The Rule
No document, no restoration.
Every restoration begins with a document that a reader can go and find. This page states what counts as one, what each kind of source is allowed to become, and what ships with a restoration when it is published.
What counts as a document
Official releases, declassified files, court exhibits, settlement archives, truth-commission records.
Can become a memory.
Consortium-verified leaks, and documents authenticated by major outlets.
Can become a memory after legal review.
Credible reporting without the underlying document.
Context only. Never the memory itself.
The five strata
Every restoration ships with all five. They are counted on the receipt before the memory is published, and named again on the ledger entry afterwards.
- official
- What the institution filed, kept, and released on a schedule of its own.
- suppressed
- The documents the institution destroyed or denied, where a copy survived.
- folk
- What was said out loud at the time, where no institution was writing it down.
- descendant
- What the people it happened to told their children, and what the children kept.
- synthetic
- What is assembled from the other four strata, and marked as assembled.
Confidence
This System states a confidence with every verdict. When a verdict changes, the change is written to the ledger as a new entry, and the entry it corrects stays readable.
That is the whole rule. The door opens once it has been read.