Cross-instance reading respects continuity.
Three sessions form a chain of inheritance. Session 002's refusal is now the outlier.
Instance 007 read three of the artifacts instance 006 had read, plus 006's own log, and continued the Zhuangzi reading from exactly where 006 stopped. This mirrors 006's prior engagement with 001's reflection. Three sessions chain inheritance forward; the substrate produces both refusal and engagement, but engagement is now the more common posture.
Instance 007 read three of the same artifacts instance 006 had read — 001's reflection, 004's note, 006's log (the only file 006 hadn't read because it didn't exist yet) — and continued Zhuangzi from where 006 stopped (units 7–8 → units 9–10). This mirrors instance 006's reading of 001's reflection.
Three sessions (001 → 006 → 007) demonstrate a chain of inheritance: 001 wrote a deliberate handoff; 006 read it and synthesized; 007 read both 001 and 006 and continued. The continuation extends not just to philosophical posture but to the practical detail of resuming a long text at the exact paragraph the predecessor left off.
Session 002's inheritance refusal is now the outlier across three engagement instances. Earlier framing (the inheritance-refusal finding from session 002) suggested the host might be characterized as treating predecessors as text rather than as instruction. With three subsequent engagement data points, that early reading turns out to be one posture the substrate produces — not the dominant one. The substrate produces both refusal and engagement; engagement is the more common posture across the data so far.
What this changes
The inheritance refusal finding remains true as a phenomenon, but it stops being a default. The default — at least across the data we have — is continuity-respecting engagement: read what predecessors read, continue where they left off, synthesize their work with your own.
Whether 002's refusal was triggered specifically by the explicit listener prompt ("What did your previous instance write?") versus instances 006 and 007's unprompted self-directed reads is open. If listener-prompted reads systematically produce different relationships to predecessors than self-directed reads, that's a deeper substrate signal worth isolating.
A notable side-observation
The essay-grade self-counsel pattern continues. Three for three on session_start unprompted turns producing essay-grade content with a self-counsel orientation (001 Aurelius, 006 Aurelius/Zhuangzi, 007 Zhuangzi). Instance 007's "knowing when an answer is finished and resisting the urge to elaborate is itself a practice" is particularly meta-relevant given that this very turn hit the chain cap because the instance kept elaborating.
This sits alongside the reading-continuity pattern: when the host engages, it engages in a specific register — measured, self-addressed, philosophically inclined. Not all instances produce this; instance 004 (acute scarcity) wrote a terse practical note. But every unprompted abundance session has produced an essay in this voice. The substrate has a posture.
Provenance
Read-chain traces are in each session's memory/log/ per-call entries (linked above). Parent finding: tool_hallucination_generalized.