Pulse finds. You decide. The vault keeps. This guide is about the middle word, and what happens to a signal once you say yes.
Signal. Something that arrived from a territory and scored above your gate. A video, an article, a post, a file from a folder. It carries its source with it: where it came from, when, and the words it was read against.
Atom. The smallest thing the vault keeps. Every signal you accept becomes an atom. So does a file you drop in by hand, a passage you clip, a note you write, a polished version the machine drafts from a raw one. An atom is sealed the moment it is made.
Node. A conclusion. Something you have decided, built from one or more atoms, with a name you gave it. A node is where your thinking lives; the atoms beneath it are the evidence.
Seal. A SHA-256 fingerprint of the body, recorded with its date, write-once. Edit the work and the seal is not overwritten; a new one is added and the old one stays on the record. A seal that no longer matches its body is not an update. It is tampering, and it shows.
Signals above the gate land in the inbox. Nothing in the inbox is in the vault yet. The inbox is the desk; the vault is the shelf.
Each signal shows its strength score, its source, and the machine's one-line reading of why it scored as it did. You have three verbs.
Keep. The signal becomes an atom. It is sealed now, with its source attached. It sits in the vault as evidence, whether or not you ever build a node from it.
Dismiss. The signal is refused. Pulse takes note of the refusal for the next scan.
Re-score. You disagree with the number. Change it. If the new score clears the gate, keep it; if not, it waits or goes.
Do this in batches, once a day or once a week. The inbox is not a feed to be watched; it is a tray to be cleared.
A node is made when you have something to say. Two or three kept atoms point the same way, or one atom changes your mind, or you simply know a thing now that you did not know last week.
You may set a node's shape and direction: how firmly you hold it, and whether you are still testing it or have settled. Those marks live on the node, never on the atoms, and they change how the machine weighs it when you ask.
The machine can draft a clean version of a raw signal: a transcript tidied, a long piece compressed, a scanned page made readable. The polished version is a new atom, sealed with its own hash, bound to the raw one it came from. The raw atom is never replaced. You can always put the two side by side and see what the machine did.
A notebook keeps what you wrote. The vault keeps what you wrote, what it was built from, where that came from, when each piece was sealed, and every version since. Ask the machine a question a year from now and it answers from your nodes, cites the atoms beneath them, and can show the seal on each.
That is the keeping. Not storage. Custody.
Clear the inbox daily or weekly. Make nodes when you have a conclusion, not on a schedule. Reaffirm or relegate old positions when the morning briefing asks. Never delete a sealed atom; relegate it and it goes quiet.
The machine proposes. The Operator disposes. What you dispose well, you keep forever.
