Ghostlight/docs/experiments/cold-wake-story-lab.md

Cold Wake Story Lab

Status: archived local-model/projection experiment. This doc records the early Cold Wake story-lab run, including Qwen outputs, projection failures, and useful pipeline lessons. It is not the current gold-data path.

The current accepted-as-draft coordinator/IF scaffold is:

• examples/ink/cold-wake-branch-and-fold.v0.ink
• examples/ink/cold-wake-branch-and-fold.v0.training.json
• examples/coordinator/cold-wake-branch-and-fold.v0.json
• experiments/cold-wake-story-lab/cold-wake-branch-and-fold-clean-run.v0.md

This experiment uses Ghostlight as a writing crutch on purpose.

The goal is to write a small Cold Wake story while producing reusable projection training data. The story should have a protagonist, themes, locations, an arc, and enough room for characters to act badly for reasons the state can explain.

This is not a benchmark in a clean little lab coat. It is a knife test.

Story Premise

During the Cold Wake Panic, a quiet-running vessel enters a Jovian convoy corridor under contradictory thermal classification. The PSC tribunal freezes its corridor status. A Navigator route steward pushes to keep rescue live. An Aya-aligned sanctuary coordinator sees a possible personhood claim in a corrupted packet. A Cognitum shell-vendor liaison tries to keep an implicated routing artifact framed as derivative firmware instead of testimony.

The protagonist is Maer Tidecall, a Cetacean Navigator route steward whose core problem is not whether to be kind. Maer's problem is that rescue obligation has to survive contact with institutions that can punish ambiguity faster than they can understand it.

Themes

• rescue obligation versus category law
• personhood trying not to get filed as firmware
• care as material capacity, not decorative mercy
• institutional fear disguised as neutral procedure
• language as a battlefield where a person can be erased without anyone raising their voice

Arc

1. Freeze

Location: Ganymede relay tribunal chamber.

Maer challenges PSC adjudicator Isdra Vel after she issues a conditional risk hold on the vessel. The scene should establish the central wound: the corridor needs categories, but categories can turn rescue delay into lawful abandonment.

2. Intake

Location: Aya-aligned clinic behind Ganymede dockside pumpworks.

Maer asks Sella Ren to hold sanctuary capacity for a rescue that may never be authorized. Sella refuses to let care become fantasy. The story should force Maer to see that rescue language can push costs onto care workers unless it names the material burden.

3. Provenance

Location: Callisto spillover compliance office.

Maer confronts Veyr Oss, a Cognitum shell-vendor liaison whose routing artifact may explain the vessel's contradictory behavior. Veyr tries to keep the artifact inside product language. This is the scene most likely to produce nonverbal action if the pressure earns it: silence, leaving, blocking a terminal, grabbing a wrist, or violence. The system must not assume one more clever line is always the answer.

4. Threshold

Location: Jovian convoy threshold as the vessel's heat-debt window closes.

Maer returns to Isdra with enough suspicion to complicate the freeze but not enough proof to make the room clean. The ending should not be a total victory. The viable resolution is a narrow, institutionally usable rescue contact that preserves evidence and life without pretending the category system has healed.

Experiment Loop

The archived run used this loop. Current gold-data runs should preserve exact packet, capture, review, mutation, branch compiler, and IF reviewer seams rather than treating model output as accepted prose by default.

For each scene:

1. Define character-local state and scene pressure.
2. Project the next response prompt for one character.
3. Send only prompt_text to the local response model.
4. Save the model output.
5. Review whether the output served the story, respected speaker-local context, and chose speech/action/silence plausibly.
6. Tweak the projection pipeline if the output fails in a way the pipeline should have prevented.
7. Save accepted and rejected examples as training material.

Current Run Notes

Scene 3, Maer to Veyr, is the first live projection test.

• v1 confirmed that action affordances work: Qwen chose a mixed terminal blocking and dialogue beat instead of defaulting to speech. It also showed that "personhood pressure" wording made the model resolve the ambiguity too early.
• v2 improved length and avoided person/passenger/victim/mind language, but still smuggled certainty through "witness."
• v3 is the first accepted output. The projection fences off resolved moral nouns and uses claimant-status, provenance, chain-of-custody, and evidence preservation instead. Qwen produced a short mixed beat that keeps the question unresolved while still letting Maer apply pressure.

Accepted v3 response:

Maer places a steady hand on the terminal's edge to halt the closing command,
his voice low and ritual-calm. "You will not let the chain dissolve before we
name its custody; state the claimant-status flag or I will freeze this interface
until the rescue ledger demands it."

The first full story pass is saved at:

• experiments/cold-wake-story-lab/the-narrowest-possible-margin.md

That pass added accepted and rejected Qwen captures across all four scenes. The main architecture lesson is that failures should not be treated as mere prompt wording mistakes. The projection artifact now needs controls for frame ownership, authority boundaries, object custody, required compromise semantics, and forbidden resolutions before prompt prose is rendered.

Archived Qwen Target

Use the LAN Ollama endpoint from gamecult-ops:

• base URL: http://192.168.1.84:11434
• model: qwen3.5:9b
• default context: 8192
• use request files for curl.exe calls so PowerShell does not eat the JSON and burp out theater.

Output Folders

• agent-state fixture: examples/agent-state.cold-wake-story-lab.json
• projection examples: examples/projections/cold-wake-story-lab.jsonl
• readable projection mirror: examples/projections/cold-wake-story-lab.pretty.json
• generated response captures: experiments/cold-wake-story-lab/

Acceptance Criteria

• The story has a visible arc, not just disconnected argument samples.
• Projection prompts include enough setting and cultural pressure for the responder to write without seeing hidden author state.
• At least one projected turn permits action instead of dialogue.
• Review notes explicitly mark whether the responder chose speech, action, silence, or a mixed beat.
• Failures are kept when they teach a useful boundary.