State two properties once, and repair SCOPE.md's withdrawn framing

Two things this week's rulings left owed, both the failure mode those
rulings were about.

A-16 and A-17, and Core Rules 16 and 17. Two general properties had
been stated three times each, always against the instance that produced
them and nowhere in general — which is how a property gets found by
accident or not at all. That is the defect gate-house corrected in
three other repositories this month while carrying it here.

A-16, distinguishable routes: where one observable state is reachable
by two routes differing in security meaning, the record must say which.
Four instances, and they only look like one rule once they are next to
each other — an envelope identical whether access-engine issued it or a
responder forged it (GH-DEC-2026-010), unknown versus absent in a
stance map (-011), a tenant claim directory-asserted versus
registration-supplied (-013), erased versus never held on an evidence
path (-014). The rule is not that the routes must diverge; usually they
must behave identically and safely. It is that a later reader can tell
them apart, or a sound check gets read as carrying a property it does
not have.

A-17, fail-closed transitions: a transitional deviation is admissible
only where it fails closed on the case distinguishing it from the
conformant state. Written because two requests for transitional relief
arrived in one week and were answered oppositely, and the answers would
otherwise read as arbitrary rather than as one rule.

Both are marked repository-level and explicitly not estate doctrine.
Graduation waits on a repository that bears a cost under them having
argued them, which is the bar security-layer-model met and these have
not.

SCOPE.md was still the withdrawn authority-plane framing. It opened by
saying gate-house "decides whether a requested action is authorized"
and listed deterministic authorization decisions as in scope — the
design retired by GH-DEC-2026-001, surviving in a derived document a
reader would take as current, with a dead pointer to Blueprint section
3 non-goals that the re-cut removed. Rewritten from current INTENT,
including what is not owned here and what would put the repository out
of scope.

The irony is noted rather than hidden: a derived artifact contradicting
its source, in the repository that generalised that failure into
statute section 12 after finding six instances in one week elsewhere.

rmgr conform clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012viPor8WJNCbV64ipwewrm

Assistant: claude-code
Assistant-Model: opus
Assistant-Process: 1754332@bnt-lap001
Assistant-Session: 9c8ac536-ff5e-46a3-8ab1-a548bde25fc0

README.md

@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ may.
 
 ---
 
-## The doctrine in fifteen lines
+## The doctrine in seventeen lines
 
 1. No privilege from cognition.
 2. Every privileged action crosses a deterministic authority boundary.
@@ -133,6 +133,14 @@ may.
 13. Audit evidence is protected from the actor being audited.
 14. Failure of critical policy or authorization dependencies fails closed.
 15. Production guarantees must survive incorrect agent behavior.
+16. Where one appearance is reachable by two routes, the record says which route.
+17. A transitional deviation is admissible only where it fails closed on the case that distinguishes it from the conformant state.
+
+The last two are September 2026 and are repository-level, not estate doctrine. 16
+is why an `unknown` and an `absent` stance cell must be told apart in the record
+even though both fail closed, and why a decision envelope that looks authentic is
+not therefore attributable. 17 is why one request for transitional relief was
+granted and another declined in the same week. See `INTENT.md` § Core Rules.
 
 ## Agentic operating modes