The Steerwish: Intent Kept on Live Systems

Discovery found the edges, calibration priced them honestly, composition carried them across hops; this paper asks the map to hold — not what it can measure, but what it can keep. An agent that tends a live system can hold a promise about it: keep this reading inside this band. This paper gives that promise a name — the steerwish — and asks what it takes to keep one on a world that refuses to stand still. The agents already know their world: couplings discovered by probing, response curves with honest error bars, curves that compose across hops. The question here is what such a map is worth once it is asked to do work. Four claims, each carried by receipts from a live measurement campaign. The map can steer: a promise of several lines at once, planned through measured couplings, judged live, and held — with its one boundary stated as measured, a limit of map density, not of principle. Refusal is part of the grammar: a promise beyond the measured range is declined by name and nothing is actuated — the engine refuses rather than fake. Drift is survived end to end: when the world moves under a standing promise, the misses stamp, the map re-opens itself, and the reading re-lands. And keeping has a price: an envelope of flights reads the hold between what luck alone would keep and what perfect hindsight could have kept — the honest distance between acting on a map and knowing the future.