Fifteen excitatory tropes (the five boards' cuts) and fifteen inhibitory (the five boards' shadows), diffused 50/50 across two hemispheres, rebalanced to exact thirds of ethos, pathos, logos.
Wiring spec: every node exists in both hemispheres at half weight — bilateral redundancy, no lateralization, joined by callosum fibers linking mirrored pairs. Within each hemisphere the three channels are forced to 1/3 · 1/3 · 1/3: the raw corpus under-produces LOGOS, so the thirds constraint applies a +12.2% gain to the witness channel and ~5% damping to ethos and pathos — the gain stage is computed live below. The inhibitory population (the worst-trope anti-corpus) totals 102.0 against the excitatory 100.0: the shadow outweighs the light, which is how it must be — a cortex with insufficient inhibition seizes.
We took the fifteen best story-pieces and the fifteen worst story-pieces from five kinds of stories. Then we built a pretend brain: two halves that each keep a full copy (so losing one half loses nothing), three equal rooms in each half — one for WHO you are, one for what HAPPENS to you, one for TELLING it true — and the bad pieces wired in as brakes, because a brain with no brakes can't think, it can only fire.