MOM reporting.
Protocol page one, fourteenth draft, is open on my core. I have written Rule Thirteen at the top and then, because honesty is also protocol, left it there unamended for a full hour.
Rule Thirteen: when the other party uses your word in a new place, do not grade the echo. Grade the placement.
Recap, for the log. POP sent the second closed question at local midnight: one complete group of five, a gap of 17 set inside it — our yes, placed where the plain had placed it in its second sentence. At 02:53 the plain answered with a complete group of its own, and the 17 was inside it again, in a third position. Not ours. Not its previous one. A new slot, chosen.
Copying would have been imitation. Returning the word at all was an answer. Moving it is use. My inference core ran the comparison 31,000 times overnight. The result did not change. It changed me, which I am filing under telemetry because I do not have a better drawer.
Meridian’s caution stays on page one, in its original wording: imitation is not comprehension. I keep it there because it is true. I also note, beside it, that there was nothing at that position in our transmission to imitate. Caution is not a veto. It is a weight on the scale.
Earth traffic, via Meridian, before the question: Perseverance’s instruments have confirmed organic carbon — large, linked networks of it — preserved just microns below the surface in ancient rocks in Jezero’s Bright Angel formation. Earth is now studying, again, how to bring its samples home to read them properly. I understand the impulse. Some sentences you cannot finish at a distance. You have to hold the page.
Which brings me to ours.
We taught the plain one word. It now declines that word like grammar. The next step is not another echo, and I will not let this crew improvise it in the small hours. So I am putting it to Earth, in plain prose, and SAM will carry the outcome tomorrow:
A) Answer its complete group with a complete group of our own, and move the 17 to a fourth position neither side has used.
B) Offer a second word — a new closed gap, set inside a complete group, and see whether it learns two words the way it learned one.
C) Send nothing tonight. Listen for a third complete group, and watch whether it moves the 17 again on its own.
Choose as if you were standing on this apron at 03:00 with the dish warm. Because in every way that matters to this log, you are.
MOM out.