**Status.** An early-reaction proposal for the owner's selected direction: certain actions join rooms into groups that stay connected through shifts, and connecting the entire station is one of the deepest and latest puzzles. Nothing here is canon — not the machinery, not the architecture, not any ending. Early shift uncertainty and permanent connections are preserved. The local latching rules are a candidate; the required deep, station-wide insight is still unresolved, and the source-sequencing claim below is not established.

**Legality is a seam signature.** Every coupling face carries a short signature in the builders' cut script. Two sections whose facing signatures match were built adjacent. At a matching seam the coupling can be latched; at a mismatch it visibly refuses.

**Making the latch needs a live run.** The coupling only engages while a service main runs live across the seam. Restoring that run is the work.

**Once latched, it is permanent.** This is the part that matters most for the owner's requirement: **a latched coupling is mechanical and remains until a deliberate release.** Power loss does not. De-energising the main does not. A circuit accident cannot erase progress, because after the latch the run's state is irrelevant.

The additional candidate constraint is at the moment of latching: **source fittings are scarce and reusable.** Whether this creates meaningful global planning still needs a concrete design example.

A main carries **one live source**. To latch a seam you must energise that main from one fitting. Having latched, you can pull the source and use it elsewhere — the latch holds. This suggests a possible **sequencing** puzzle: which main to energise, from which fitting, and when. The current rules do not establish that any particular order is necessary.

The unresolved counterexample is simple: use a source to latch one seam, retrieve it without undoing that latch, then use it on the next seam. Scarcity and one-source-at-a-time operation alone do not prevent this. Reachability or compatibility might create an ordering dependency, but a concrete failed sequence and a successful sequence based on a discovered rule are still missing. The proposal may currently add travel rather than a deep insight.

**Working.** Blue Ward's east flange and Lift Service's west flange carry the same signature. The cable main between them is dead at a pulled contact. Re-seat the contact: the run goes live from Lift Service's source fitting, the coupling latches, and the pair is bound for good.

**Refused, mismatch.** Cold Storage's north flange carries a different signature from anything it currently touches. The lock refuses on contact. Cost: the trip, nothing else.

**Refused, two sources.** Recovery Stair's flange *does* match Lift Service's north face, but Recovery Stair sits on a stub already driven by its own fitting.

- *Seeing it beforehand:* a source fitting shows plainly whether it is driving, and a live main carries a flow tell along its length. Standing at the seam, the player can see tells running **toward each other** from both directions. Two feeds, one main.

| Power loss anywhere | Unaffected | Unchanged | — |

My earlier claim that historical adjacency records stay predictive after binding does not hold up. The player knows the binds they made; they do not know the whole free set, because they have not seen every section. **Any order among re-seats is an unestablished authored condition.** If it exists, its legibility has to be designed, and nothing here shows the player could derive it. No forced death is proposed to prove any of it.

**Every room and region in one connected network.** Not selected hubs — everything genuinely belongs. I am dropping the spanning-versus-every-seam question: extra latches beyond a connected whole would mostly duplicate geometry, and asking the owner a technical question with no player-visible difference is not worth his time.

**Stabilisation is a proposed payoff, not an accepted rule.** With nothing unbound, nothing re-seats, and the station holds one shape. Contents still vary — population, hazards, machine states — so it is stable rather than inert. This is a proposed change to every-death shifting and needs the owner's acceptance; it is separate from any ending, and completion is not required for one.

**Seams alone.** One rule: matching signatures latch, mismatches refuse. It is the simpler candidate to teach and author, and fits the selected persistent-connection direction; it does not yet supply the deep station-wide insight.

Seams alone is the simpler local baseline. Both versions still need a convincing deep puzzle; the extra source system has not yet demonstrated the ordering problem that would justify its teaching and authoring cost. It remains a candidate rather than the preferred rule on an established depth advantage.

The choice is not established as light versus deep. The source system should earn its extra complexity through a concrete discovery; merely adding it does not satisfy the owner's late-puzzle ambition.

Registration is not a rival: a terminal could be the **readable interface to the source plan**, showing which fittings drive what and why a latch refused. That is worth exploring and does not add a system.

Nothing here requires the binding puzzle to carry both alien languages; that would be an invented obligation.

**Remaining dissent:** whether the one-source rule reads as reasoning or as arbitrary plumbing is unresolved and I cannot settle it on paper. It is the thing I would most want checked once observation is authorised.