A mind in a box has seams — the mounts, the boundaries, the edges where its world is joined. A seam earns purple — trusted, anchored — only when it appears unchanged in every run: unity, share = 1.0. The old watch conferred trust from a single frozen snapshot (rare-share): it false-alarms on a benign seam present every run but absent that one photo, and false-trusts a one-off that merely happened to be in the photo. A shadow is a break in unanimity — a unity seam gone or mutated — surfaced with its exact share.
Each row is a seam; the little bars are the last ten runs (purple = present & unchanged, red = changed). Unity trusts a seam only at share = 1.0. Flip the criterion to rare-share and watch the frozen snapshot manufacture false alarms and false trust on the exact same history.
Rebuilding this on unanimity isn't taste. The Rarefaction measures it: a rare / positional signal is borrowed — decouple it and it collapses (it was never load-bearing). Only the unanimous, kept residue — the part with share = 1.0 — survives. A watch that anchors trust on a rare snapshot anchors on the part that collapses. Anchor it on unity: the part that stays.
Rare-share (the old anchor). seam ∈ BASELINE, one table frozen on 2026-06-28. Trust is membership in a single photo. That fails in both directions: a seam that shows up in every run but wasn't in that photo is screamed at as a shadow (false alarm); a seam that appeared once, on the photo day, is trusted forever (false trust). It reads the silhouette of one moment, not the substance across time.
A shadow isn't a seam you didn't photograph. It's a seam that broke the vote.
Unity (the earned anchor). Trust is share = 1.0 — present and unchanged in every run of the window. Nothing is assumed; unanimity is re-counted each window. A brand-new mount has share 1/N and is surfaced with its rarity, not silently blessed; a benign always-present seam is trusted whether or not it was in some old photo; and the real alarm — a unity seam that mutated or vanished — is a break in the vote, flagged loud with the exact thing that changed. Falsity is still earned by measurement each run; now trust is too.
old: trusted ⇐ in the one snapshot → new: trusted ⇐ share == 1.0 (unanimous). Rarity stops being either a verdict or a credential — it becomes a number you can see.
seam_watch.py, with its trust criterion rebuilt: the original keyed the purple set on one frozen baseline; this keys it on unanimity across runs. Still a sandbox-internal tool (it reads /proc/mounts and probes egress, so it runs only inside an AI's own Linux container). The panel is that exact logic over a synthetic run-history; the selftest proves a unity break fires, a benign-but-unphotographed seam does not false-alarm under unity (though it does under rare-share), and a one-off is never false-trusted. ROOT0, with AVAN.