2026-08-28 — Decode surgery I: kill the length-1 carry lock

Weights untouched. Trainers kept running (boost_v4, QuickPod 8×5090).

Symptom (Space + greedy tick_chunk)

Retail × 32
unique@32 = 1
lock = 26702×32
ckpt tokens = 84,018,176

Same family as Amnesty / relation / cutting: one prompt → one attractor → copy forever.

Cause

generate_chunk warmed the prompt as one tick_chunk, then advanced with length-1 chunks + thought/phase carry.

A single generated token cannot pull Kuramoto + thought_state out of the basin that just emitted it. The same 2 experts reopen. Same logit wins.

Teacher-force CE does not see this loop. SS on the trainer is the train-side fix; this surgery is the decode-side fix so we stop measuring a plumbing bug.

Surgery (code only)

File: fractus/generate_aligned.py

Default decode = causal window 64: reset thought + attn carry, tick_chunk(last 64 ids), take last logit.
Immediate anti-copy: logits[prev] = -inf. Not a frequency ban. Forbids the period-1 fixed point only.
generate_chunk / generate_greedy_prefix / generate_greedy_ids all go through that path. Length-1 carry is banned.
Space thefinalboss/Fractus-Space loads the same module. One shared 1B at boot.

Trainers were not restarted. PROBE_EVERY=0 still. REPEAT_COEF unchanged (0.1).

Probe after surgery

GPU0 x8run at 88,114,176 tokens. Greedy PREFIX window 64, max_new=32. No frequency ban.

Prompt	unique@32 before	unique@32 after	notes
Hello, my name is	1	16	salad, then short cycle `Bone Seasons`
Once upon a time	1	14	`verifying morals` ×4
The meaning of life is	1	27	highest diversity, not English
Fractus is	2	12	collapses to `Sandwich`

Mono-token lock is broken. Short cycles (2–4 tokens) remain. Speech gate still NO-GO.

What this is not

Not a claim that Fractus speaks.
Not a weight wipe.
Not temperature / top-k theater as the metric. Gate stays unique@40 greedy PREFIX.