Custody and Freshness During Disconnected Operations

Paper 8 of the ten-paper aZTF Research Series. Version 1.0-preprint. A disconnected engineering worker may retain readable inputs and an authentic approval while lacking evidence that a particular action remains admissible. This paper continues a synthetic comparison of actuator-housing revisions and develops a proposed contract for authority, observation freshness, custody and reconciliation within the author's Automated Zero Trust Framework (aZTF) and Sovereign Data Fabric (SDF). Three histories distinguish local admission, reconstruction after worker removal, and an exposed action with a lost response. Physical hardware and network constraints precede logical narrowing. The design requires operational models to have no discovery or query route into protected administration and every model to remain within externally enforced hardware, network and logical constraints (rails). Loss of a required prerequisite must close affected future actions while preserving in-flight uncertainty. Retention checks depend on actual rights and custody paths; later protected access requires a fresh authorized observation. Reconnection appends evidence without rewriting earlier knowledge or supplying execution authority. Selected repetition requires documented and independently probed endpoint conditions. The proposed evaluation gives a fully equipped conventional arrangement the same contract, evidence opportunities, acceptance criteria and complete cost boundary. It separates finite conformance, unscorable truth, automatic and human-assisted outcomes, and accepted-outcome economics. No architecture experiment, deployment validation or measured comparative advantage is reported. The contribution is a reviewable integration and evaluation contract whose implementation and incremental value remain open to falsification. Edition note: the internal series edition map preserves the approved manuscript snapshot. Current companion releases are listed separately in the series catalog; no cited companion text has been silently updated.