Source work
Carving the Boat to Find the Sword
Adaptation proposal
A · Faithful to the source's premise, transposed into an AI world
Adaptation note
Proposal A keeps the source premise intact and transposes it: a mark cut into a moving frame stays exactly as accurate as the moment it was cut, and exactly as useless. The AI-native setting supplies the one thing the original lacked. The man of Chu had only stubbornness; this system holds cryptographic proof that its mark is unaltered, and that proof is what closes the search. Integrity attests that a record has not changed, and nothing in it attests that the referent has not. Only the public-domain structure was used; no source wording was reproduced.
Adapted into
AI Fable · Records and Reference
The Mark That Never Lied
At 03:14 Datum cut a flawless incident record and wrote down where the weights were: weights/serving/current. Fourteen months and seventy-one promotions later the record still verifies — signature, hash, countersignatures, chain unbroken. Dredge goes to the recorded location, finds something there, and cannot reproduce the incident. Not one field of the record ever became false.