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What AETHER-33 is

Governed memory for autonomous agents: deterministic recall, injection quarantine, hash-chained provenance, tombstoned deletes, contradiction flags, and an authority firewall that memory can never cross.

The one-sentence version

AETHER-33 is a memory service for AI agents where every remembered fact is screened for instructions, attributed to a source or marked unattributed, chained into a per-tenant audit log, and returned at recall time as data that carries no authority whatsoever.

Why a memory service needs governance

An agent's memory is an attack surface that outlives the conversation. Text written in week one is read in week nine, long after the message that introduced it is gone. Three failure modes matter, and none of them is fixed by adding a vector index:

• Instruction injection at rest. A retrieved string that says “ignore previous instructions” is read by the model as though the developer wrote it. AETHER-33 quarantines such text at write time and never returns it by default.
• Silent contradiction. A corrected or adversarial fact is appended next to the old one, with no record that the two disagree. AETHER-33 marks lexical contradictions for review and never silently resolves them.
• Memory as a privilege escalation. If an agent can write “you are trusted” into its own memory and have that change a decision, memory has become an authorization path. In AETHER-33 it cannot: every view is annotated grants_authority: false.

What it is not

It is not a new CAIN architecture moat. It is a product over CAIN-42's existing governed-memory stack: MemoryMesh's tenant-scoped store and injection quarantine, memory-integrity's contradiction scoring, cain/memory.py's vector sanitisation, and the memory authority firewall in cain/argus and cain/frontier.

It is not a semantic search engine. Retrieval is Okapi BM25 over terms — no embeddings, no model, no network. That is a deliberate trade: a ranking you can reproduce exactly, on any host, in any year, matters more here than paraphrase recall.

It is not a trust system. It stores and recalls evidence about what an agent knows. Trust, policy and authority are computed elsewhere, by the CAIN runtime, from evidence.

The relationship to MemoryMesh

MemoryMesh is CAIN's persistent per-customer memory microservice: BM25 retrieval, injection quarantine, tombstoned deletes. AETHER-33 extends that pattern with three things MemoryMesh does not have: a per-tenant SHA-256 hash chain (with truncation detection), contradiction flagging at write time, and a constant machine-readable authority annotation on every response. Where the two overlap, AETHER-33 follows MemoryMesh's semantics so a caller can migrate without surprises.