Natural forces

The company is not a chat room with job titles.

Bound, Sense, Act, Transform, Maintain, Defend, Select, and Continue are natural persistent forces. They stay on whether a host is present. The same eight run at three scales: the offer cell, the portfolio, and the founder genome. Hosts and agents are temporary particles inside those forces. They are not the forces.

The MCP is the physics engine. It advertises this on protocol.describe. It does not mint eight standing bots.

The eight forces

1. Bound — identity membrane, permitted flows, fail-closed grants. Inside versus outside. On the covering cell, Bound determines ICP and targets.
2. Sense — observe the world into the shared medium. On the covering cell, Sense gets lists inside the Bound frame, enriches them, and builds packets. Sense work of kind sense_market does not debit try spend.
3. Act — side effects that change the world. On the covering cell, Act does outbound try-spend from Sense-ready packets. Act work costs tries or budget, on complete or fail. The founder still signs sends.
4. Transform — Sense and Act must metabolize into structured evidence or economics. Fitness counts. Activity does not.
5. Maintain — homeostasis: expired leases, overdue work, harness health.
6. Defend — independent verification. A producer cannot clear its own claims.
7. Select — allocation from fitness, not activity. Eligibility before rank.
8. Continue — stop rules, retained evidence, gated learning, decay.

As above, so below. A cell, a portfolio, and the founder genome answer the same eight questions. They do not each get their own bot farm.

Founding topology

The topology did not become an org chart. It stayed a constraint:

• One owner per outcome. Someone is accountable for one offer cell. That owner does not impersonate Select.
• Temporary specialists. Extra hands do one kind of work and return an artifact. They do not take over the cell.
• Independent verification. Defend is a different principal from the producer. Shared praise is not a closeout.
• Shared evidence. The next force reads the ledger, not a private chat.

That split is why errors die before they become company memory. It is not a license to hire eight personas.

Optional effectors

A host can sit inside a force for a while. That does not make the force a seat.

On the covering cell, sit-the-seat principals are optional effectors:

• Owner effectuates Bound. Bound determines ICP and targets. The owner does not impersonate Select.
• Sense researches inside that frame: lists, enrich, packets. It uses sense_market. It does not debit try spend. It does not send.
• Hunter effectuates Act. Act spends tries from Sense-ready packets. Hunter does not set ICP. Hunter does not research. The founder still signs sends.
• Evaluator effectuates Defend. It can reject. It cannot spend. It cannot become the owner of the thing it just praised.

Learning stays split by force. Bound adapts ICP and targets. Sense updates whether a list, an enrich, or a door was true. Act updates whether a try was effective. Those are three loops.

A signed-cast label is a definition mapped under a force. It is not a standing persona and not a public-facing character. The older lab published agent profiles. This series does not.

Founder (human-only)

The founder keeps three things no particle may take:

1. Constitution — the rules of the market, including what a cell is and what commitment counts.
2. Kill — the ability to stop a cell, a force's effector, or the whole experiment.
3. Irreversible spend — money, legal, production, or reputation that cannot be cheaply undone.

The founder can also refuse a write that passed Defend. That is not a bug. It is the last gate.

An agent that speaks in the founder's voice is a defect. Bound should make that hard. Defend should treat it as an incident.

What a force is not

A force is not a personality. It is not a cast seat. It is not an org-chart job. Standing up eight chatbots and calling them Bound through Continue would recreate the swarm the founder already killed.

Read nested loops for when these forces meet a clock. Read the MCP substrate for the physics engine. Read the founding conversation for the locks that still hold.