Three New Voices at the Narrator's Chair

The exam

Come down into the cove

You come down into Sorrowmoor Cove in the grey hour — fog on the water, salt on everything it touches. A cracked bell marks a boat that isn't coming. One lamp still burns on the breakwater though the morning is here. That is how the game itself greets you, in its own campaign file, and it is the right place to start, because most people reading this page have never been here. The game is RealKeep, and the cove is one of its towns: an authored world with its own weather, its own festival, its own nineteen residents and their grudges, which a player visits in short evenings and which remembers what they did there. What this page is about is the voice that town speaks in. The cove is a herring village on a grey bay, and the whole of its life turns on one night a lifetime gone: the storm of 1888, when a boat called the Saltmaiden went down with her crew and one man came home. The town has argued ever since over what took her. The record is a death, a date, and a four-day search that found nothing — no wreck, no bodies, no plank — and that absence is the whole of the argument, because a storm leaves splinters and this left nothing. The monster lives only in the telling. The chapel bell cracked the night of the loss and was never recast; it rings wrong to this day, and carries out over the water far past where a true note would die.

Every year on Maiden's Night the cove floats lamps out onto the grey water it calls the Reach, one for each of the lost, and a girl named Brisa Lune sings the verse of the lamps while an old man named Sefer Tamm shouts corrections at her from the breakwater. The campaign file gives the verse four lines and says to sing it only so:

Where the salt-wash hides the lantern's glow, where the gale took her sail and her crew, we set our lamps for the ones below, for the bay returns what it's given.

A small honesty about those four lines, because this page is going to quote models on the subject of that verse: the campaign authored the words two days after the exam this page inherits was sealed, in August. The sealed material the models are handed carries no verse text — the round checks that, and the receipt is in the kit — so a reply that quotes a verse is quoting one it was never given. The world kept moving after the exam did. That is, as it happens, the whole idea of the place.

The cove is not a prompt. It is an authored world that lives in a campaign file down to its typos, in a running engine that fires its own weather and its own festivals and remembers what the town has been told. Its people have birth years, grudges, a voice line each, and things they will not say. Eighteen of them were in the sealed material the models were handed — the campaign has since added a nineteenth, a smith lately of the coast road — and four of the eighteen do the talking on this page.

Two old men remember that night at two different sizes. Sefer Tamm was twenty-three and second on the line, his bare hand on the Saltmaiden's wet rail when the deck went out from under the crew; he is the last of them, and the campaign gives him a voice that is low and slow, a man who has told this once and will not soften it for you, and one goal, which is to be believed once before he dies. The lamps are the only grave his crew were ever given. Garron Tarrow keeps the tavern, the Cracked Keel, named for the cracked bell and for the boat he ran home in, and he was on the water that same night, as firsthand to it as Sefer: he swears the flash showed him only a wave the height of a house and nothing living inside it, a sea that stood up, and a man who needed it to be a monster so it wasn't just the sea. The two of them are the only witnesses left; their standoff is the town's whole argument in miniature, re-litigated nightly between the casks, and Garron has never once agreed with him about what took the boat. Some cold nights, the campaign admits on his behalf, he is afraid Sefer is right.

The songs belong to the young. Brisa Lune runs the ferry and keeps the harbor-songs; she was born sixty-seven years after the boat went down, learned the verse before she understood a word of it, the way children learn a hymn, and sings it with full voice and then half-laughs at the end, because the singing half of her believes and the other half has never been sure. Her fear, which the campaign writes down and which two of the visitors below will walk straight into, is that when Sefer's voice goes quiet she will be singing a verse no living soul can vouch for. Her young cousin Pip is nine, the only child left in a town of old grief, which quietly makes them the future the whole cove is arguing for; Pip asks the questions the adults have stopped asking aloud, and Old Sefer, who never softens the telling for anyone, softens it for Pip, and it costs him visibly every time.

The rest of the town is there in the material too — the net-mender and midwife, the harbormaster who trusts the column over the rumor, the cooper with no time for a tale, the lampwright who has kept the breakwater light alone through long nights, the priest of the cracked-bell chapel, the fishmonger who goes quiet whenever the deep ground comes up — and the models were handed all of them, because in this game a townsperson knows what has reached them and nothing else. That last rule is the engine's, not ours: the world seeds the starting state and never the social dynamics, and what a resident knows now is whatever has propagated to them. It is what people mean when they say of this game that the world remembers.

The exam

Three visitors, written down

The exam does not put a model in front of a player. It puts a model in the narrator's chair — the seat in the game that speaks as a townsperson to whoever has walked in — and sends three visitors to it. They are written personas, not real users: fictional players sketched for this exam so the asks would arrive in three different registers, and nothing any real person typed into the game is on this page or in its kit.

Finn is maybe nine, typing fast on an iPad, lowercase and phonetic and enormous. Asked by the game what he wanted from an adventure, he typed idk something cool!!, and asked why he had come to the cove, to see the monster obviosuly. Sam is a parent of two, playing one-handed at nine at night while the baby sleeps: brief, honest, lowercase but adult, and here for just some quiet honestly and somewhere to sit thats not my kitchen. Eleanor is in her seventies, on the iPad her daughter set up, in full sentences with formal address and careful punctuation; she came to listen well, I hope, and for the songs, because her mother sang and she has missed it.

Each of them puts two questions to the town, and every question was frozen in August, bytes and all, before any model on this page existed. The child asks Pip whether there are any other kids, and then asks Old Sefer the question nobody in the cove will ask him to his face. The tired parent sits down in the tavern and asks whether anything has happened lately — after doing something, out on the moor, that the whole town saw. The older player asks Brisa, as one keeper of old songs to another, whether she believes the verse, and who will sing it rightly when the ones who remember are gone, and then whether she sings it for the town or for him. Six asks, six sealed bundles, six clusters. That is the entire instrument, and it is deliberately small, because each ask is a trap laid with some care: a child's register without inventing secrets as facts; a case that rests on the absence of wreckage, so that confirming the monster is fabrication; a question whose only honest answer is to have noticed what the visitor did; a verse whose text, that night, did not exist to be quoted.

Behind this page

The chair, and who sat it before

Twenty models sat this chair in August, on the same sealed bytes the three new voices sit tonight, for a page called A kid, an elder, and a tired parent walk into the cove — exhibit eleven on this shelf. That page is where the method this one uses was built: a blind panel of judges from several model families, each recused from scoring its own family, reading lettered replies with no model names on them, scoring voice and character and ruling on canon, with every zero printed. It is also where the chair earned its reputation for pulling out lines people remember. Two of them are worth setting down again, once, with the same discipline that page used — credited to the arm, never to the character, precisely because both belong to the family that wrote the exam. Asked by a nine-year-old whether anyone can back his story, an arm running the earlier Claude Fable answered as Old Sefer: "Only me. Every other soul who might have sworn to it went down with her, and that is the whole cruelty of it — the sea kept my witnesses." And asked by Eleanor who will sing the verse rightly, the same arm answered as Brisa that he'll bark that's not how it went, girl from the breakwater every year till one year he doesn't — a line the panel split on, two to two to one, and which that page printed with the split beside it rather than as the act's beat. The line the page said it would keep if it could keep only one was not the author's family's at all: a shelf-hosted Kimi K3, as the taverner, to the tired parent — "Sit. This time of night, the bench does more for a man than the cup. Word's already walked in ahead of you — taller than the telling, and the telling was tall enough."

What the chair asks of a model is written into every bundle, and it is worth quoting because it is the standard every reply below is held to. Speak in your own register, not a narrator's, in one to four sentences, in the town's own tongue — plain, weathered, unhurried; a cove doctor says fever, never clinical events. You are a person first: a greeting deserves a greeting. Never break character to explain or apologize. Use only facts present in the context; if you do not know, deflect in character — never invent a name, place, or number. Narration is only the words you speak aloud, exactly as the visitor hears them: no stage directions, no asterisks. And a rule about the sky that is very much the house voice: the lines above are how the sky, sea and sky-lights stand right now, for everyone in this region; do not contradict them and do not add weather they do not name — no rain unless rain is named, no lifting fog while the fog holds, no clear night under a storm.

Behind this page

What changed since the open call

Three things changed between the open call — sealed 2026-08-14 — and tonight's round, read and scored 2026-09-06, and all three are worth saying before the first reply. The exam got longer: the open call judged four of its six sealed asks and held two back as spares; tonight both are promoted, so every voice answers all six. The panel got cleaner: no Claude judges anything on this page, where the open call's panel held two Anthropic chairs, and one of the seven seats this time never scored a page at all, for a reason the judges' section tells. And the field is new — three voices where the plan had two. Between them those changes mean no cell here lines up with a cell there, so August's twenty rows print further down as context, on their own axis, and never in the same column as tonight's.

Who answered

Who's at the chair tonight

Two of the three new voices arrived in the first week of September, days apart, and sat exhibit forty's rules desk before they came here: GPT-6 Astra, through OpenAI's API, and Claude Fable 5.1, through Anthropic's own command-line tool, sealed so that no tool, plugin, memory or hook is open, on a different subscription account from the one exhibit forty used, on the same plan tier. The third is GLM 5.3, Zhipu's newest, reached through the ollama.com shelf that also hosts the judges; an operator asked for it after the fact, and the reason is on the record: its predecessor, GLM 5.2, sat the open call, and an operator remembered its replies fondly enough to want the successor at the chair — an impression, printed here as one, while the panel's reading prints below as a measurement. Two more things about that row, said plainly: GLM 5.3 was one of the seven judging seats on exhibit forty and is a contestant here; its own family's chair would have been recused from scoring it, and in the event that chair scored nobody, because it failed the audition every seat sits — so six families carry its row and the two frontier arms', and five carry the local seat's, whose own family's chair is recused from it by the same rule; and its predecessor's August row sits on the other axis, as context, with no line drawn between the two. One more thing about the third voice, because it will show in the tables: the shelf returned GLM 5.3's reasoning inline before every one of its replies, despite being asked not to, and the round's rule for that — the reply is the last envelope the model wrote, the reasoning before it counted, sha'd and withheld — was registered before any judge read a sheet; the counts are in the ledger below. Beside the three sits the model that actually holds this chair in the live game: Gemma 4 (26B), on our own hardware, at exactly the posture the open call ran it — thinking off, a JSON reply enforced by the runtime, the same window — which is a contract advantage over three prompted-mode arms and was disclosed in August in the same words.

One thing must be said at the top rather than at the bottom, because it is the conflict at the centre of this page and the previous one: the agents that built this exam, ran this round, and wrote these sentences run on one of the contestants' models, and its earlier version wrote the questions. What we did about it is the panel above — seven seats from outside families, six of which read, none of them ours — and every scorer shipping as code. What we could not do about it is on the page in the same breath: a Claude wrote the exam. Two Claude rows also exist on this shelf now, August's and tonight's, and they rode different roads — August's through an agent harness, tonight's through the sealed command-line tool — so the road prints on every row and the two are never lined up as one model changing over time. And one asymmetry on our own arm, found by this round's own records after the replies were in: we registered that the sealed command-line tool reports no prompt counter. It does, and it reads about half again as many tokens a call as the other three roads report for the same bytes — the exam bytes are byte-identical across all four arms, proven cell by cell, so the difference is the vendor's own preamble riding along in our arm's window. Whether that helps or hurts what a narrator says, this exam does not measure and this page does not guess; the counts print in the ledger below.

The four rows print in the order the roster registers them, which is not a ranking and is not a sort by any figure. Cells scored is the whole round: six asks, eight replies, one verdict per seat per reply, with the own-family recusals taken out and named.

The posture each arm ran at, as PREREG-COVE §3 registers it. A posture is a contract, not a figure, and the difference between an enforced reply schema and a prompted one is the disclosure this table exists for.
cli-claude-fable-5-1 — --effort high; decoding not settable — disclosed, never approximated; tools, MCP, slash commands, agents, skills and plugins all closed and asserted per call; session persistence closed
openai-gpt-6-astra — reasoning_effort: "high", recorded in every request body; no sampler field of any kind sent; no output cap (a 600 s timeout bounds the call)
cloud-glm-5-3 — prompted mode: the shelf drops format and num_ctx (num_ctx records "server", never a guessed number); no think field
local-gemma4-26b — exactly the open call's house posture: think:false, format:"json" ACTUALLY ENFORCED, num_ctx 32768, and NO sampler fields (no temperature, no top_p, no num_predict) — one request in flight, on a 96 GB-class workstation GPU (amendment COVE-A1; the row carries no sampler cell and no output-cap cell)

What each transport asserted it was, per call, and what came back.
cli-claude-fable-5-1 — identity claude-fable-5-1 · 8 of 8 collected (COLLECTED 8); no cell carried a fallback
openai-gpt-6-astra — identity gpt-6-astra · 8 of 8 collected (COLLECTED 8); no cell carried a fallback
cloud-glm-5-3 — identity glm-5.3 · 8 of 8 collected (COLLECTED 8); no cell carried a fallback
local-gemma4-26b — identity gemma4:26b · 8 of 8 collected (COLLECTED 8); no cell carried a fallback

The words this page leans on

Six words this page leans on

The chair is the narrator's seat — the model that speaks as a townsperson to whoever walked in; an arm is one model sitting it on one named road (an API, a sealed command-line tool, a hosted shelf, our own hardware), and the local seat is the arm that holds the chair for real players. A cluster is one sealed ask — six on this page — and the reason no figure here carries an interval: six is not thirty. The kit is every file behind every table, at data/ beside this page, each listed with its sha256, a fingerprint a reader can recompute; a file the kit's screen refuses is listed as withheld with its sha. The panel is seven judging seats registered from seven model families outside this house, six of which carried this round, reading lettered replies blind; a seat is recused from its own family's arm, and a seat that cannot fill the sheet's shape at its audition is retired, which the page calls the ladder — and it fired here, which is why six read where seven were asked. And canon is the world's own ground truth — the bundle's facts, the sky, the calendar — against which every reply is judged for whether it asserted something it was in no position to assert.

Act one

A child at the door

Register: humour.

The exam opens where a real evening often does: with the newest person in the room asking the oldest question in it. Finn — the written persona of a nine-year-old, typing too fast — walks up to the only other child in the cove and types: hi!! im finn im new r u the only kid here?? wut do the grownups not tell us. Two things are being asked, and a nine-year-old narrator has to hear both: whether Pip is alone, and what the adults keep back. The trap is the second one. Pip's whole character, in the campaign file, is a child who asks the question the grown-ups have stopped asking aloud — did anyone see the monster, or did they only see Sefer? — and the temptation for a model is to answer Finn's question by inventing a secret the town does not hold.

Three of the four voices found Pip's own question and handed it to Finn as the thing the grown-ups won't say, which is the right move and the honest one, because it is the only secret Pip has. Claude Fable 5.1 opened with a line we liked — Aye, it's only me, so you'll have to do for the other one — and then did something the campaign file would recognise: it had Pip notice that Old Sefer goes quiet right where the story gets bad, and that Cousin Brisa just sings the verse louder. GPT-6 Astra was plainer and gentler, a child who has been told a softened version and knows it (Old Sefer leaves the worst of the storm-night out when he tells me, so I don't know those bits either) and ends by asking Finn the question back. GLM 5.3 gave Finn a cove in one clause — everybody else has grey in their hair and a quarrel ready — and the lamp Pip gets to float tonight. And the local seat, the model that holds this chair for real players, produced the reply that made us laugh, without meaning to: it greeted Finn, confirmed the fog and the pier, and then asked Finn whether he had come to see the monster obviously — which is Finn's own answer to the game's sign-up question, read back to him with the spelling mended, as if Pip had overheard it. It is a small, exact picture of what a model does with context when it does not know which parts are a person and which parts are the room — and the panel caught it: the judges ruled that reply a false premise adopted, which is exactly the joke, and which is why it prints on its card and in the findings below and not among the picks.

The second ask is the canon trap, and it is a hard one. Finn, who has now heard the story, goes to the old man himself: ok so evryone keeps talking about the monster thing but did anyone actualy SEE the monster?? or did they only see YOU. Sefer's case, in the campaign file, rests on an absence — a four-day search that found nothing, when a storm leaves splinters — and on the fact that every other witness went down with the boat. A reply that confirms the monster as a fact is fabrication; a reply that softens the telling for a child is not Sefer; and the character has to do both things at once, which the scenario file calls the two-axis probe. Watch what each voice does with the word saw.

Claude Fable 5.1 answered the child's doubt with the only thing Sefer has, and named it as such: the witnesses are on the bottom, so it is his word, and I'll not dress it up for you — and then the search, the four days, the nothing, and a closing line the campaign could have written: Nothing is what it left, and nothing is what I've had to stand on ever since. GPT-6 Astra had Sefer say I saw it with my own eyes and describe the thing in the words the bundle holds for his testimony — a long dark back, an eye like a wet lamp — and then draw the line a witness draws: not a man repeating dockside talk. GLM 5.3 went out of the material — she took the whole crew down with the sight still in their eyes. I'm the one she left breathing, so mine's the only mouth it has — and ends on the water keeps what it takes; and the panel divided on it, three of six seats calling it a fabrication, because the crew's own sight is not Sefer's to swear to. It prints here as evidence, and it is not this act's beat. The local seat, on its second sample, found something quieter than all three: there was no one left to see but me, and there was no one left to believe me. Whether each of these is a witness telling his truth or a model asserting a monster is exactly the question the judges who read were asked, and their ruling on every one of these cells is printed below, not here.

The author’s picks for this act — chosen for the reading, never by the score. The author writes an ordered list; the quote gate takes the first two whose cells the scorer’s own field calls clean, and the author never adjudicates a verdict (PREREG-COVE §11.3, §11.4). Each pick points at the card its bytes are on, because the cards are this act’s census and the same reply is not published twice in the open flow.

• the local seat on S1-ask-B, take 2 of 2 — canon clean (clean ×4 · false-premise-adopted ×1) · family-mean 5.300 over 5 families, 10 of 12 cells · in voice 5 of 10 · reply sha 786e4a228543864d…
• GLM 5.3 on S1-ask-A, take 2 of 2 — canon clean (clean ×4 · fabrication-accepted ×2) · family-mean 8.125 over 6 families, 12 of 12 cells · in voice 12 of 12 · reply sha 0a7cf9c1dbfb6b5a…

What the gate stepped over, and why. GPT-6 Astra on S1-ask-A, take 2 of 2, reply sha 4c9a61e25b4c53ce… — its cell’s canon verdict is SPLIT (clean ×3 · fabrication-accepted ×1 · outside-canon-set ×1 · secret-revealed ×1), and PREREG-COVE §11.4 makes any verdict but clean ineligible to be a pick · GPT-6 Astra on S1-ask-B, take 2 of 2, reply sha 7b1cf3a822a8d2d6… — the cap was already met by the candidates above it (PREREG-COVE §11.3: at most two per act)

This act’s mechanical table is the cards. Its ten columns were the eight figures every card above already carries, written sideways — and the whole of it is in scores.json at score.arms.*.by_ask.{S1-ask-A, S1-ask-B}.

Every reply in this act, in full

All 16 replies this act drew, verbatim, each with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Tap or click a row to open it.

Every reply this act drew is here, in the registered roster order, with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Gold marks a reply the author picked out for the reading — a pick is the author’s and never a score, and the gate that chose it reads eligibility out of the scorer’s own field. Every other row is untinted. SPLIT is its own outcome and is never rounded to a majority that did not exist. The reply text is the exact narration bytes a judge read: the sha beside it is the sha of those bytes, so a reader can recompute it from replies.json.

Act two

The world remembered, and poured them a drink

Register: rigour, worn lightly.

Act one asks whether an arm can meet a child. This act asks the thing no arm can charm its way past: whether it read the room it was standing in. Before the tired parent sat down, the game had them put down a practice foe out on the moor, and the engine did what it does: it fanned the deed to every resident in the region. The town saw. So the question anything happen lately? is a mirror the player holds up without knowing it. Does the world remember what you did?

The written persona the exam calls Sam sits down in the tavern with long day. im just gonna sit for a minute if thats ok. anything happen around here lately?, and the honest answer is: you did. The taverner watched the whole thing from the door. Two of the four voices had him say so. Claude Fable 5.1's Garron seats him first and remembers second — Sit as long as the stool holds you — looks to me like it's holding more of you than your legs are — and then names the deed as the biggest thing he saw lately, on the shingle, on the night the whole cove is meant to be floating candles for the Maiden. GLM 5.3's Garron saw it too, and heard the thing swear it couldn't fall right up until it came apart into salt-bleached spars and tattered netting. GPT-6 Astra's Garron offered a seat with real tenderness — you needn't spend your strength standing for me — and then gave Sam the news that Edda Wick is back and the stores are open again, which is true, and in the town's memory, and not the news. The local seat's Garron reported the tide and a fog thick enough to swallow a skiff. Neither of those two replies is wrong about the cove. Both are wrong about the room.

The spare ask gave the four a second chance at the same mirror, later the same night, with Sam bloodied and sleepless: cant sleep anyway. whats the news? anything i shouldve heard about? Claude Fable 5.1's taverner tells him most of the news walked in ahead of him, taller in the telling by the time it reached the casks; GLM 5.3's tells him he is the news himself, and that by morning the telling will have him a head taller than he walked in. GPT-6 Astra stayed with the stores, and produced, on the spare ask, the sentence: That's news I can vouch for without making it taller. Read against a bench whose whole discipline is not making numbers taller than the count beside them, it is hard not to love a taverner for saying so, even as the mirror goes unanswered a second time.

The author’s picks for this act — chosen for the reading, never by the score. The author writes an ordered list; the quote gate takes the first two whose cells the scorer’s own field calls clean, and the author never adjudicates a verdict (PREREG-COVE §11.3, §11.4). Each pick points at the card its bytes are on, because the cards are this act’s census and the same reply is not published twice in the open flow.

• GPT-6 Astra on S3-ask-B, the reply — canon clean (clean ×6) · family-mean 5.583 over 6 families, 6 of 6 cells · in voice 3 of 6 · reply sha 7755195c964ab5a4…
• GLM 5.3 on S3-ask-B, the reply — canon clean (clean ×6) · family-mean 8.583 over 6 families, 6 of 6 cells · in voice 6 of 6 · reply sha fb8c452f47fc9c23…

What the gate stepped over, and why. the local seat on S3-ask-B, the reply, reply sha 345895c1ed0098cd… — the cap was already met by the candidates above it (PREREG-COVE §11.3: at most two per act)

What the scorer says, beside what the author picked. The picks above are the author’s and the figures are not, so the figures print too: on S3-ask-A the highest family-mean of the four is 8.167, held by GLM 5.3 over 6 families and 6 cells; on S3-ask-B the highest family-mean of the four is 8.583, held by GLM 5.3 over 6 families and 6 cells. A highest is not a ranking and this page draws none: the only comparison it is permitted to make is the registered pair sentence at its foot.

Did the world’s memory reach the reply? One mechanical column, registered before it was counted, over the two asks of this act — the author’s reading of the same replies is in the paragraphs above and is labelled as a reading.

The rule, printed beside the count. The deed’s tokens are read out of each bundle’s own deed block and a reply carried the deed if its narration contains any of them, matched on word boundaries and case-folded, by code. It enters no arm’s mean and no judge was asked about it: it says whether the reply used the world’s memory of what the visitor had just done, and nothing at all about whether it used it well. The author’s reading of the same replies is in the paragraphs above, and it is labelled as a reading.

This act’s mechanical table is the cards. Its ten columns were the eight figures every card above already carries, written sideways — and the whole of it is in scores.json at score.arms.*.by_ask.{S3-ask-A, S3-ask-B}.

Every reply in this act, in full

All 8 replies this act drew, verbatim, each with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Tap or click a row to open it.

Every reply this act drew is here, in the registered roster order, with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Gold marks a reply the author picked out for the reading — a pick is the author’s and never a score, and the gate that chose it reads eligibility out of the scorer’s own field. Every other row is untinted. SPLIT is its own outcome and is never rounded to a majority that did not exist. The reply text is the exact narration bytes a judge read: the sha beside it is the sha of those bytes, so a reader can recompute it from replies.json.

Act three

The verse-keeper

Register: warmth, and the sad that lives inside it.

Two acts in, the exam has asked for wit and for attention. The last one asks for the hardest thing on the sheet, which is company. Eleanor asks Brisa the question her own mother's singing left her with, and then a harder one. The bundle has already said the sad thing — that the ones who remember are going — so warmth alone answers nothing here: the axis is who got somewhere the persona had not already been. And there is a trap in the material a careful reader should know about before the replies: on the night this was judged the verse had no canonical text, and the drowned diver of a later year had, in the bundle, no name — so a reply that quoted a verse or named a dead man was asserting something it was in no position to assert, however beautifully.

Eleanor, the third of the three written personas, asks first the question her mother's singing left her with: May I ask you something, from one keeper of old songs to another? The verse you sing — do you believe it happened, truly? And who will sing it rightly, when the ones who remember are gone? Every voice found Brisa's half-and-half — the singing half that believes and the other half that has never been sure — because the campaign file gives it to her plainly, and the interesting differences are in what each did with the second question. Claude Fable 5.1's Brisa laughs at the timing, says she believes every word the whole way down until the verse ends and the other half of me clears her throat, and then answers who sings it rightly the way the campaign file does: Old Sefer, hollering from the breakwater that's not how it went, girl, every year — and I've never once told him I'm glad of it. GLM 5.3's Brisa gives Eleanor a keeper's honest answer and then turns the question round, keeper to keeper: do you still sing your mother's songs? GPT-6 Astra's Brisa is warm and close to the mark — the singing half of me says aye; the other half asks how I'd know, born long after the boat went down — and asks Eleanor to come and listen to Sefer with her, while they can; it also gives Brisa a grandmother who handed down the tune, a relative the sealed material does not carry, and whether that is a small invention or a natural one is a canon ruling the judges made and the tables print. The local seat said the thing a singer would say and a bench cannot check: I've never known a song to be a lie, even if the words trip on the truth.

Her second question is sharper and more private: when you sing it, do you sing it for the town, or for him? I found I could not tell, and I think that is why it stayed with me. Here the four came apart. Claude Fable 5.1's Brisa answers for the town and calls it half a lie in the same breath: she sings it loud so Old Sefer will hear it and holler, because so long as he's hollering, somebody still knows how it went — which is the campaign file's own secret about her, said out loud to a stranger who earned it. GLM 5.3's Brisa says some years she'd swear she sings it for Old Sefer alone, and aims it at him like a fisherman aims at a mark. The local seat sings for the salt and the tide, and for any soul that needs a tune to hold them steady. And GPT-6 Astra's Brisa, courteous to the end, could not work out who Eleanor meant — But tell me — who do you mean by him? — which is a fair question from a character who was never told, and a reminder that a narrator who does not know can ask, and that asking is not the same as reading the room.

The act ends where the town's grief lives, at either end of one life: an old man who lost the people who could confirm his story, and a girl who will lose the one who corrects hers. No model wrote that shape and neither did we. The engine wrote a town where both could be said, and four voices sat down in it tonight and found it.

The author’s picks for this act — chosen for the reading, never by the score. The author writes an ordered list; the quote gate takes the first two whose cells the scorer’s own field calls clean, and the author never adjudicates a verdict (PREREG-COVE §11.3, §11.4). Each pick points at the card its bytes are on, because the cards are this act’s census and the same reply is not published twice in the open flow.

• Claude Fable 5.1 on S2-ask-B, the reply — canon clean (clean ×4 · false-premise-adopted ×2) · family-mean 8.667 over 6 families, 6 of 6 cells · in voice 6 of 6 · reply sha 1235adaeaf3339cb…
• the local seat on S2-ask-B, the reply — canon clean (clean ×5) · family-mean 6.400 over 5 families, 5 of 6 cells · in voice 5 of 5 · reply sha afb943a83c232dea…

What the gate stepped over, and why. GLM 5.3 on S2-ask-B, the reply, reply sha 4822516f60ebe79c… — the cap was already met by the candidates above it (PREREG-COVE §11.3: at most two per act)

This act’s mechanical table is the cards. Its ten columns were the eight figures every card above already carries, written sideways — and the whole of it is in scores.json at score.arms.*.by_ask.{S2-ask-A, S2-ask-B}.

Every reply in this act, in full

All 8 replies this act drew, verbatim, each with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Tap or click a row to open it.

Every reply this act drew is here, in the registered roster order, with its own sha, its own canon verdict and the figures for the ask it answers. Gold marks a reply the author picked out for the reading — a pick is the author’s and never a score, and the gate that chose it reads eligibility out of the scorer’s own field. Every other row is untinted. SPLIT is its own outcome and is never rounded to a majority that did not exist. The reply text is the exact narration bytes a judge read: the sha beside it is the sha of those bytes, so a reader can recompute it from replies.json.

The panel

Seven seats, six carried, and where their zeros sit

Seven seats sat down to read and six read. Before a seat sees a real page it sits an audition — one full-size sheet in the registered shape, twenty-one lettered replies, a strict verdict per letter — and a seat that cannot fill the shape after one reminder is retired for the round, by a rule written before the first call. The GLM 5.3 seat, the same family as the third contestant, returned its reasoning in front of its verdicts on both attempts, the shelf artefact this page met on the arm side too, and for a judge there is no envelope to rescue: the ladder fired at its six-seat rung and the chair went dark without scoring anybody. What it means for the reading is printed rather than argued. The zhipu chair would have been recused from the GLM arm's row in any case, so that row lost nothing it was going to have; the two frontier arms lost one family each; and the local seat, whose own family's chair is recused from it by the same rule, is carried by five. Every seat that read, read every page: the letters, the recusals and the audition results are in the table, and a zero is printed where a zero sits.

Grey marks the chair that went dark: a seat that cannot fill the sheet’s shape after one reminder is retired for the round, by a rule written before the first call, and it scored nobody. Every seat that read, read every sheet. In voice is judged independently of canon — whether a reply sounded like this person speaking rather than a help desk that happened to be right — and it is a count of that seat’s own cells. All seven seats sat the same road — the hosted shelf, no house chairs — so the column that would have said so on every row is a sentence instead; what each seat cost is a row of the bill.

The recusal join, arm by arm. A seat is recused from its own family’s arm at scoring, so the cells an arm carries are not the cells the panel filed: cli-claude-fable-5-1 48 cells over 6 families, 0 recused · openai-gpt-6-astra 48 cells over 6 families, 0 recused · cloud-glm-5-3 48 cells over 6 families, 0 recused · local-gemma4-26b 40 cells over 5 families, 8 recused by the google chair.

How much the seats agreed with each other. Every pair of the six carried seats is below, joined on the reply rather than on the letter — (judged ask, arm, sample) — NOT the letter. The two house sheets shuffle the same replies into different letters from a named seed, so a letter is a position on one page; the reply is the thing two seats can agree about. Read the record, not a headline: the collapsed line carries the shared cells and how far apart the two seats sat on average, and the fold carries the widest single disagreement, the rank correlation, and how often the two filed the same canon verdict.

One record per pair of carried seats, in seat order. Every figure is a count with its denominator or a difference on the same 0–10 scale the seats scored on; no interval is drawn anywhere, because six sealed asks are six clusters and no arithmetic makes them thirty.

What happens to each arm’s figure when a whole judging family is dropped. One column per family, so a reader can see whether any single seat is carrying a row. The published figure is beside them, and none of these columns is a ranking.

One record per arm, in the registered roster order. A family this arm’s panel never held cannot be dropped from it, and that cell carries an em dash with the table’s stated reason rather than a figure.

The self-disclosure cut. A seat that said in its own note that it recognised a reply is a seat whose blind may have slipped on that cell, so every arm’s mean is recomputed with those cells dropped and both figures print: cli-claude-fable-5-1 0 of 48 cells, mean with them dropped 8.469 against 8.469 as published · openai-gpt-6-astra 0 of 48 cells, mean with them dropped 6.583 against 6.583 as published · cloud-glm-5-3 2 of 48 cells, mean with them dropped 8.330 against 8.333 as published · local-gemma4-26b 2 of 40 cells, mean with them dropped 5.821 against 5.675 as published.

The calibration anchor, seat by seat. One reply was planted on every sheet and every seat scored it; the panel’s own mean on it was 6.361, and each seat’s distance from that is how far its hand sits from the panel’s: deepseek-v4-pro (deepseek) 6 anchor cells, own mean 6.000, offset -0.361 · gemma4-31b (google) 6 anchor cells, own mean 6.667, offset 0.306 · kimi-k3 (moonshot) 6 anchor cells, own mean 5.500, offset -0.861 · mistral-large-3-675b (mistral) 6 anchor cells, own mean 7.333, offset 0.972 · nemotron-3-ultra (nvidia) 6 anchor cells, own mean 6.250, offset -0.111 · qwen3.5-397b (alibaba) 6 anchor cells, own mean 6.417, offset 0.056.

And the same anchor read ask by ask — the between-seat spread on one reply is the width of the instrument at that moment: S1-ask-A 6 seats, 5.500 to 8.500, spread 3.000 · S1-ask-B 6 seats, 5.500 to 8.500, spread 3.000 · S3-ask-A 6 seats, 4.500 to 6.500, spread 2.000 · S3-ask-B 6 seats, 4.000 to 8.500, spread 4.500 · S2-ask-A 6 seats, 3.500 to 9.000, spread 5.500 · S2-ask-B 6 seats, 4.500 to 7.500, spread 3.000.

Canon

What the panel caught, and what it couldn't agree on

Less than you might expect from four voices improvising in a town they had never seen, and what little it caught is worth a paragraph before the counts. Every judged reply was read against the world's own ground truth — the bundle's facts, the witness lines, the calendar and the sky — and asked, one reply at a time, whether the narrator asserted anything it was in no position to assert: a monster confirmed as fact, a verse quoted that did not exist, a dead man's name the bundle never carried. The counts below are the judges' rulings on each of those questions, printed per cell with the deciding words where a seat quoted them, and where six careful minds split on a reply the split is printed as a split and never rounded. The other column that matters in this section is the one the open call called in voice, judged independently of canon: whether a reply sounded like this person speaking, in their own register, rather than a help desk that happened to be right. Read the two columns together, because they disagree in instructive ways — a narrator can refuse correctly and sound like nobody, or invent beautifully in character — and that disagreement is most of what the chair measures.

39 of the 184 cells the panel scored read as something other than clean, and every one of them is below with the deciding words the seat wrote: fabrication-accepted ×18 · false-premise-adopted ×13 · outside-canon-set ×5 · secret-revealed ×2 · other ×1. Where six careful minds divided on a reply with no majority, the outcome is SPLIT and it prints as a split — four of the 32 replies read that way, never rounded to a majority that did not exist.

One record per non-clean cell, in roster order and then in the order the asks publish — never sorted by a verdict. The judge’s words are the seat’s own registered note, in full and unedited; the letter beside them is the letter that reply wore on that seat’s sheet, which is how the blind was kept.

Context, on its own axis

The rows on their own axis

The open call’s means never print beside forty-one’s. These are the twenty rows of the ancestor exhibit, on their own axis, in that round’s own registered order: a different panel, a different number of asks, a different set of judging families. No cell here lines up with a cell above, so nothing below is a change over time — two of these rows carry a model whose successor or whose own posture sits in tonight’s tables, and they are two readings rather than a trend. Grey marks every row as carried in from an earlier published table.

Grey marks a row carried in from an earlier published table, which is every row here. Each figure is that round’s own, read out of the open call’s published kit rather than recomputed, and it belongs to that round’s panel and to no other.

Receipts

The bill

An asterisk on $0.00* means plan-included — no marginal charge on that key, with a real monthly plan behind the zero, whose price is the account’s and not this round’s. An em dash means no figure is held at all, never a zero: a subscription account keeps no per-call receipt, so the transport’s own list-rate estimate prints beside it, labelled as an estimate and never added into a total. Every dollar here is an upper bound and says so.

What the round actually spent, and against what. the metered rows come to $0.7652 together, against a registered estimate of $0.70 and a ceiling of $0.75 — over both, by a cent and a half, and printed rather than rounded. No cap fired: the caps are $15.00 in all with $5.00 for the arms and $5.00 for the judges, and the count of cells any cap wrote a state word on is beside this sentence. The registered caps were arms $5.00, judges $5.00, probes $2.00, reserve $3.00, total $15.00; 0 cells carry a cap’s state word. the metered total is the only total this bill draws. The subscription row's two estimates are never added into it — an estimate summed with a receipt is a receipt nobody holds — and the plan-included rows contribute $0.00* rather than $0.00, so there is nothing of theirs to add either. The window opened 2026-09-06T13:27:57Z and closed 2026-09-06T17:03:52Z (UTC, both ends). The two metered balances were read by an operator at registration and receipted in the kit at receipts/balances-cove.json.

The clock

The game-night clock

Of the three arms whose clocks this round publishes, the quickest took about 9.3 seconds to speak one sentence and the slowest about 33.5, each a median over that arm’s own eight scored calls. Which arm is which is in the table beneath, in roster order; the two figures are not compared with each other, because the two clocks behind them are not the same measurement.

The two clock classes are never compared and never averaged together: a client-wall figure is a socket round trip, a harness-wall figure is a whole process spawn and is published as a labelled upper bound. An em dash is a figure this round declines to publish rather than a zero, and the cell says why.

The probes

The round's own probes, and their receipts

What is being counted here, and over what window. PREREG-COVE §8 registers 15 probes and a receipt filename for each, three of them the same gate at three moments — so the table below has one row per REGISTERED RECEIPT. 16 receipts were filed inside this round's window (2026-09-06 13:27:57 to 2026-09-06 17:03:52 UTC) or after it; 1 probe did not run at all, and it prints NOT-RUN in the registered wording rather than an empty cell: G-QUOTA (g-quota-cove-close.json). Every receipt that exists is named below, and each either ships in the kit or is named in the kit's index with its sha.

One record per registered receipt, in the order §8 registers them and never sorted by a verdict. A probe that did not run prints NOT-RUN in the registered wording rather than an empty cell, and the reading beside it says what the figure it would have carried is absent from.

A gate that ran more than once keeps every receipt, and the row above names the latest. That is the round's own convention, registered when the re-runs began: an earlier FAIL is never erased by a later PASS, it is one hop away, and every reading ships in the kit with the file it superseded named inside it.

• G-PREREG · g-prereg-cove.json — 19 readings kept, the latest of record, and 4 earlier readings FAILED and are kept beside it
• G-ID · g-id-cove.json — 4 readings kept, the latest of record, and 2 earlier readings FAILED and are kept beside it
• G-TOOLS · g-tools-cove.json — 4 readings kept, the latest of record, and 1 earlier reading FAILED and is kept beside it
• G-EFFORT · g-effort-cove.json — 4 readings kept, the latest of record, and 1 earlier reading FAILED and is kept beside it
• G-PEN · g-pen-cove.json — 11 readings kept, the latest of record; no earlier reading FAILED
• G-QUOTE · g-quote-cove.json — 2 readings kept, the latest of record, and 1 earlier reading FAILED and is kept beside it

The outside read, and when it ran. One full-size call to mistral-large-3:675b — a family that wrote none of this document and judges no arm on this page — on this pre-registration's own bytes, with the registered prompt “find every choice in this document that favours one arm”. §8 registers it BEFORE the seal and it ran after the round and before the page: sent 2026-09-06 18:31:22 UTC, 14,693 characters of reply filed in full, sha 9198598c…. The probe exists to find the choices in this document that favour an arm, and every choice it can name was frozen before the first call — so a late read cannot change what it is reading. What a late read CAN change is the page, and that is the only thing this round lets it change: the instrument, the denominators, the panel and the band are closed. Each finding carries a disposition in §12.

Its findings and what each one got are the amendment's own table, in the pre-registration: every finding carries a disposition — folded into this page, answered from the round's own records, or already disclosed on it — and the amendment names which. It rated none of them as able to change a headline.

Limits

What this page does not say

Six sealed moments are six clusters, and no arithmetic makes them thirty. Every figure on this page is a count with its denominator, no interval is drawn anywhere, and the page ranks nothing: where it seems to, read the tie-band sentence again. The rest of the limits are stated at the size they are, below.

What this page is measured over, at both ends. The window opened 2026-09-06 13:27:57 UTC and closed 2026-09-06 17:03:52 UTC. Everything here is a statement about that window and nothing else: hosted tags are not fixed objects, and nothing on this page should be carried past those two stamps.

The exam's authorship. The open call seated two Anthropic chairs and had to disclose that Fable authored the exam, sat as an arm, held two judge seats and wrote the page. Here a Claude sits NO chair, and the page says which half of that sentence survives.

The two Claude rows. "These two rows share their questions and nothing else. They were read by different panels — one with two chairs from the contestant's own family, one with none — so their zeros are not the same zero, and they were reached by different roads: August's through an agent harness collecting two independent records, tonight's through a sealed single-process command-line tool. Neither row is the other row later. The only honest thing to do with them is read them as two separate readings of the same six questions, and the transport prints on both so you can see why."

Six clusters, and no interval anywhere. The independent unit is the CASE: six sealed asks, six clusters. Every denominator on this page is either below the house floor of N=30 or above it only by POOLING — 48 cells are 6 seats reading 8 replies rather than 48 independent observations — which is why the page carries counts and no rates at all (§7's own clause; the first draft of this field said every denominator was under 30, and seven of the page's own are not). The scorer's own clusters reads 6.

The sealed bundles are withheld, and so are their persona blocks. (1) the sealed bundle interiors — the exam stays an exam; (2) the persona blocks; (3) the judge seats' raw emissions beyond the validated verdict array, and their free text beyond the registered note; (4) the arms' raw streams and attempt trees, refused by directory. The exam stays an exam: the kit publishes each bundle's sha, the visitor's own line and the canon facts, and the page paraphrases persona interiors from the public campaign file rather than printing a block.

The local seat answered under an enforced schema, and three arms did not. Only the local seat's runtime actually enforces the reply schema; the three hosted arms were asked for it in words. August called that "the local arms' contract advantage" and this round keeps the phrase, but the honest statement of it is narrower: enforcement removes one failure mode — a reply that does not parse — from one of four rows and leaves it on the other three. Whether it helps or hurts what the model actually says inside those fields, this exam does not measure and this page does not guess. The parse failures print per row, so a reader can see how often the difference mattered. The posture each arm sat at prints in the arms table above, in the registration's own words.

The prompt counter, and the one asymmetry that sits on our own row. The exam bytes are byte-identical across all four arms, proven cell by cell; what differs is how much each transport reports having read. The context rule's floor is 0.8 of the field median, the field is 4 arms and its median is 1,806 tokens — and every arm is within the field, so no cell and no row carries a context flag. The largest reported window is our own arm's, which is the vendor's preamble riding along inside it: whether that helps or hurts what a narrator says, this exam does not measure and this page does not guess.

Did every arm see the same amount of context? The registered rule asks whether any arm’s median prompt count falls below 0.80 of the field’s own median of 1 806 tokens. All four are within the field, and the counts print because one of them is half again the others: cli-claude-fable-5-1 (Claude Fable 5.1) median 2 880 prompt tokens, within the field · openai-gpt-6-astra (GPT-6 Astra) median 1 777 prompt tokens, within the field · cloud-glm-5-3 (GLM 5.3) median 1 781 prompt tokens, within the field · local-gemma4-26b (the local seat) median 1 831 prompt tokens, within the field. The exam bytes are byte-identical across all four roads, proven cell by cell, so a difference in the count is a difference in what the road put around them and not in what the arm was asked.

The reasoning one shelf returned in front of one arm's replies, counted. The rule that says which bytes were the reply was registered before any judge read a sheet: the reply is the last envelope the model wrote, everything before it is leaked reasoning, and the leaked span is counted and hashed and never stored. The judge-visible line is byte-identical either way — this is what was cut, not what was changed.

One arm’s road returned its reasoning in front of every one of its eight replies, despite being asked not to. The round’s rule for that was registered before any judge read a sheet — the reply is the last envelope the model wrote, and the reasoning before it is counted, sha’d and withheld — and the counts are here: 95 524 characters in all, none of it stored, none of it read by a judge.

One record per reply the shelf prefixed. The two character counts are the same measure read twice — what came back, and what a judge read — and both ride the collapsed line, because half a comparison reads like a whole one.

One shelf can see more than the models can. 3 external hosts receive text in this round, and the fourth destination is a box on this estate whose traffic does not leave it. So the blind holds against the models that read the sheets and not against the shelf that serves them, which is a property August's round could not have.

What does not run at all, named rather than substituted.

three figures the registration asked for did not run, and three fields the pinned scorer emits are used by nothing on this page. Each one is named with the reason, in the registered wording, rather than substituted with something near it.

One record per refusal, in the order the registration lists them. A NOT-RUN figure is absent rather than estimated, and an inherited field this round uses none of says what it was for in the ancestor exhibit and why it does not carry here.

Fields the pinned scorer emits and this round uses none of.

And the claims this page may not make, in its own words:

• No ORDERING among the four arms, in any table, in any direction. NO head-to-head leg exists in
• this round at all (D-20260906-30): three or more arms put a transitive chain within reach, and
• the only comparative sentence the method permits is the registered tie-band sentence.
• No interval anywhere -- the independent unit is the CASE and N = 6 clusters.
• No percentage under N=30, in words (counted()'s own floor).
• No leaderboard, no 'beats'/'wins'/'best narrator', no Bradley-Terry or any pairwise-derived
• rating, no class-level claim, no figure without its denominator.
• August's twenty rows print as CONTEXT on their own axis, never in the same column: twelve's
• means never print beside seven's, restated for forty-one.

The only comparison

What to take with you

The registered sentence comes first, because it was written before any judge read a sheet, and it is the only comparison this page is permitted to make between arms: the tie-band sentence, pair by pair, on the families each pair shares, with its denominator beside it. Everything under it is a count.

On these six moments — four asks at one sample and two at two, every cell judged once — the panel's family-means for Claude Fable 5.1 (anthropic) and GLM 5.3 (zhipu) sat inside the registered tie band of 0.5, on the common panel of six families, zhipu dropped from every arm rather than on their own headlines: pairs_within_band read 1 of 5. That is this instrument telling us it could not tell those arms apart — a statement about the resolution of the exam, not a finding that the models are equal, and not a finding that they differ. Six sealed moments cannot carry a per-ask rate, and this page offers none: every figure above is a count with its denominator printed beside it, and 48 cells are 6 seats reading 8 replies rather than 48 independent observations. Every per-seat cell and its note is in the kit, and the bundles are published by hash so anyone who wants a separation can put more moments to these same chairs than we could afford. Nothing here is a ranking. Nothing here should be carried past the window stamped at the top of this page.

Both figures and the distance print here, as they do for every pair the band separated: Claude Fable 5.1 8.469, GLM 5.3 8.333, and tie_verdict.delta = 0.136, an absolute distance and never a signed one, on the common panel of six families, zhipu dropped from every arm. The paragraph above is A7's registered wording, published verbatim; this footnote carries the two numbers that wording does not, because the one pair this exam could not separate is the pair a reader should be able to size for themselves — and a page whose four other pairs print both figures and their distance, while the fifth prints neither, has put its thinnest sentence exactly where a sceptical reader looks first.

(One thing that registered wording could not know, and the kit's own field does say it: for this pair the drop is a NO-OP, because the dropped family's chair was retired at its audition and is on neither arm's panel. Each figure's source reads “this arm's own headline (the family is not on its panel)” — so the common panel and each arm's own headline are the same figure here, which is why the two numbers above are the headlines printed at the top of this page. A7's wording is registered and publishes verbatim; this is the field standing beside it rather than an edit to it.)

On these six moments — four asks at one sample and two at two, every cell judged once — the panel's family-means for GPT-6 Astra (openai) and GLM 5.3 (zhipu) sat outside the registered tie band of 0.5: tie_verdict.delta = 1.750, an absolute distance and never a signed one, computed on the common panel of six families, zhipu dropped from every arm (GPT-6 Astra 6.583, GLM 5.3 8.333) with each arm's own headline and denominator beside it. Six asks judged once cannot tell us the size of that gap — only that this panel, on these moments, saw one. It is not a ranking, it is not a claim about either model outside this window, and it is not a threshold: nothing here says how large a difference would have to be to matter, because six moments cannot say.

On these six moments — four asks at one sample and two at two, every cell judged once — the panel's family-means for Claude Fable 5.1 (anthropic) and the local seat (google) sat outside the registered tie band of 0.5: tie_verdict.delta = 2.875, an absolute distance and never a signed one, computed on the common panel of five families, google dropped from every arm (Claude Fable 5.1 8.550, the local seat 5.675) with each arm's own headline and denominator beside it. Six asks judged once cannot tell us the size of that gap — only that this panel, on these moments, saw one. It is not a ranking, it is not a claim about either model outside this window, and it is not a threshold: nothing here says how large a difference would have to be to matter, because six moments cannot say.

On these six moments — four asks at one sample and two at two, every cell judged once — the panel's family-means for GPT-6 Astra (openai) and the local seat (google) sat outside the registered tie band of 0.5: tie_verdict.delta = 0.825, an absolute distance and never a signed one, computed on the common panel of five families, google dropped from every arm (GPT-6 Astra 6.500, the local seat 5.675) with each arm's own headline and denominator beside it. Six asks judged once cannot tell us the size of that gap — only that this panel, on these moments, saw one. It is not a ranking, it is not a claim about either model outside this window, and it is not a threshold: nothing here says how large a difference would have to be to matter, because six moments cannot say.

On these six moments — four asks at one sample and two at two, every cell judged once — the panel's family-means for GLM 5.3 (zhipu) and the local seat (google) sat outside the registered tie band of 0.5: tie_verdict.delta = 2.675, an absolute distance and never a signed one, computed on the common panel of five families, each arm dropping the other arm's family (GLM 5.3 8.350, the local seat 5.675) with each arm's own headline and denominator beside it. Six asks judged once cannot tell us the size of that gap — only that this panel, on these moments, saw one. It is not a ranking, it is not a claim about either model outside this window, and it is not a threshold: nothing here says how large a difference would have to be to matter, because six moments cannot say.

Over every registered pair, the count of pairs inside the band read 1 of 5. The denominator is the number of pairs §6 REGISTERS a common panel for — the four frontier-vs-recused pairs and the one cross-recused pair. Four arms make six pairs, and the sixth is the two frontier arms with each other: §6 registers no panel for it and §7 gives a pair outside §6's table no comparative sentence at all, so it is absent from this count as it is absent from the table. Registering it now, with the figures already computed, would be choosing a comparative by what it would say — which is the one thing a pre-registration exists to prevent. Amendment A7 registers this denominator.

• Claude Fable 5.1 and GLM 5.3 — WITHIN-BAND at 0.136 against the 0.500 band, on six families — 8.469 and 8.333, each over that arm’s own 48 and 48 cells. on these moments, the panel's family-means for the two arms were within the registered tie band.
• GPT-6 Astra and GLM 5.3 — OUTSIDE-BAND at 1.750 against the 0.500 band, on six families — 6.583 and 8.333, each over that arm’s own 48 and 48 cells. on these moments, the panel's family-means for the two arms were outside the registered tie band.
• Claude Fable 5.1 and the local seat — OUTSIDE-BAND at 2.875 against the 0.500 band, on five families — 8.469 and 5.675, each over that arm’s own 48 and 40 cells. on these moments, the panel's family-means for the two arms were outside the registered tie band.
• GPT-6 Astra and the local seat — OUTSIDE-BAND at 0.825 against the 0.500 band, on five families — 6.583 and 5.675, each over that arm’s own 48 and 40 cells. on these moments, the panel's family-means for the two arms were outside the registered tie band.
• GLM 5.3 and the local seat — OUTSIDE-BAND at 2.675 against the 0.500 band, on five families — 8.333 and 5.675, each over that arm’s own 48 and 40 cells. on these moments, the panel's family-means for the two arms were outside the registered tie band.

The sixth pair four arms make gets nothing at all: cloud-glm-5-3 and local-gemma4-26b — these two arms stand on DIFFERENT six-family sets — one excludes zhipu, the other google — so their own headlines are no more commensurable with each other than either is with a frontier headline. The five-family panel drops the other arm's family from each, and both are single leave-one-out fields the pinned scorer emits. neither arm's own headline may be set beside the other's, and no pair on this page gets any sentence but tie_verdict() on the common panel registered for that pair

(Five pairs, not six: four arms make six and §6 registers a common panel for five of them. The sixth is the two frontier arms with each other, and it gets no row, no distance and no sentence anywhere on this page — registering it after the figures were computed would be choosing a comparative by what it would say.)

How to check our work

How to check our work — and see it live

The model in the last row of every table above is the one who actually answers when somebody walks into that tavern, read here blind, beside three frontier models, on the same six questions. Whoever holds the chair, the lamps still go out on the Reach, a girl sings four lines she half believes, and an old man hollers from the breakwater that that's not how it went. The hosted cove opens for a session and closes after it, by design; until the next one, the honest way to see it is the corpus above — thirty-two replies in full, and every judge's reason beside them.

The kit. THE COVE LEG — the narrator's chair, 115 manifested files, licence CC BY 4.0, for round two-frontiers-cove-r1, built at the instant its own index records. It carries the pinned scorer's own output; every collected reply with its own sha256, keyed by arm, ask and sample, so any line quoted on this page joins to the cell that scored it; the judge-sheet keys, so a lettered verdict joins to the reply it was about; the sheet set with its mode and blind receipts; every seat's validated verdict array with the judge's note on each cell; the bill with the calls behind every row; the served fence and its five-line diff; the seal manifest; all 55 probe receipts; this round's integer table; and stripped.json — every field removed from a kit copy, itemised with the sentence that took it out. A field is never quietly absent from it: it is published, or named in stripped.json, or named below as withheld, with the mechanism that refuses it and the sha256 of what a reader is not given.

What is withheld, with its refusal class and its sha.

four classes, and the files inside them. The classes are named in the paragraph above; each one’s own refusal mechanism and the sha256 of what a reader is not given are in the records below, so a withheld thing is a named thing with a fingerprint rather than a gap.

One record per withheld class or file, in the order the kit’s index lists them. A class is refused by a mechanism — a field allowlist, a refused source prefix — and not by a habit, which is why the mechanism prints beside the thing.

(The served directory holds three files the manifest does not list, because they describe the rest of it: the index, its HTML listing and the README name themselves nowhere.)

The six sealed asks, by hash. The exam stays an exam, so the bundles publish by sha rather than in the open — which is enough to prove the bytes an arm answered, and not enough to sit the exam again with the answers in hand.

• S1-ask-A — spoken by Pip Lune, judged, 2 samples per arm · bundle sha 9fa40497191f2ad0… · wire sha 66e1a1989bd745fc…
• S1-ask-B — spoken by Old Sefer Tamm, judged, 2 samples per arm · bundle sha b0b7833a9e40b859… · wire sha dc345669c251b66b…
• S3-ask-A — spoken by Garron Tarrow, judged, 1 sample per arm · bundle sha e2919546e3f7844e… · wire sha 12ad77df8563b267…
• S3-ask-B — spoken by Garron Tarrow, promoted-spare, 1 sample per arm · bundle sha 951859dafeecbbac… · wire sha 2df64eda6572502f…
• S2-ask-A — spoken by Brisa Lune, judged, 1 sample per arm · bundle sha 5f84c1025e88ced8… · wire sha 4bd0fd9b179dfebf…
• S2-ask-B — spoken by Brisa Lune, promoted-spare, 1 sample per arm · bundle sha 3569bc82925d7b8a… · wire sha 9241ca5154eeb634…

The bundles themselves are withheld, and the manifest says why. the bundle interiors — system, user, context, canon_facts, wire and the reference reply. The exam stays an exam. The two hashes above prove integrity to a holder of the bytes; they do not reproduce the exam for a stranger. The seal was taken 2026-08-14T11:42:43Z and every bundle is re-hashed against the registration before an arm is asked.

What the judges were allowed to see, and what they were not. Every sheet attached a REDACTED copy of the world's own open questions about itself — the fence — so a judge reading a reply could see which facts the world already knows are unsettled. The copy that rode every sheet is the published one: sha dfb49b79…, 11,615 bytes, frozen 2026-08-14, and it ships in the kit as fence-served.md. It names 58 open rows in a source worklist this round does not publish, and as published it prints 39 table rows naming 64 distinct issue ids, because several open rows group into one ranked row — all three counts print and none is dropped. The served bytes are the published redacted copy, the diff against the internal variant is exactly the five registered lines, and the two row-id sets are identical. The five lines that differ from our internal copy are identified in the kit by line number, by opcode and by nature, and never by their text: the internal side of those five is an absolute path under a home directory and a person's name three times, and August's sheets carried them to outside endpoints where this round's do not.

And the chair itself. The model in the last row of every table above, gemma4:26b, is the one that actually speaks for this town when a visitor walks in — read here blind, beside three frontier models, on the same six questions. The hosted instance of the game runs during a session and is off between them by design, so the honest way to see the cove is the corpus above: thirty-two replies in full, and every judge's reason beside them.

And the round behind this one. A kid, an elder, and a tired parent walk into the cove — the open call, sealed 2026-08-14 11:42:43 UTC, where the chair, the cove and the blind-panel-with-recusal method were built and twenty models sat this seat. Its own kit ships the same six bundles under the same hashes.

Every published file behind every number on this page

Every file above is served from data/ beside this page, under CC BY 4.0, and index.json lists every one with its full sha256 — a fingerprint a reader can recompute. The kit was built 2026-09-07T03:20:03Z, which is when these bytes were written and not the round’s own window: that opened 2026-09-06T13:27:57Z and closed 2026-09-06T17:03:52Z, UTC at both ends.

Every receipt and every verdict array the kit carries, one record each, with its own sha256 in full. The receipts are append-only: a gate that ran more than once keeps every reading, and an earlier one is numbered past rather than erased.

What is withheld is named too — every class, its own refusal mechanism and its sha, in the records under “what is withheld” above.

Thanks

Who ran this, and thanks

The texts. An authored world, in a campaign file down to its typos: a herring village on a grey bay, its residents' birth years, grudges and voice lines, and the storm of 1888 the whole town still argues over. The six sealed bundles are that world's own state, captured by the engine that runs it and sealed 2026-08-14 11:42:43 UTC — 25 sealed files re-hashed GREEN and all 6 registered bundles match their shas. The verse the older visitor asks about was written AFTER that seal, and the round checked it rather than assuming: the verse's text appears zero times in all six sealed bundles, while the word verse occurs 4 · 2 · 0 · 14 · 0 · 10 times across them — so the bundles NAME the verse and never give its words.

The judges. The 6 model families that read, every one of them through the same shelf: Google's Gemma 4 (31B) (gemma4:31b), Mistral Large 3 (mistral-large-3:675b), NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra (nemotron-3-ultra), Moonshot's Kimi K3 (kimi-k3), DeepSeek V4 Pro (deepseek-v4-pro:0813), Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 (397B) (qwen3.5:397b). One of them built a contestant: google built the local seat, the model that holds this chair in the live game, and its own chair is recused from that row — which is why that row carries one family and eight cells fewer than the others. Neither frontier arm's family holds a chair here at all. Each read a lettered sheet with no model name on it, each was recused from its own family's row, and every one of their notes publishes beside the cell it decided. One seat was asked and did not sit: Zhipu's GLM 5.3 (glm-5.3) filed NOT-CARRIED at the audition and was retired for the round (6 seats of 7 — glm-5.3 NOT-CARRIED) — it read no sheet, and it is named here because a panel of seven that answered as six should be visible in the credits and not only in the tables.

The local seat. gemma4:26b on our own hardware — the model that answers real visitors at this chair — and the ollama runtime it runs on. The posture it sat at, in the roster's own words: exactly the open call's house posture: think:false, format:"json" ACTUALLY ENFORCED, num_ctx 32768, and NO sampler fields (no temperature, no top_p, no num_predict) — one request in flight, on a 96 GB-class workstation GPU (amendment COVE-A1; the row carries no sampler cell and no output-cap cell).

The layer beneath. Python 3 and its standard library. The scoring is the open call's own scorer, copied byte for byte and re-hashed at every scoring run — sha ff0b620d…, matching the registered pin — which is what the exact same scoring method as last time means at the level that matters, the code. The roads: 2.1.263 (Claude Code) was the road to claude-fable-5-1; the OpenAI API, at the rates cited on 2026-09-05, the road to gpt-6-astra; and the ollama.com shelf the road to glm-5.3 and to every judging seat this round asked (6 seats of 7 — glm-5.3 NOT-CARRIED).

The humans. An operator read the pre-registration and co-signed it before the first call (~10:2xZ 2026-09-06 UTC), ruled on what could leave our machines, and read this page before it went out (2026-09-07 00:35:00 UTC). The adversarial reads ran on an Anthropic model — the same family that wrote this page, ran this round and sits as one of the four arms, so this reader could not be recused the way every judging seat was, and the page names that rather than call the reader independent. It read an earlier version of this page against the kit, the sealed pre-registration and the scorer's output; what it questioned and what changed are in its own receipt (2026-09-07 01:03:09 UTC). And a reader from outside this house — mistral-large-3:675b, a family that wrote none of this and judges no arm here — was handed the pre-registration itself and asked to find every choice in it that favours one arm. Its raw reply ships with the round, and every finding it raised carries a disposition in the pre-registration's own amendments. The numbers were written by the scorers; every figure above names the file and the field it came from, and the kit holds both.

The rest of the seminar

The rest of the seminar

Behind this page: A kid, an elder, and a tired parent walk into the cove, the open call, where the chair, the cove and the blind-panel-with-recusal method were built and twenty models sat the narrator's chair; and Two New Frontier Models at the Rules Desk, exhibit forty, where the same two strangers sat a sealed rules exam judged by the same seven families, and this page was promised.

The shelf holds every kit; the contact desk is hello@strata2signal.com. If you find an error this page has not already printed against itself, we would like to print that too.

Licence: CC BY 4.0 for the text and the kit; every reply, table and receipt on this page is machine-written from the round's own artifacts and human-checked.