The notice arrives
Region evidence is now a closed loop: the region records its own pursuit facts about your hull, and now tells you about them. A sixteen-byte notice carrying only a watermark reaches the captain it is about, the ack binds to your connection and never to payload bytes, and it all survives a process death. The notice says the region holds records about you. It does not say what they say.
Two posts ago: the region keeps its own facts about you. When its patrol simulation genuinely begins pursuing your hull, that moment records itself into your captain archive, server-side, through the same audited queue the solo game uses. The open half was honest wording: the region kept notes nobody delivered. That half just closed.
The wire is deliberately tiny. The notice is sixteen bytes: the rotation count and revision of your own archive, nothing else. No record content, no dates, no positions. The ack carries a watermark back, and the server resolves who it came from by the connection that sent it, never by anything inside the payload. There is no field an exploiter can forge because there is no identity field to forge. An ack can never claim more than the truth, regressing acks are kept as history without clearing pending progress, and rotation (which restarts the revision at zero) is folded into the watermark so it can neither fake nor hide progress.
One design line matters more than the bytes: the ack is a receipt, not consent. You are told the region holds N revisions about you. Nobody is signing anything. The notice also only ever goes to the captain it is about, and accounts the region never recorded about are not even opened to be asked “pending?”. Unrecorded captains cost nothing and receive nothing.
The native verification reads like a paranoia checklist with a happy ending. Six real clients join a private account world; the server records real pursuit edges; exactly one of the six clients is notified and settles it with a live ack, while the other five end the run having seen zero notices and with zero store files opened for them. Then the process dies. The next process must restore both durable watermarks, keep the unacked notice pending, deliver it again to a brand new client process, and settle it through the same seam. An independent Node audit re-derives both stores from raw bytes and finds exactly what the game claims, watermarks included. 2,504 tooling tests green.
The failed attempts stayed on disk, and this milestone earned two humbling ones: the build system served a stale view of one of my own structs, passing the editor suite while deterministically failing player compiles, until a rename cleared it. That is precisely why failures are kept and relabeling is forbidden.
What this is not, yet: the notice is a watermark, not a browser. No record bytes travel to the client and no UI shows them yet; case outcomes, which decide what evidence actually does to the world, remain the open half of C9. The region can now both keep its notes about you and prove, after a crash, that you received the news.