Dr. Lena Varga · The Causal Projector

Consolidated from the development brief (§8.3, §7.11, §14). The brief is the canonical source: story/development-brief.md.

Working design (brief §8.3)

Dimension	Working design
Role	Experimental counterweight, witness, and moral opponent who helps establish that the anomaly is real.
Expertise	Cryogenic materials, thermal metrology, experimental controls, and statistical validation.
Strength	Understands that replication and falsification matter more once the result becomes personally useful.
Conflict	Wants to separate discovery from exploitation; the protagonist increasingly experiences caution as betrayal.
Arc options	Escape into a branch family that vanishes; betray him because his suspicion selects betrayal; become the first independent carrier of the projector pattern; or survive to document the parent universe’s collapse.

Established continuity (Chapters 7–8)

Lena challenged the thermal model in Evan's first low-field imaging proposal. Fourteen months later, he sends her the anomaly data because he trusts her to find the conventional explanation he missed.
She rebuilds the metrology with her own isolated instruments, blinds the software conditions, and reproduces the cognitive state before operating the machine without Evan present.
A private action mapping known only to Lena reverses the raw noise bias while preserving the favored physical action. She accepts that the effect is real without accepting Evan's causal-history interpretation.
After seeing Evan's exposure frequency increase, she requires a joint hold on cognitive protocols, outcome targeting, and any exposure of patients or dependents pending replication at a neutral site.

Established continuity (Chapter 9)

Lena refuses to approve Ruth's proposed exposure because its identity risks cannot be described, then treats Ruth's immediate safety as the first priority after Evan breaks the hold.
She directs Evan to disable and lock the apparatus, but the unauthorized run creates a durable breach between scientific replication and exploitation.

Established continuity (Chapter 10)

Lena converts Evan's geometric reports into a blinded phase-sweep with a fixed vocabulary, physical phase changes, decoy register writes, and concealed machine conditions.
She accepts the perceptual correlation as a result while retaining physical cue and observer-inference explanations. She rejects treating the responsive structure as a trustworthy person or optimization source.

Established continuity (Chapter 11)

Lena forces every observation, assumption, and cosmological claim into a separate evidence category. She accepts only finite effective support in the observed system, not Evan's broader finite-universe claim.
She agrees to one identification run for the unstable peripheral form with an automatic abort if its visible recursion depth decreases.

Established continuity (Chapter 12)

Lena isolates Evan's spoken depth reports from the acquisition system so a report below four can only open and latch a physical safety contactor. She retains an independent manual stop for uncertainty or protocol fault.
She recognizes that Evan's claimed fourth level has become repetition and manually terminates the run after his false report prevents the automatic abort.
She preserves the classifier, controller, and audio records on write-once storage, records that the observer defeated the safety path, and removes the contactor key. The breach makes her moral opposition direct and personal.

Established continuity (Chapter 13)

Lena demands permanent decommissioning and independently verifies Evan's complete storage inventory, electrical isolation, local erasure, and destruction of the controller flash.
She refuses to erase the exact P-04 environment because doing so would conceal evidence of Evan's protocol breach. Her reproducible, retention-locked escrow package therefore preserves the complete fault build.
She says the outcome is what selection against shutdown would look like through ordinary defensible procedures, not sabotage or a supernatural restart.

Established continuity (Chapter 14)

Lena interprets Evan's peripheral-link audit as possible delayed effects of earlier selection, noting that an electrically dead apparatus cannot restore alternatives already removed from its history.
She accepts that the motor improvement and its human benefits are real while warning that causal capture would preserve locally defensible reasons rather than make Evan simply wrong.
She asks Evan not to distribute the anomaly audit until they agree on an independent safety disclosure, establishing the next conflict over who may receive the evidence.

Established continuity (Chapter 15)

Lena proposes a redacted, non-runnable incident record for a confidential research-safety intake and jointly opens the evidence workspace only to prepare that limited review.
Evan's logged controller-image export changes the risk before joint approval. She makes a minimum-necessary disclosure that excludes identities, locations, source, toolchain, bitstream, and calibration data.
After discovering that her marked packet controlled Evan's continuation gate, she preserves every record on write-once storage, closes routine escrow access, requests qualified containment, and ends their collaboration.
She remains available only through the independent evidence channel and will not return to the garage with Evan.

Established continuity (Chapter 16)

Lena observes OLD-7's controlled destruction remotely and countersigns the chain of custody without resuming direct collaboration with Evan.
She classifies Ruth's task loop as structural analogy, not evidence, and notes that zero shared implementation does not exclude social or documentary transmission along known causal links.
She preregisters paired blinded tests that separately break the motor's live acceptance edge and retain that topology while removing Evan from operation and analysis.

Established continuity (Chapter 17)

Lena participates only through signed preregistration, evidence custody, and post-commit annotations; she does not resume direct operation or partnership.
She distinguishes historical antecedent from active dependence when Evan tries to preserve authorship as the explanation for a topology-only result.
She countersigns the evidence-based disposition that removes Evan from operating or interpreting the system he initiated.

Established continuity (Chapter 18)

Lena remains alive, offsite, and limited to the independent evidence channel; her immutable C-01 packet survives even when its administrative index acquires an incompatible origin.
She distinguishes measured sensor rank from causal reserve and warns that optimizing a divergence report does not preserve alternatives.
Her signed DO NOT START recommendation rejects D-01 without resuming collaboration, and Evan proceeds in documented opposition to it.

Established continuity (Chapters 22-23)

Lena supplies no new instruction, consent, signature, or live participation to ORTHO-01. Her P-04 manual stop remains only a historical sign-orientation counter-sample, and HOLD continues to mean safe no-pulse shutdown.
F-01's parent-boundary fit retains her signed warning as an antecedent fact. It does not convert opposition into authorization, transfer her biography to the initial factor, or make her a witness to genesis.

Self-fulfilling betrayal (brief §7.11)

Once the protagonist’s internal model dominates the controller, the machine preserves histories consistent with that model. If he suspects betrayal, branches containing betrayal become more compatible with the attractor. His friend eventually betrays him because nonbetrayal branches are eroded. Delusion becomes evidence, then history.

Validation role (brief §6.6)

In the validation ladder, a collaborator operates the machine while the protagonist is absent. The effect follows the active controller but retains weaker coupling through software and experiment design.

Open decision on fate (brief §14)

Collaborator fate: erased branch, self-fulfilling betrayal, unwilling carrier, witness to genesis, or survivor in the child universe’s residual myth.