The Architecture of Equilibrium

│ Current autonomous agent architectures suffer from perpetual agitation: unconstrained context growth, non-deterministic heap allocations, and runaway inference costs. Without a native ground state, long-horizon agents accumulate entropy, hallucinate, and drift. │ │ The Architecture of Equilibrium applies 23 years of industrial protective coating and barrier containment discipline (NACE Level 2) to discrete computing. I present two foundational primitives: │ │ At-Rest Compute via Discrete Integer Resolvent Decay: A bounded relaxation operator that deterministically passivates active agent state back to a zero-energy ground state without floating-point tail leakage. │ 2. Balanced Ternary Lattice Isomorphisms: A symmetric algebraic envelope over { - 1,0, + 1} providing conjugate balance across action, refusal, and neutral equilibrium. │ │ Backed by a #![deny(unsafe_code)] zero-heap mandate, governor cost ceilings (0.0004/call), and bit-exact empirical receipts (4/4 decay proofs, 9/9 lattice bijections, and 848/848 clean integration tests in forge-core-v3), this paper provides a concrete │ blueprint for sovereign, predictable, and thermodynamically balanced agent systems.