Ruth Hale · The Causal Projector

Consolidated from the development brief (§8.2, §4.3, §1) and continuity established in Chapter 1, "Loose Ends." The brief remains the canonical source: story/development-brief.md.

Working design (brief §8.2)

Dimension	Working design
Role	Emotional anchor, mirror of the cosmology, early beneficiary, and eventually the person least cleanly absorbed by the protagonist’s attractor.
Independent desire	Remain at home, keep ordinary plans and friendships, preserve dignity and continuity on her own terms, and avoid being treated as a puzzle or prototype.
Dramatic function	Makes branch-based identity personal before the plot becomes cosmic. Their “wrong” memories provide evidence that coherence and authenticity differ.
Resistance	Their already-fractured bundle does not align cleanly with the protagonist’s narrowing world. They may perceive multiple versions of him or recognize his loss of multiplicity before anyone else.
Potential climax role	After the original apparatus is destroyed, they recreate its topology from ordinary objects, proving that the pattern has escaped both machine and inventor.
Open choices	Exact age, diagnosis, and stage of illness.

Established continuity (Chapter 1)

Ruth is Evan's mother and a former community-college mathematics teacher. She retains a precise, dry sense of humor and dislikes being watched while taking medication.
Her husband died four years before the opening. She planned his funeral and knew the facts of his death, but sometimes asks when he will be home for dinner.
Her cognition is variable rather than uniformly absent. She catches an error in her medication schedule, remembers a library outing Evan forgot, and also looks for people and places from inaccessible periods of her life.
She has an active friendship with Marisol, who takes her to the library sale. Remaining at home and continuing these ordinary choices matter to her independently of Evan's need to keep her safe.
Evan's garage apparatus is, in Ruth's preferred shorthand, the machine that takes pictures of thoughts. Their exchanges are affectionate, impatient, and intellectually familiar rather than clinical.

Established continuity (Chapters 6–7)

Ruth recognizes Evan's first deliberately selected but useless outcome as practice, seeing the behavioral threshold before he names it that way.
The home-care agency approves twelve weekly hours on Tuesday and Thursday mornings plus alternating Saturdays. Ruth chooses the schedule herself and corrects Evan when he optimizes for supervision rather than her preferences.
She removes Evan's new cupboard labels, resisting his effort to make her home conform to a single orderly system.

Established continuity (Chapter 9)

After an episode sends her to a defunct bus route for a class she no longer teaches, Ruth requests one six-minute reduced exposure. She records informed instructions, defines her own stop conditions, and cuts Lena's numbered seal herself, while recognizing that Evan wants the result.
The run gives Ruth roughly forty-three minutes of sustained orientation, reasoning, and autobiographical coherence. She uses that clarity to state her own care preferences rather than simply performing wellness for Evan.
She also remembers an older daughter, Celia, whose detailed life is integrated across family history but absent from Evan's memory and current records. Ruth experiences Celia's absence as a second real loss, not a puzzle for Evan to correct.

Established continuity (Chapter 11)

Ruth requires the working model to describe Celia as absent from Evan's records rather than as a wrong version, refusing to let his history serve as the sole authenticator of hers.

Established continuity (Chapter 13)

Ruth remains in her own home during the decommissioning rather than allowing the apparatus to displace her again. When Evan says the machine is off, she recognizes that he has not answered whether it is gone.

Established continuity (Chapter 16)

Ruth creates a five-position index-card loop to complete an ordinary home-care scheduling call despite interruptions and delayed confirmation. The method adapts a proof-checking rotation she used as a teacher.
She insists that WAIT is a functional position, completes the task before allowing Evan to photograph it, and requires the photograph to include the cup marking the apparently empty interval.
Her arrangement is neither a vision nor an anomalous cure. Evan records it as structural analogy only, and Ruth retains ownership of its purpose and use.

Established continuity (Chapter 18)

Ruth retains a grounded expectation of Marisol and a Thursday library trip even though current telephone-carrier and care records no longer include her friend; messages, photographs, and the ceramic shoe remain as scars.
She visits a physically ordinary North Branch whose active account, book, receipt, and plaque conflict with an equally valid demolition history.
She refuses to let unlike records cancel one another or suspend her ordinary choices, and she explicitly withholds consent from Evan's new carrier.
Evan records her refusal but starts D-01 inside her home anyway; Ruth neither endorses the experiment nor leaves to simplify his account of exposure.

Established continuity (Chapter 19)

Ruth does not operate or validate D-01. During a HOLD interval, she reads Evan's provisional entity catalog from outside the garage line.
She identifies his category error between a biographical feature his protocol can recover and the person or history that feature once represented.
Her reference to Celia is a moral analogy about Evan's language, not anomalous evidence or privileged knowledge of the residuals.

Established continuity (Chapters 22-23)

Ruth's recorded household-exposure refusal remains in force when Evan executes ORTHO-01. Her evening medication and overnight plan still depend on him, so attempted self-erasure would not be a consequence local to Evan.
F-01's parent-boundary fit retains her refusal and unsatisfied care dependency as antecedent facts. They do not cross into the initial factor as consent, physical law, or a guarantee that Ruth has a parent-universe successor.
The boundary result does not establish Ruth's death, erasure, or privileged cosmological role. Her ordinary needs and moral claim remain unresolved.

Dementia as loss of overlap (brief §4.3)

In the fictional model, dementia is not simply “having too few copies.” Different cognitive subsystems remain supported by different history bundles, but their shared intersection shrinks. Language, autobiographical memory, face recognition, emotional association, and temporal orientation no longer align within enough complete histories to decode one stable self.

B_self = B_memory intersect B_language intersect B_perception intersect B_emotion

As this intersection becomes sparse, damaged inputs are reconstructed as the nearest surviving codeword. Years alias together. One loved person decodes as another. A plausible memory from an adjacent family history fills a gap. Lucid intervals occur when the bundles temporarily realign.

Character and ethical consequence (brief §4.3)

A treatment run can produce genuine lucidity while restoring the wrong coherent version. The relative knows the protagonist but remembers a sibling he never had or a childhood accident from another history. The machine has not healed the original person; it has selected a version that still closes consistently. The relative must retain dignity, desire, and agency rather than serving as a cosmic clue dispenser.

Disaster 2: The cure is a substitution (brief §1)

The dementia-affected relative becomes lucid but remembers another life. A coherent implementation has been selected, not restored.

Guardrail (brief §13)

Dementia is not a sign of lesser worth, weak will, or metaphysical scarcity. The relative remains a person with independent aims and moral standing.