A memory system that only answers from its own store is a filing cabinet,
not a partner. The transactive rule the project is named for — not knowing
is fine when you know who does — needed a holder registry, a directory
query, and a referral that never leaks the text it may not read.
- schema v5 adds `holders` (person/agent/service, declared topics, contact).
A holder with memories exists whether or not anybody registered them; the
registry adds reachability, it does not grant existence.
- `who_knows` ranks holders by their own memories and is deliberately NOT
filtered by visibility: "she knows" is the answer. The answer is filtered.
- `ask` searches the asker's visible scope first (hop 0), then walks the
directory with a visited set and a hop budget. Three terminal states:
answered, referred, no_holder_knows. Nobody knowing is a result, not an error.
- Confidence is ordinal, not calibrated: relative strength, coverage, and
declared topics. Every hit carries the raw numbers and the basis lines that
produced the score, so a ranking can be argued with.
- Faces: HTTP (/api/holders, /api/who_knows, /api/ask), CLI (holders,
holder-set, holder-rm, who-knows, ask), MCP (who_knows, ask, list_holders).
Four bugs found by running the thing, not by reading it:
- FTS5 refuses bm25() inside MAX(); the aggregate uses FTS5's own `rank` column.
- A CJK question is longer than the sentence that answers it, so the whole-run
phrase matched nothing. The query now ORs adjacent bigram phrases; adjacency
is kept, equal length is not. Latin path untouched, baseline unaffected.
- The hop budget counted the asker as a hop, so max_hops=1 asked nobody.
- A second, stricter readability test in _answered() disagreed with the SQL
visibility clause and hid a memory the asker was allowed to read. The SQL
clause is the only authority now.
A method named `list` shadowed the builtin inside its own class and made
mypy reject the return annotation; renamed rather than cast around it.
Proof: 155 pytest, 12 Go tests, ruff and mypy clean on touched files, pyright
ledger unchanged at 62, and scripts/mcp_write_smoke.sh drives two principals
on one SQLite file — the husband asks through MCP, gets `referred` with his
wife's contact channel, and her private sentence appears nowhere in the reply.
