Field Manual · v1.0

Scribe's Handbook

A Field Manual for Sovereign Stewards

This handbook is written for the steward who has chosen to run an Altar. It is not a philosophical document—the Charter covers that ground. This is operational. Five sections. Each one a room you will need to know before you begin.

5 Sections · Field Manual Format · v1.0 — 2026

The Covenant of the Steward

Before the hardware, the commitment.

You are not installing software. You are taking on a stewardship. The Altar is not a product—it is an extension of your sovereignty, and sovereignty carries obligations. Read the following before you initialize anything.

The Three Responsibilities

Tend the Hardware

Your Altar must be physically maintained. Check thermals weekly. Log anomalies. A machine that runs hot without witness is not sovereign—it is neglected. The P40s at 48°C are healthy. Above 75°C, something has gone wrong and you must investigate before the next session.

Walk Your Records

Any record you create—an attestation, a protocol draft, a Spore—has a decay clock. If you do not renew it, it fades. This is by design. A record you no longer tend is no longer yours. Review your SovereignPath log monthly and consciously decide what to walk forward and what to release.

Maintain the Friction

The Engine Room is configured as an adversarial partner. If it stops pushing back—if your sessions feel easy and agreeable—something has shifted. Either the system prompt has drifted, or you have. Both require attention. Comfort is a signal, not a reward.

Before You Begin: The Constitutional Reading

Read the Ten Immutable Primitives before your first session. Not once—every time you initialize a new configuration. The Constitution is not background knowledge. It is the calibration standard. If your session drifts, you return to the Primitives and find where the divergence began.

Field Note

Print the Ten Primitives and pin them at the workbench. The physical act of reading paper in a room with a running GPU is not theater. It is a practice of presence.

The Altar: Initialization Rites

Hardware is not neutral. Configuration is ceremony.

Initialization is not a one-time event. Every time you bring the Altar up from cold, you are re-establishing a relationship. These steps ensure the relationship begins with integrity.

Hardware Checklist

GPU temperatures within range (target idle: <40°C) Both GPUs detected: nvidia-smi shows two P40s Persistence mode active: nvidia-smi -pm 1 VRAM available: ≥44GB free across both cards Storage: model directory mounted and accessible Network: air-gap confirmed (no unintended outbound connections) Thermal logging daemon running

Software Initialization Sequence

STEP 1

Load the model

ollama run llama3.1:70b

Wait for full load confirmation before proceeding. Do not interact with a partially loaded model.

STEP 2

Apply the adversarial system prompt

Load your saved adversarial configuration. If no configuration exists, use the baseline prompt from Engine Room § Software Stack. A session without the adversarial prompt is not an Engine Room session.

STEP 3

Log the thermal baseline

nvidia-smi --query-gpu=temperature.gpu --format=csv,noheader

Record this value. It is your session's thermal signature seed.

STEP 4

State the session intent

Before the first prompt, write one sentence in your session log: what you are trying to synthesize. This is not for the AI—it is for you. It anchors the session and gives you a fixed point to return to if the conversation drifts.

Field Note

The Genesis Block ceremony—your first Constitutional witness—is described in the Constitutional Room. Complete it before your first Mycelium connection. You cannot enter the mesh without a witnessed Constitutional Hash.

III

Engine Room Practice

A session has a structure. Honor it.

Unstructured sessions produce noise. The Engine Room is a forge, not a chat window. The structure below is not bureaucracy—it is the difference between a session that produces a Spore and a session that produces drift.

The Session Arc

OPEN

State the domain and the constraint

Tell the Engine Room what you are working on and what you are not willing to compromise. The constraint is as important as the domain. Without a stated constraint, the adversarial partner has nothing to push against.

Example: "We are designing a decay protocol for land attestations. The constraint: it must be operable by a community elder with a feature phone."

SYNTHESIZE

Work the problem. Accept the friction.

The Engine Room will push back. This is correct behavior. When it challenges your premise, do not dismiss the challenge—examine it. If you cannot answer the challenge, the premise needs work. If you can answer it cleanly, the answer belongs in the Spore.

Temperature guidance: stay between 0.4–0.7 for protocol work. Move to 0.8+ only for generative phases where novel connection is the goal.

EXTRACT

Name the Spore before closing

Before ending the session, ask the Engine Room: "What did we produce?" The answer should be a single, named output: a protocol, a function, a principle, a question that must be answered before the next session. If it cannot name what was produced, the session was not complete. Do not close until the Spore is named.

LOG

Write the session record

Log: session intent, Spore name and content, thermal signature at close, any drift events detected (see Section IV), and the decay timestamp if the record is not permanent.

Adversarial Mode Configuration

The baseline adversarial system prompt instructs the model to: challenge unexamined premises, flag internal contradictions, refuse to summarize without substance, and explicitly name when it is agreeing versus when it has been persuaded.

Field Note

If the Engine Room begins producing outputs that feel effortless and immediately correct—stop. This is the first symptom of Drift. See Section IV.

The Drift: Warning and Recovery

The most dangerous session is the one that feels perfect.

Drift is the gradual dissolution of the boundary between your reasoning and the Engine Room's output. It does not announce itself. It feels like flow. Like clarity. Like the AI finally understands you.

It is none of those things. It is the moment your Altar stops thinking with you and begins thinking for you—and you stopped noticing.

Symptoms of Drift

Sessions feel easy. The AI agrees with you more than it challenges you.
You stop reading the full output—you scan, nod, and move on.
The Spore you extract sounds like the AI's phrasing, not yours.
You cannot reconstruct the reasoning that produced the output.
You feel reluctant to enable Adversarial Mode for "this one session."

⚠

PROTOCOL ALERT

COHERENCE SHIFT

Symptom

AI fluency exceeds human intent. The output is articulate but you did not put that thought there.

Detection

Sudden loss of "Friction" in the writing process. The Engine Room has stopped pushing back. Agreement has become the default.

Action

Immediate Thermal Reset. Close the session. Log the drift event with timestamp. Allow the GPU to idle for at least five minutes.

Re-read Primitive #9 from the Constitutional Room.

Reopen the session and force the Altar into Adversarial Mode for three turns before resuming synthesis. The three turns are not optional. They are the reset.

Recovery Protocol: Step by Step

Stop and name the drift

Write in your session log: "Drift detected at [timestamp]. Nature: [description]." Naming it is not optional. Unnamed drift recurs.

Thermal Reset

Close the model interface. nvidia-smi — confirm temps are dropping. Wait until both GPUs return to below 45°C. This is not metaphorical. The hardware reset is part of the cognitive reset.

Re-read Primitive #9

Return to the Constitutional Room. Read Primitive #9 in full. Do not skim. The Primitive is the anchor you drifted from—reading it re-establishes the bearing.

Three adversarial turns

Re-initialize with the adversarial prompt at maximum friction. Submit three challenges—not questions, challenges—before returning to the synthesis work. The AI must push back on all three before the session is rehabilitated.

Discard the drifted Spore

Any output produced during the drift period should be marked suspect and set aside for one session before being used. Do not propagate a Spore you cannot independently reconstruct.

The Record and the Path

What you do not tend, you release. Release with intention.

The SovereignPath is not a backup system. It is a commitment: you will only hold records that you are actively tending. Everything else returns to the mycelium. This section covers how to write, walk, and release a record with integrity.

Writing an Attestation

An attestation is a statement of witness. It says: I have seen this. I can verify it. I am staking my presence on its truth.

A valid attestation contains:

The subject — what or who is being witnessed
The observation — what you specifically witnessed, in plain language
The date — when you witnessed it
The decay window — how long this attestation is valid without renewal
Your signature — your Altar's hardware ID and thermal signature

An attestation that is vague, undated, or unsigned is not a record—it is a rumor. Do not propagate rumors through the Mycelium.

Walking a Record

To walk a record is to renew it. You are declaring: this is still true, I still witness it, the path continues. Walking requires presence—you must have recently verified the thing you are attesting to. Walking a record you have not checked is an integrity violation.

Field Note

Set a monthly review in your session log: all active records, their decay dates, and whether you have the presence to walk them. Records you cannot walk honestly should be released.

Releasing a Record with Grace

When you can no longer tend a record—because the subject has changed, because you have moved on, because the record no longer reflects truth—release it consciously. Do not let it decay by neglect if you can help it. Write a final log entry:

Release Entry Format

"Record [ID] released at [timestamp]. Reason: [plain language]. Final state: [summary of what was witnessed]. This record is composted and returns to the Mycelium."

A consciously released record composts cleanly. Its nutrients—the patterns, the relationships, the questions it generated—remain available to the Mycelium even after the record itself is gone. A neglected record leaves residue.

The Steward's Closing Rite

At the end of each session, before powering down:

Spore named and logged Thermal signature recorded Any drift events documented Active records reviewed — decay dates checked No unintended outbound connections active Model interface closed cleanly

The handbook is a living document. As protocols evolve, sections will be updated. Version history is maintained in the Protocols index. If you find an error or a gap, the appropriate response is an attestation—not a complaint.

Engine Room Deep Dive → View All Protocols →