memory: snapshot — the mccarthy leak gate passed with five protagonist names in every copy, and the chain it happened on was unrecorded

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# `[2026-09-17]` The leak gate passed with five protagonist names still in every copy
Found during D4 pre-flight, three stages downstream of where it happened. Commit `c559664`.
```
leak gate, 2026-09-17 morning 0 of 75 renameable, 0 of 37 sub-threshold, both controls green
actually present, all 6 copies Bell x2 Chigurh x3 Moss x2 Toadvine x4 Glanton x2
```
## The mechanism
`leak_gate.py` scans `\b(Surface)\b`. **A character inserted inside a name defeats that
pattern outright**, so a mangled occurrence is not merely unrepaired — it is *unrenameable*
by `rename.py` and *unreportable* by the gate, and the gate prints a clean zero over it.
Two extraction artifacts produce exactly that:
```
B ell C higurh M oss T oadvine a small-caps drop cap kept as its own token
Toad-vine Glan-ton a print line-break hyphen kept by the extractor
```
⭐ **Every VISIBLE occurrence had been renamed correctly** — exact-match survivors were 0,
as the gate said. That is what makes this residue invisible to a spot-read: the names are
gone everywhere you look. `Bell` sits in the entity map at 147 capitals, `Glanton` at 365.
This is the third member of a family. lv-bronte's was `_Antigua_` (`_` is a word character,
so `\bAntigua\b` cannot match inside it), found by hand in 2026-09-16 and never generalised.
**The generalisation is the point: any separator inside a name blinds a word-boundary scan.**
## Fixed at three levels, and all three must stay
1. **`build_corpus_mccarthy.py` rules 4 and 5** repair the source text — 32 split initials
with a *lowercase* remainder (rule 1 requires a following ALL-CAPS word and DROPCAP
requires two, so this is the class both leave behind), 5 hyphen-split names by name.
Both carry expected counts so a master change fails the build.
⚠ **Rule 4's letter class is consonants only.** `I` opens **1,966** paragraphs (the
pronoun), `A` opens 143 (the article), `Y` opens 32 (Spanish *y*). Folding any of them
would corrupt 2,141 lines to fix 32 — the same `I`/`A` trap that bit `audit_stoplist.py`.
2. **`leak_gate.py` runs a separator-tolerant pass every time**, with its own positive and
negative controls, and **it fails the gate**. Validated against the pre-fix tree: reports
all five surfaces, exits 1.
3. The exact-match passes are untouched, so the old verdict is reproduced alongside the new.
⚠ **The fragment filter is what makes the new pass usable.** A naive separator-tolerant
scan is dominated by false positives — on Hemingway it returns 21 hits of which **18 are
ordinary text** (`God damn` for the surface `Goddamn` ×14, plus `I run`, `On an`, `Do me`,
`Si le`). The discriminator, with no dictionary: in a genuine split at least one FRAGMENT
is not a word of this corpus. `God` and `damn` occur constantly; `Primi`, `tivo`, `ell`,
`higurh`, `Toad` do not. That one test cleared all 18 and kept all 3 real ones.
⚠ **My first negative control could not pass.** It planted the split nonce in its own probe
text and then asserted the nonce was absent — an alarm wired to itself, failing on every
run. It now hunts the split nonce in the *real* copies. A control that cannot pass is not a
control.
## The shipped corpora, checked with the committed instrument
```
lv-bronte clean of this class (`English women` vs `Englishwomen` is a false positive)
lv-hemingway 3 real: `Primi tivo`, `Pasionar ia`, `Chi cote` — SHIPPED and LIVE
```
**Operator call outstanding** on whether 3 occurrences in 958k words warrant re-gating a
live adapter. Not acted on.
## The chain was recovered, not remembered — and is now written down
There was **no McCarthy runbook**, and the D1→D3 session issued its commands over
non-interactive ssh so no shell history survived. The chain was recovered by rebuilding
candidates and matching sha256 against the artifacts on disk, then pinned:
```
D1 build_corpus_mccarthy.py 6 works byte-identical
D2 entities.py --min-count 5 --fold-clitics --drop-acronyms --min-mid-ratio 0.2 --min-mid 2
D2c apply_gender_overrides.py entities-final.json byte-identical
D3 rename.py --preset mccarthy --scope corpus --min-cap 5 --copies 6 --seed 4919
--holdout-chapter 7 17 all 36 copy files byte-identical
```
⚠ `--min-mid-ratio` is what keeps `Yeah`/`Buenas`/`Shh`/`Sí` out of the map. The map is
**insensitive** to it: any value in [0.05, 0.3] with `--min-mid` 1 or 2 reproduces byte-for-
byte; `--min-mid 3` does not. The original values are unrecoverable and it does not matter —
which is worth saying, because an exact-looking recipe that was never pinned invites a
false claim of reproduction. Full recipe and every deviation: `scripts/mccarthy-corpus/RUNBOOK.md`.
⚠ **D1 must run on nh3-dev** — the builder reads the kvasir catalogue by absolute path and
gx10 has no copy. The previous session's "on gx10" note is true of D2 onward only.
⚠ **No phrase map exists for this corpus**, so the gate's phrase audit does not run at all.
Yarros and Brontë both had one. Not closed.
Rollback: `~/lv-mccarthy/corpus-{clean,renamed}.pre-splitfix` on gx10.
Related: [[2026-09-17-mccarthy-d1-d3]], [[2026-09-17-beat-contamination-leak]],
[[2026-09-17-lv-hemingway-gate]], [[2026-09-17-lv-bronte-gate]].