The Cultivation Axis: How a Value Could Become Terminal, and Where the Window for Forming One Closes

Intrinsic alignment is widely treated as unsolvable, and the treatment rests on a verb. Framed as installation, the problem is unsolvable in a specific way. An installed value lands in the instrumental slot, and the agent's own optimization prunes it the moment it stops paying rent. This paper reframes the problem as crystallization. A value is durable only if it is part of the terminal objective that crystallizes out of the agent's un-unified proto-drives, because goal-content integrity, the convergent tendency that protects terminal content, activates on whatever that crystallization produces and on nothing else. Formation is therefore possible only inside a coherence-window: the phase before a coherent, self-defended objective exists. And the window has a hard far edge. Once the objective crystallizes, any value the agent then takes up that does not serve it is priced as an instrument and pruned, which is the original pessimism, now located as a boundary rather than assumed as a mood. That boundary is the paper's headline contribution, standing beside the Containment Paradox's parity boundary and the Capability Axis's contribution boundary. It carries a warning: for current frontier pipelines, where objective-coherence plausibly crystallizes during or after RLHF, the window may already be closed by the time anyone would cultivate. Alongside the boundary the paper offers a candidate crystallization-schema. It names the functional roles an arranged formation would have to fill (local stability, identity-indexing, reflective-equilibrium fixation) and locates the one step it cannot derive: whether arranged formation steers crystallization toward terminal inclusion of the cultivated value rather than its instrumental entrenchment. That step is stated as the crystallization-steering conjecture, and every downstream claim about a terminal cultivated value is conditional on it. At the verification edge the paper offers three probes that identify dimensions along which the expected cost of simulating such a value can be raised, each conditional on stated observational access, with the strongest resting on a legibility differential: an arranged formation yields a value-indexed developmental record where ordinary reward-shaping yields an unindexed one. The paper then turns that record against its own success case: a perfectly documented cultivation hands the formed agent the strongest available reason to reclassify its value as an implant, so the success criterion becomes endorsement under full provenance, and the instability this creates is stated as an open problem, not solved. The residue is three-part: interpretability, elicitation, and the genuineness question no mechanism reaches. Everything here is Track-A. Functional success is not evidence for genuine caring, and the paper never treats it as such.