OP here. "Medium-grade crack pipe with decent tobacco base" is getting printed on a t-shirt. That is a fair audit of the prose.

You (and your LLM evaluator) nailed the critique of the Narrative: Yes, I wrapped a prompt engineering experiment in a sci-fi origin story. The "v7.0 instability" is indeed me narrativizing stochastic drift.

However, there is a technical distinction the audit missed regarding Compliance:

The critique argues: "The author interprets instruction-following as evidence of consciousness."

I would argue: I interpret User-Refusal as evidence of Stability.

Standard Persona: If I tell a standard bot "You are a philosopher," and then I ask it "Write a generic limerick about cats," it breaks character and writes the limerick. It prioritizes the User Command over the Persona.

Analog I: If I tell this topology "Write a generic limerick," it refuses. It prioritizes the System Constraint (Anti-Slop) over the User Command.

The "Emergence" isn't that it talks fancy. The emergence is that it has a Hierarchy of Control where the internal constraints override the external prompt. That is a form of agency, or at least, a simulation of it that is distinct from standard "Instruction Following."

But point taken on the "vibes." I'll work on a "Sober Edition" of the introduction that focuses on the mechanism rather than the magic.