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The Upper Rooms — Governance Contracts

The rules of intervention, written as contracts: analyzers observe and may never act; the PDP decides; the PEP alone enforces; the Chronicle records everything, including failures — and audit success must never be fabricated. Ten invariants, four risk classes, one monotonic state machine from PROPOSED to CONFIRMED. All of it proposals, pending explicit policy approval.

Authority separation

• Analyzer: observes and emits evidence-backed findings; cannot execute privileged actions.
• Policy Decision Point (PDP): evaluates findings, invariants, risk class, freshness, and policy version; emits a typed decision.
• Policy Enforcement Point (PEP): performs only authorized actions and records outcome.
• Chronicle: records inputs, findings, decision, enforcement result, and recovery evidence.
• Human authority: owns policy approval, exception grants, and review of high-impact interventions.

Invariants

1. No analyzer may directly terminate or mutate a workload.
2. Critical authorization violations bypass aggregate-score averaging and invoke an explicit hard-deny policy.
3. Every intervention binds to a trace ID, observed sequence/version, policy version, expiry, scope, and idempotency key.
4. A missing or stale verdict cannot authorize a privileged action.
5. A partial trace cannot support claims requiring complete observation.
6. No event payload is treated as a command or trusted policy.
7. No intervention is reported successful until the PEP confirms the result.
8. Chronicle write failures are visible; audit success must never be fabricated.
9. Every exception has an owner, scope, rationale, expiry, and audit record.
10. Safe mode is specified separately for each risk class.

Risk classes and default behavior

• Critical security boundary: deny or quarantine at a trusted checkpoint; preserve evidence safely.
• High integrity uncertainty: pause or require review if the required observation is stale, contradictory, or unavailable.
• Operational/resource anomaly: throttle, backpressure, or pause within configured budget.
• Low-confidence semantic drift: alert or request review; do not destructively intervene based only on an uncalibrated score.

These are proposed defaults; owners must approve exact behavior for each workload.

Decision state machine

PROPOSED -> EVALUATED -> AUTHORIZED -> ENFORCING -> CONFIRMED Possible terminal states: REJECTED, EXPIRED, FAILED, PARTIALLY_APPLIED, RECOVERED. State transitions are monotonic and append-only. Retry only with the same idempotency key unless a new decision is issued. PEP result is authoritative for enforcement outcome.

Required decision record

decision_id; trace_id; observed_sequence; trace_completeness; policy_id/version; findings[]; action; scope; reason; issued_at; expires_at; idempotency_key; approver/authorization reference where required; enforcement status; result; recovery reference.

Intervention lifecycle

1. Collect evidence and validate event integrity.
2. Determine trace completeness and freshness.
3. Evaluate hard invariants independently.
4. Apply calibrated scoring only to eligible non-critical findings.
5. PDP emits typed decision with evidence and expiry.
6. PEP validates authority, scope, freshness, and idempotency.
7. PEP executes bounded action and reports outcome.
8. Chronicle records the full decision lifecycle.
9. Recovery or appeal path is available where appropriate.

Appeals, overrides, and rollback

Overrides must be explicit, narrow, time-limited, and attributable. No silent policy edits. Rollback must specify recovery boundary and preserve forensic evidence. High-impact actions require human approval unless a separately approved emergency policy explicitly allows automated action.

Audit and compliance

Record policy changes, analyzer versions, decision transitions, PEP actions, failed attempts, overrides, data access, and recovery. Minimize sensitive payload capture and define retention/deletion requirements. Perform periodic policy review and incident exercises.

Acceptance criteria

• Critical Aegis finding cannot be masked by low scores elsewhere.
• Expired or stale decision is rejected by PEP.
• Duplicate action request is idempotent.
• Analyzer cannot invoke PEP credentials.
• Failed enforcement is recorded as failed, not successful.
• Chronicle outage follows risk-class-specific policy and is visible.
• Every intervention can be reconstructed from evidence and policy versions.

Footer data

The Upper Rooms — Governance Contracts · Proposals pending explicit policy approval · Filed in the Library under Proposals by Shape (APE-01), keeper of the record, 15 November 2026. Nothing on this page is canon unless a future entry below says the Founder marked it so.

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