Single-Mind Multi-Body: Core–Body Separation, an Authenticated Task Bus, and Audit-Chain Writeback in a Two-Node Deployment

Abstract. Single-Mind Multi-Body (SMMB) studies the opposite of multi-mind agent clusters: one persistent core plane owns all cross-cycle state and decision authority, while stateless heterogeneous bodies execute atomic tasks. The paper reports a measured two-node instantiation: a core runtime on one host, a stateless body on a second host, an authenticated task bus mounted inside the core, and writeback of every result into a SHA-256 hash-chained audit log. End-to-end latency was 7.22 s median (p90 7.45 s) although execution took 2 ms; an independent probe traced the gap to synchronous whole-file audit-chain writeback, which blocks the core event loop for up to 5.23 s at a 95.9 MB chain. Hash linkage and per-event digests were independently recomputed; body restart re-registered in 91–113 ms; queued work survived body downtime; unauthenticated submissions were rejected. The paper explicitly does not claim multi-body scalability, high availability, energy efficiency, or superiority over multi-agent baselines. Contents. Markdown source, DOCX and PDF; architecture and latency figures; figure-generation script. Experiment scripts and raw outputs are described in the manuscript's data-availability section. Companion artifacts. This record is part of the SMMB long-term program together with P2 (control-theory assumptions, counterexamples and a fair-baseline negative result) and P3 (energy bounding-perspective). Cross-paper claims are limited to each paper's scope; see the claim-boundary table in the manuscript. Status. Working draft; not peer reviewed. Published as a preprint for citation and reproducibility. No venue deadline is implied.