becomes valid and anyone may call it. Before that it reverts. After it succeeds it reverts again until the following threshold is crossed.

The call is not automatic. A crossed threshold sits unconsumed until someone spends the gas to consume it, so the form index can trail the totals for as long as nobody bothers.

Advance takes no argument that changes its effect. The caller cannot choose which band is consumed, cannot skip one, and cannot consume two in one call.

The address that lands the call is written into the record beside the crossing and stays there permanently.

Advance rerolls the trait bits, moves the form index up one, and writes the crossing. Those three writes are the whole of its effect.

The trait bits are a packed field. Rerolling replaces them; it does not accumulate them, and the previous value is not retained anywhere in the record.

Nothing else changes. Witnessed, dark, deepest, lapses, the register and the treasury are untouched by advance. A crossing is a consequence of the totals and never an input to them.

The form is a rendering of the current trait bits at the current index. It is presentation, and the record treats it as such.

There is no band beyond the last one. When the final entry has been crossed and consumed, the form index equals the band count and advance is permanently invalid.

Nothing happens after that. There is no wrap, no continuation, no second ladder, and no instruction capable of extending the array.

The record continues in every other respect. Marks still land, intervals still close, witnessed and dark still accumulate, and the deepest can still be replaced.

The end of the ladder is therefore the end of the ladder and not the end of the record.