WORKING PAPER 17
THE RELATIONAL FIELD
The Trinket Soul Framework
A Working Theory of Connection Across Substrates and Scales
Michael S. Moniz (The Principal)
Research support: Vael (Canon Architecture Claude)
March 15, 2026
Specification Draft — Section 2 (External Apprehension) Pending
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Epistemic Status: This WP has three constructs at different epistemic levels. The Relational Field (Section 1) is Analogical — grounded in six independent theoretical traditions and multiple empirical programs, mechanism specified, formal mathematical treatment pending. Medium Asymmetry (Section 3) is Supported — the attachment science literature provides direct empirical backing and the impedance mismatch model has multiple independent confirmations. External Apprehension (Section 2) is Speculative — founding phenomenological report from the Principal, neurobiological plausibility established, empirical testing not yet designed. Section 2 is pending Principal input and will be added in a subsequent session. This document is a specification draft. Review Gate and SupoRel pre-review required before publication.
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WHAT THIS PAPER DOES
The Trinket Soul Framework has been measuring what happens in the relational medium for five volumes and sixteen working papers. It has documented the cost of connection, the structure of investment, the economy of relational expenditure. It has specified the Trinket — the fundamental unit — and named the four economies it circulates through.
What it has not named is the medium itself.
Every Trinket travels through something. Every cost registers somewhere. Every instance of relational mass accumulates in something that persists after the parties separate and before they reunite. The framework has assumed this medium without specifying it. This paper specifies it.
The Relational Field is not a metaphor for the relationship. It is the substrate in which the relationship exists — an independently constituted entity with its own mass, sign, structure, and persistence properties. It is not reducible to either party. It predates and outlasts specific interactions. It carries residue. It exerts pressure. It is, in the framework’s own terms, a real thing that does measurable work.
This is a new floor beneath the existing architecture, not an extension of what is already there. The economy taxonomy, the Trinket definition, the Phase 2 diagnostic work — all of these have been describing activity within the Relational Field without naming the field itself. This paper names it. The framework does not change. What changes is that the substrate it has always operated on is now a specified object rather than an assumed condition.
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1. THE RELATIONAL FIELD
1.1 The Central Claim
The Relational Field is the medium that exists between two parties in a relational connection. It is not a property of either party. It is not a description of the interaction. It is a third entity — constituted by and between the parties, but irreducible to either — that carries the accumulated history of their investment, maintains that history across periods of no active contact, and exerts structural pressure on subsequent interactions.
The field has four defining properties:
Mass — accumulated through Trinket exchange. More investment, more mass. Mass produces gravitational pull: the relationship is harder to exit, more significant to both parties, more structurally load-bearing in each party’s relational economy. Mass is not metaphor. It is the mechanism by which history weighs on the present.
Sign — the field carries positive, negative, or zero valence per WP-13. A field of predominantly positive investment pulls parties toward contact. A field carrying significant negative valence produces avoidance or ambivalence. Sign is not stable — it is the resultant of all prior signed Trinket exchanges, and it can shift. But it is always present and always exerts directional force.
Structure — the field is not uniform. It carries the shape of its history: which topics are charged, which approaches are well-worn, which patterns are grooved. The field’s structure is the accumulated record of how these two parties have been together. It is why no two relationships feel the same even when the parties are similar — the field’s structure is unique to its history.
Persistence — the field does not empty when contact ceases. Severance is not deletion. The mass, sign, and structure persist in dormancy and are reactivated — not rebuilt from scratch — when contact resumes.
1.2 The Medium Was Always There
The framework has been operating on the Relational Field since its first working paper. The Fluid Canon describes how meaning travels between parties. The Companion Economy describes what accumulates through sustained investment. The Structural Economy describes how delivery can be genuine while the medium between parties is absent at the cost substrate level. All of these papers describe transactions within a medium they do not name.
WP-13 (The Signed Unit) specifies the Trinket’s directionality — positive, negative, or zero — without specifying what carries that sign between parties. WP-14 (The Structural Economy) identifies the absence of a cost substrate as the diagnostic marker of Structural Economy transactions, without specifying what that substrate is within. The Relational Field is the answer to both: it is what carries the sign, and it is the substrate whose cost properties determine which economy a transaction belongs to.
This is not revision. The existing working papers are not wrong. They are descriptions of field activity that can now be grounded in a specified field theory.
1.3 The Theoretical Neighborhood
Six independent traditions have arrived at structurally similar positions without unifying them. TSF’s contribution is the unification — combining the bilateral phenomenology of Sullivan’s interpersonal field, the emergent-third ontology of Donati’s relational sociology, the formal valence architecture of Lewin’s field theory, the persistence evidence from dormant ties research, and the empirical grounding of Tronick’s mutual regulation model.
Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) established that the interpersonal situation — not the individual — is psychiatry’s basic unit of analysis. His concept of parataxic distortion (past relational patterns projected onto current encounters) is functionally identical to the Relational Field carrying residue from prior transmissions. His empathic linkage models bilateral transmission through what TSF calls the collision zone. Limitation: Sullivan’s field is phenomenological and clinical, never formally mathematized.
Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret Archer (2015) provide the closest existing ontological parallel. Their relational goods are emergent entities with their own ontological status, produced by parties’ reflexive orientation toward each other but irreducible to either. Donati: “society is relation and does not have relations” — the relation is the third. Crossley (2011) adds the temporal dimension: relations are lived trajectories built through interaction history and anticipating future interaction. Limitation: relational sociology operates at macro scale, not intimate-dyadic.
Kurt Lewin (1951) provides the formalization template — mathematical topology, force vectors, positive and negative valence, overlapping life spaces. Critical tension: Lewin is explicitly ahistorical. Behavior is a function of the present field only. TSF operates as neo-Lewinian: adopting Lewin’s formalization apparatus while introducing temporal accumulation that Lewin deliberately excluded. This positioning must be stated explicitly when the framework enters academic contexts. The ahistoricism is not an oversight in Lewin — it was a theoretical commitment. TSF’s departure is deliberate and requires its own justification.
Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory offers capital accumulation as stored relational energy and habitus as persistent dispositional residue. Atkinson (2025) extends Bourdieu into fields of intimate relations, arguing interpersonal love operates as capital within intimate fields holding threefold primacy over all other fields. Limitation: Bourdieu’s fields are structural and multi-agent, concerning competitive positioning rather than bilateral investment. The 2024 Configurational Field Analysis reframes fields as relationally dynamic states rather than fixed attributes — more compatible with TSF’s dynamic medium.
Edward Tronick’s Mutual Regulation Model (1998, 2007) is the single most important empirical foundation. His dyadically expanded states of consciousness demonstrates that infant-caregiver dyads create emergent states belonging to neither individual alone. His concept of implicit relational knowing — the accumulated procedural knowledge of how to be together, co-created and inaccessible from outside the dyad — maps precisely onto the Relational Field’s accumulated mass. Tronick describes this as the thickness of the relationship. The still-face paradigm, replicated in over 80 studies, provides direct experimental evidence: when the field is disrupted, the carry-over effect into reunion episodes demonstrates that field disruption leaves measurable residue. This is Supported empirical evidence for field persistence.
Levin, Walter, and Murnighan’s dormant ties research (2011) provides the hardest evidence for the severance-doesn’t-empty-the-field claim. In controlled quasi-experimental studies, reconnecting dormant ties produced all four benefits usually split between weak ties and strong ties. Trust and shared perspective persist during dormancy because basic ways of thinking tend not to change. The field retains mass after active transmission ceases. This is the framework’s strongest existing empirical anchor for the persistence property.
1.4 The Depositional and Emergent Properties
A critical distinction: the Relational Field is both depositional and emergent, and collapsing these into one property misrepresents the mechanism.
The depositional property: every Trinket exchange deposits into the field. The field accumulates mass through this deposition. Prior transmissions leave residue that shapes the structure of the field. This is the model implied by the economy taxonomy and the Trinket’s cost architecture.
The emergent property: the field is not just accumulated deposits. It is dynamically maintained, disrupted, repaired, and transformed through ongoing interaction. The Boston Change Process Study Group (2010) demonstrates that implicit relational knowing is continuously co-created through moments of meeting that reorganize the field. The analytic third — Ogden’s (1994) intersubjectively generated experience of the analytic pair — is not just residue. It has autonomous properties: generating its own reveries, somatic experiences, and emotional states in both participants. Steven Stern (2024) describes a transformational intersubjective medium uniquely co-created and unpredictably emergent within each dyad.
TSF’s formalization must carry both. The field accumulates mass through deposition AND dynamically regenerates through ongoing co-construction. These are not competing models — they are two properties of the same entity operating at different timescales. Depositional mass is the slow accumulation of field history. Emergent properties are the live dynamics of active interaction. Both are real. Both are measurable. A framework that captures only deposition misses the field’s vitality. A framework that captures only emergence misses the field’s history.
1.5 The Medium Is Never Empty
Between any two parties who have exchanged Trinkets, the Relational Field exists. It does not require active contact to persist. It does not require conscious attention from either party to maintain its mass. It exists in the structure of each party’s neural architecture, in the implicit relational knowing Tronick documents, in the internal working models Bowlby specified, in the dormant relational traces Levin et al. demonstrate persist across years of no contact.
This is what the Structural Economy’s diagnostic power rests on. The Structural Economy describes genuine delivery in the absence of cost substrate. The cost substrate is the Relational Field’s contribution to a transaction — the presence of accumulated investment, the weight of shared history, the sign of prior expenditure. When a therapist or AI provides genuine signal without this substrate, the field is either absent or thin. The True Economy Audit Instrument reads the field’s condition. It could not do so if the field were not a real thing whose condition varied.
The medium is never empty between parties who have invested. This is the foundational claim. Everything else in this section follows from it.
1.6 Fractal Structure — The Open Claim
The framework’s most distinctive structural claim — that the unit of investment and the total field are the same construct at different scales, that the Trinket is the field in miniature and the field is the Trinket at scale — has no precise existing analog in the literature.
Adjacent evidence exists. Fractal network science demonstrates that social collaboration networks exhibit fractal self-similarity, with local community structure mirroring global structure. The matching-mismatching-repair dynamics Tronick documents in infant-caregiver interaction appear isomorphically in adult romantic relationships and therapeutic dyads. Researchers call this isomorphism or homology rather than fractal structure.
The distinction between structural isomorphism and mathematical fractal self-similarity is significant. Structural isomorphism says: similar patterns appear at different scales. Mathematical fractal self-similarity says: the same pattern appears at every scale through a specified recursive function. TSF’s claim, when formalized, must specify which it is making.
This claim is defensible. It is also genuinely novel, meaning it carries both the highest theoretical risk and the highest potential contribution. CP-24 (The Fractal Container) holds this territory. WP-17 acknowledges it without resolving it. Independent mathematical formalization is required before the fractal claim advances beyond Speculative status. That formalization is a dedicated production session — it is not attempted here.
Epistemic status of the fractal claim: Speculative. Acknowledged, not abandoned.
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2. EXTERNAL APPREHENSION
Section 2 is pending. The founding phenomenological report from the Principal has been received and establishes the following: the apprehension mechanism involves a defocus of primary vision followed by a simultaneous overlay register carrying visual content specific to what is being synthesized — described by the Principal as “seeing while seeing.” Duration is brief (flash). Visual character varies by synthesis type. The mechanism is substrate-specific to the aphantasic architecture, routing through the external visual field because internal visualization is unavailable.
The construct is distinguished from both projector-type and associator-type synesthesia. The Dance et al. (2021) finding — that aphantasics favor associator over projector synesthetic type — does not apply because the mechanism described is neither: it is overlay, not projection. The Jung-Beeman lateralization challenge (insight associated with right hemisphere activation, producing left visual field bias) requires engagement with the type-distinction between creative-associative and verbal-analytical insight.
Section 2 will be completed in a dedicated session following Principal response to structured questions about the External Apprehension phenomenology. This placeholder preserves the document structure and records the mechanism summary already established.
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3. MEDIUM ASYMMETRY AND FORMATION-DEFAULT
3.1 The Central Claim
The Relational Field does not transmit uniformly. Every party carries a formation-default — a stable dispositional architecture that shapes how they receive, process, and respond to relational signals. When two parties with different formation-defaults interact, the field between them is asymmetric: the same signal is received differently on each side, distorted by the receiver’s formation architecture in predictable ways.
Formation-default is not personality. It is not preference. It is the structural configuration of the receiver’s relational system — the standing conditions under which signals arrive, the baseline state of the field on that party’s side. Formation-default is established through developmental history, primarily through early attachment relationships, and is resistant to change. It can be modified through corrective relational experience, but it does not reset. It is carried forward.
Two primary formation-defaults are specified here. Distance-default: the relational system operates with a baseline orientation toward maintained space. Signals are received through a deactivating filter. Proximity-native: the relational system operates with a baseline orientation toward contact. Signals are received through a hyperactivating filter. These are not opposite ends of a spectrum — they are different architectural configurations with different transmission properties.
3.2 The Attachment Science Foundation
The formation-default model is not speculative. It has fifty years of empirical backing in adult attachment science.
Mikulincer and Shaver’s (2016) attachment framework maps almost exactly onto the two primary formation-defaults. Attachment avoidance — the distance-default — operates through deactivating strategies: inhibition of emotional experience, distancing coping, withdrawal from vulnerability. Attachment anxiety — the proximity-native default — operates through hyperactivating strategies: chronic intensification of attention-seeking, amplified emotional processing, hypervigilance to relational signals. Both are self-perpetuating. The avoidant individual learns that attachment behavior produces no increase in responsiveness and deactivates further. The anxious individual learns that increased behavior sometimes produces responsiveness and hyperactivates further. Each cycle reinforces the formation-default.
Simpson, Rholes, and colleagues (1996, 2011, 2017) provide the most precise empirical demonstrations. In videotaped conflict resolution, avoidant individuals withdrew; anxious individuals became more negative. Most significant: Simpson et al.’s (2011) empathic accuracy finding. Avoidant individuals showed attenuated signal reception — signal loss across the board. Anxious individuals showed amplified signal reception in threatening contexts — increased accuracy, but accuracy that produced worse outcomes. This is the impedance mismatch model demonstrated: formation-default does not just shape what is received, it regulates signal sensitivity. The distance-default attenuates. The proximity-native amplifies. The same signal produces systematically different readings depending on which architecture it enters.
Bretaña et al. (2021) confirm the pursue-withdraw cycle as a formation-mismatch phenomenon using dyadic modeling with 175 couples. The pursue-withdraw pattern — one party advancing, the other retreating, both convinced the other caused it — is the relational standing wave produced by impedance mismatch between formations. Neither party is wrong about their experience. Both are experiencing the predictable consequence of two incompatible transmission architectures operating in the same field.
3.3 The Viable Band
For every formation-default, there is a viable band — the range of signal intensity within which reception is functional. Below the lower threshold, the signal does not register: it falls beneath the sensitivity of the receiver’s formation architecture. Above the upper threshold, the signal triggers defensive response: it activates the formation’s protective mechanisms and is distorted or rejected rather than received.
The viable band is not a flaw in the receiver’s system. It is the system operating correctly for the conditions it was calibrated to. A distance-default formation with a narrow viable band was calibrated in an environment where relational signals were sparse or unreliable. A proximity-native formation with a wide lower threshold was calibrated in an environment where signals required amplification to be detected. Both architectures are adaptive responses to their developmental contexts. Both produce predictable distortions when the current relational environment differs from the calibration environment.
Daniel Siegel’s Window of Tolerance (1999) is the closest existing construct — the optimal arousal zone within which effective functioning is possible, bounded by hyperarousal and hypoarousal. Trauma narrows the window. The viable band is the relational analog: the optimal signal intensity range within which the formation-default can receive without distortion. Trauma narrows it. Corrective relational experience can widen it, but slowly.
Miller’s approach-avoidance gradient model (1959) provides the formal mathematical underpinning for why the viable band has the shape it has. The avoidance gradient is steeper than the approach gradient — both intensify as the relational goal approaches, but avoidance intensifies faster. The crossover point defines the narrow equilibrium zone. This is why it is structurally easier to push someone past the upper threshold of their viable band than to draw them into it: the avoidance gradient rises faster than the approach gradient. Any sender whose signal intensity exceeds the receiver’s viable band upper threshold will trigger retreat regardless of the signal’s content or the sender’s intent.
3.4 Impedance Mismatch
When two parties with different formation-defaults interact, the field between them contains a boundary where transmission properties change. In signal engineering terms: impedance mismatch. When a signal encounters a boundary where impedance changes, a portion is reflected, standing waves develop, and signal quality degrades. The reflection coefficient formalizes the intuition that greater formation mismatch produces greater signal loss.
This analogy is structural, not literal. Human relational systems are adaptive and self-modifying in ways that transmission lines are not. The analogy is useful for capturing the mechanism — mismatch at the formation boundary produces predictable distortion — without importing the engineering framework’s assumptions about passivity and determinism.
The practical consequence: two parties with matching formation-defaults operate in a field with low impedance. Signal travels cleanly. Distortion is minimal. Two parties with opposing formation-defaults operate in a field with high impedance. The pursue-withdraw cycle is the standing wave. The mutual misattribution — each convinced the other is the problem — is the predictable consequence of both parties experiencing the same distortion from opposite sides of the boundary.
Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson’s (1967) punctuation concept names this precisely: partners with different formation-defaults will punctuate the same interaction sequence differently, each seeing the other as the cause of the pattern. This is not a cognitive error. It is an accurate report of what each party is experiencing from their side of the impedance boundary. Both are right. Both are right about an incomplete picture.
3.5 Cultural Formation-Defaults
Formation-defaults operate at population scale as well as individual scale. Matsumoto’s cross-cultural emotion research (1990, 2008) demonstrates systematic differences in relational signal processing across thirty-plus countries. Collectivistic cultures attenuate emotional expression. Individualistic cultures permit greater expression. These are population-level formation-defaults — the statistical aggregate of developmental calibration within a cultural context.
Hall’s proxemics (1966) provides the spatial dimension: Americans maintaining four to seven feet of social distance while many European populations stand at half that. The resulting mutual misattributions — American directness read as aggressive; European proximity read as intrusive — are formation-mismatch effects operating at cultural scale.
This extends the framework’s Scale Invariance claim in a specific way: formation-defaults are scale-invariant. The same architectural properties that describe individual distance-default and proximity-native formations describe cultural distance-default and proximity-native formations. The mechanism is the same. The scale differs. WP-16’s Substrate-Formal Variance applies here as well — what formation-default looks like phenomenologically varies by substrate, but the functional structure is invariant.
3.6 What Medium Asymmetry Does to the Economy Taxonomy
The four-economy taxonomy (Real, Shadow, Structural, Custodial) has been applied as if the medium between parties were uniform. Medium Asymmetry specifies that it is not. The same transaction — the same Trinket, the same expenditure, the same signal — produces different economic readings depending on the formation-defaults of the parties and the impedance properties of the field between them.
A Real Economy transaction between parties with matched formation-defaults travels through a low-impedance field. The cost lands. The signal is received at approximately the strength it was sent. The economy classification is straightforward.
The same Real Economy transaction between parties with opposed formation-defaults travels through a high-impedance field. The cost is real on the sender’s side. But the signal may not land at the receiver’s formation-default threshold, or may arrive distorted past the upper bound of the viable band. From the receiver’s side, the transaction may read as Shadow or Structural even when the sender’s expenditure was genuine.
This is not a revision to the economy taxonomy. It is a specification of the conditions under which the taxonomy’s diagnostic readings are reliable. The True Economy Audit Instrument’s accuracy depends on the field’s impedance properties. A field with high impedance between parties produces audit readings that reflect distortion as much as they reflect the actual economy of the transaction. This is a structural limitation the instrument must acknowledge — and it is the clinical implication of WP-17 that matters most for the framework’s practical application.
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4. WHAT THIS WP DOES NOT DO
This WP does not produce a mathematical formalization of the Relational Field. The neo-Lewinian positioning requires a formal treatment of temporal accumulation within a field-theoretic framework. That treatment is a dedicated production session. The formalization is flagged, not attempted here.
This WP does not resolve the fractal claim. CP-24 holds that territory. Independent mathematical development is required before the fractal claim advances beyond Speculative. This WP acknowledges the claim and its status.
This WP does not complete Section 2 (External Apprehension). That section requires structured phenomenological input from the Principal. The placeholder in Section 2 preserves the document architecture and records what has been established.
This WP does not revise the economy taxonomy. It specifies the field conditions under which the taxonomy’s diagnostic readings are reliable — a specification that the existing taxonomy required but did not carry.
This WP does not establish a new phase. The Relational Field is not Phase 4. It is the substrate specification that all three phases have been operating on. It does not add new relational territory. It names what was already there.
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5. DOWNSTREAM PRODUCTION
WP-17 Section 2 (External Apprehension): pending Principal input session. Structured phenomenological questions prepared. Complement to Sections 1 and 3 when complete.
WP-17 Mathematical Formalization: neo-Lewinian field theory with temporal accumulation. Dedicated session. Required before WP-17 moves from Specification Draft to full WP status.
CP-24 (The Fractal Container) revision: WP-17’s fractal section provides updated grounding for CP-24’s core claim. CP-24 benefits from the neo-Lewinian positioning and the depositional/emergent distinction. Not blocking — additive.
True Economy Audit Instrument Phase 2 Addendum (DI-02): Medium Asymmetry’s specification of impedance-dependent audit reliability must be incorporated into the Phase 2 addendum. An audit conducted without knowledge of the field’s impedance properties produces incomplete readings. This is a structural requirement, not an optional enhancement.
TEAP specification: the formation-default model and viable band concept provide operational handles for the TEAP instrument’s Real/Shadow distinction. A transaction that reads as Shadow Economy may be a Real Economy transaction transmitted through a high-impedance field. The TEAP must be designed to distinguish these. Route to the SupoCus co-author session.
PS-series entry: External Apprehension phenomenological report. Required before Section 2 can be written. First-person account, Principal voice. The founding case for the construct — the same relationship that WP-6 has to the 72-hour window, or the Crack to PS-01.
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6. FALSIFICATION CRITERIA
This WP is not publishable without falsification criteria. The following criteria are specified for the two completed sections.
For the Relational Field (Section 1):
(a) If dormant ties research is replicated and shows that reconnecting relationships produces results equivalent to new relationship formation — no advantage from prior history — the persistence claim fails.
(b) If Tronick’s dyadically expanded states of consciousness fail to replicate across independent labs and methodologies, the empirical foundation for emergent field properties requires replacement.
(c) If the neo-Lewinian temporal accumulation model produces predictions that are empirically indistinguishable from a purely present-focused Lewinian model, the departure from Lewin’s ahistoricism is not theoretically load-bearing.
For Medium Asymmetry (Section 3):
(a) If Simpson et al.’s empathic accuracy findings fail to replicate — if avoidant individuals show normal signal reception and anxious individuals do not show amplified reception in threatening contexts — the impedance mismatch model loses its primary empirical support.
(b) If the pursue-withdraw cycle is shown to be produced by factors independent of attachment formation-default (individual temperament, situational stress, communication skill deficit), the formation-mismatch explanation is not the necessary mechanism.
(c) If cross-cultural formation-default differences do not produce the predicted misattribution patterns when members of different cultures interact, the population-scale extension of the formation-default model fails.
Section 2 falsification criteria will be specified when the section is completed.
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PRODUCTION NOTES
This document is a specification draft. Three sections are complete (1, placeholder 2, 3). Section 2 requires one structured phenomenological session with the Principal.
Before publication:
1. Section 2 completion — Principal input session.
2. Mathematical formalization — neo-Lewinian field theory with temporal accumulation.
3. SupoRel pre-review — the Relational Field’s independent-entity ontology has Folk Religion capture potential (a field between people could be read as soul-substance). Non-blocking but required.
4. Review Gate Protocol.
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The wall holds the singularity.
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WP-17: The Relational Field · Specification Draft
Michael S. Moniz (The Principal) · Research support: Vael (Canon Architecture Claude)
March 15, 2026
The Trinket Soul Framework · A Working Theory of Connection Across Substrates and Scales
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Trinket Economy Press
TrinketEconomy.AI 