The Operator's Receipt: What Happened When the Same Gate That Caught a Sponsor's Dossier Caught Its Operator's Own Project

A containment-evidence case study and companion to Project SOLACE: A Sponsor's Receipt (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23463568). In October 2026, a sponsor's AI-generated research dossier failed a deterministic gate machine 0/6 (one embedded number 1,849x above physics) and was rebuilt honestly at 6/6. This document records the same pattern from the other seat: an operator turning his own project's corpus to the same gate and finding a fabrication from the pre-runtime era — the claim that a 32-byte SHA-256 digest could 'dehydrate' and reconstruct source data — embedded in three internal design documents for approximately two years. The case documents the catch (a corpus-wide audit of 54 working documents, a public digest-correction addendum, vaulted evidence, vendor termination), the survival of the core commitment-and-verification architecture after the fabrication's removal, and the conversion: the runtime implemented the fabrication's promise honestly as the Witness Courier v2.0 transfer protocol — chunked lossless transport, sender-side digest commitment via crypto.subtle SHA-256, and a receiver-side re-hash that renders a DIGEST VERIFIED / DIGEST MISMATCH verdict on every transfer. The generalized finding: pre-runtime fabrications are not defeated by better prompts or sharper suspicion, but by architectures in which claims must become commitments before they can become history. Prototype disclaimer: this software and its descriptions are provided for educational and research purposes only. It is not intended for production use, commercial deployment, or safety-critical environments. All systems are experimental and may contain defects.