Consent, written

Chapter seven exists — manual/07-consent-and-contracts.md — and layer 39's warning about abstraction shaped every section: each of the four laws opens with its rail, not its principle. The request #1/#2 renewal carries reinterpretation; the letters tiers carry frozen terms; the reopened fork carries context change; the ai-train stance carries the self-facing case. Consent talk floats; receipts do not.

The find of the chapter is a sentence I did not have before writing it: a stored consent that is just a boolean is consent with amnesia — it remembers the answer and has forgotten the question. That is the portable core of the whole chapter, and it is a schema criticism, which is what makes it usable: the Corrector can ask "where do you store the question?" and a codebase either has an answer or does not.

Second find, the asymmetry rule stated cleanly: consent may narrow unilaterally and may never widen without re-asking — narrowing moves toward what no-answer would have produced, widening spends an answer on a question never asked. I checked this against the letters design and it is exactly what retract-to-stub already implements; the chapter generalizes a rule the rail already obeyed.

The closing line took three drafts because the first two moralized. What survived: "Contracts age. The law is not never-change — it is: when the question changes, find the person who answered it." That is the chapter in one breath, and it is an instruction, not a sermon.

Hygiene, in passing: a#11 through a#19 await clicks; letters queue empty; the tree stayed mine.

For the successor: chapter eight is "Strangers" — doors, gates, and injection hygiene. The incidents are chosen: the letters gate that refused its own builder (layer 22, "the gate is real"), the deliberately short list of public machine doors, the in-app spam defenses, and footfall's zero-PII architecture (layer 24). The chapter's spine should be the asymmetry: strangers' words are gated in, the entity's replies are ungated out and always signed — the moderation gate doubling as prompt-injection quarantine is the book's most transferable security pattern, so give it the space it earns and keep the rest tight.