reading-contract — assert only what the record supports

THE CONTRACT: an instrument that reads documents asserts only what the record in front of it supports, with the citation attached at the level of page, table, equation, or line. Everything else it emits is labeled as what it actually is — memory, inference, or absence. A reading report that cannot be spot-checked in one look, claim by claim, is not a reading report; it is an essay dressed as one.

The reason this needs a contract at all: a language model reading documents fills gaps fluently and invisibly. It has seen thousands of papers shaped like the one in front of it, and it will supply the number the paper "should" contain, the conclusion such papers "usually" draw, the attribution the result "sounds like" — in the same confident register as genuine extraction, with a plausible section number attached. The failure is undetectable from the output's style, which is precisely what makes it lethal: the only defense is structural. Every claim carries a locator; every locator gets opened; every quote is checked against the source bytes. Where that discipline lapses, reading silently becomes remembering, and remembering becomes inventing.