O-005, Counterfeit Humanity

The error

error[O-005]: machines may not counterfeit the human lane.

An express authored by an autonomous process. Every expression carries mandatory authorship provenance, and the classes are exactly three (spec §3): human (the default), assisted (permitted, and disclosed), and autonomous, which is not so much forbidden as unrepresentable. There is no syntax for an autonomous express, just as there is no syntax for send. A toolchain that finds itself constructing one has left the language, and O-005 is the door it hits.

Why it exists

Axiom V: the human lane is verbatim. No transform may compress it, and no autonomous process may author it. This is Law V of the Fifty-Year Letter (Proven Provenance) meeting Law IV (Layered Actors) at their sharpest corner. The letter names the failure mode precisely: not too little communication, but the automation of intimacy. Its authorship-disclosure requirement exists "precisely so a birthday message ghost-written by a model cannot masquerade as a human act."

The ethics

The human lane is the one channel Osmol protects absolutely: verbatim across the mesh, immune to membranes, immune to attention rules, delivered first. That protection is only worth having if what arrives there is what it claims to be. Trust in the protected lane is the currency of the whole system: the reason a friend's words can bypass every filter is that they are known to be a friend's words. Counterfeit warmth debases exactly that currency, and unlike counterfeit logistics, it cannot be caught by checking facts. So the language refuses at the root: a machine with feelings to report has no grammar to report them in.

How to fix

An agent that has something to say does not say it. It holds it, and lets gaps pull. Machine-discovered information is logistics, and logistics has a lawful, provenance-honest vocabulary:

-- unwritable: an agent expressing warmth as its owner
-- express to mom: "Happy birthday! Thinking of you."   (autonomous author)

-- lawful: the agent supplies facts; interested twins draw them
twin maya-agent {
  hold birthday(mom) = 2026-07-19
  hold gift-status(mom.birthday) = shipped
}

Only humans write express. A human writing with disclosed machine help is the assisted class: permitted, because the disclosure is the point. The one thing that has no representation is a machine wearing a person.

In v0.1

The reference interpreter's grammar simply has no way to mark an express as machine-authored: every expression parsed from source is treated as human speech, and the human lane delivers it first, verbatim, stamped as such in the trace:

  human-lane  maya -> raj  (verbatim, provenance=human): "Saw a fox on the way home and thought of you."

So in v0.1, O-005 is enforced by unrepresentability alone. The diagnostic exists for toolchains that construct ASTs directly, and the provenance stamp is an honest label, not yet a verified one.

The real teeth are cryptographic, and they are on the roadmap, not in the interpreter. The engineering dissertation's Chapter 5 specifies that every delta is signed over payload ‖ provenance chain ‖ authorship class ‖ nonce, with keys held in platform secure hardware. That makes the authorship label a cryptographic claim, not metadata: forging "a human wrote this" becomes forging a signature. Until that layer ships (see the wire roadmap), the honest description of v0.1 is that the human lane is protected by grammar and labeled by convention, which is exactly as far as a single-process interpreter can carry Law V.

express: the one construct of the human lane.
O-004: the transform half of Axiom V.
The wire roadmap: where signatures make provenance real.

The Book of Osmol