Wekesa refused to touch the first screw until everyone had looked into the chain-of-custody camera.
The F-19 visor sat inside a Faraday box at the university hardware lab. The tamper seal, purchased-sample checksum, and transfer time were visible on the board. Ruth watched by video. Joel sat to one side after declaring his creator conflict. Amina remained a quality witness.
“We image storage first,” Wekesa said. “No normal boot. No network. If we change metadata, we answer the question with evidence we altered ourselves.”
The media outside had already chosen a simpler story. One headline said the app stole memories. Another called it a soul cache.
The storage image showed something far less supernatural and more useful: purchased packs, local cache, session metrics, and consent tokens. There were no complete memories saved as films. There were compact sensory fragments—scent vectors, sound textures, heat profiles, and intensity curves.
“Emotional anchors,” Amina said.
Wekesa nodded. “Short packages. Not whole dreams.”
He opened K-17. It contained several layers: clove, low hum, heartbeat-like rhythm, warmth, and two encrypted components.
The lineage file was the real problem. The distributor had delivered one consolidated permission token. Firmware treated `experience improvement` as permission for local cache and eligible training return unless the user explicitly denied it.
“Experience permission became storage and training,” Amina said.
“At firmware level, yes.”
Joel said, “Theft.”
“We can prove consent expansion,” Amina answered. “We have not proven criminal intent.”
“They sold my tag.”
“And that is separate creator-rights evidence. Do not merge it with the user finding before the chain is complete.”
K-17 itself was composite. Some layers carried old creator tags. Others carried beta cohort tokens. The consolidation step had stripped individual provenance from the output.
“So Kendi's kitchen does not prove the source was Sifa,” Ruth said.
“No,” Amina replied. “It proves the pack contained an unexplained borrowed fragment. Source remains bounded.”
Wekesa opened the training-return log. When network access resumed, the device sent engagement metrics and adjusted sensory weights back to the distributor. The F-19 consent screen never separated that use.
“This,” Ruth said, “is something a hearing can carry.”
Joel's creator code had another problem. His original pointer read `single-project`. Inside the distributor package it had become `pool-compatible`.
“I signed one project,” he said.
“Bring the contract to the collective,” Wekesa told him.
“Did that change happen on this device?” Amina asked.
“No. The package arrived like that.”
That removed Timo as the likely source of the license mutation, at least for this sample.
Wekesa found the firmware rule in plain language. If an improvement token existed and there was no explicit denial, cache and training were allowed by default.
“If users were never offered a denial?” Amina asked.
“Then allow remains the default.”
Ruth summarized the likely complaint language: consent expansion, provenance loss, unauthorized license mutation, opaque cache, and training reuse. Memory-loss claims would remain clinically uncertain and separate.
Amina asked the uncomfortable questions directly. Could the device prove Sifa's missing song came from this system? No. Could it prove Kendi's kitchen fragment was a whole memory taken from someone else? No. Could it prove a sensory fragment with unclear lineage entered her session? Yes.
That distinction mattered.
Before closing the box, Amina asked Wekesa to preserve the consent-to-firmware mapping so the collective could later see the difference between what a user clicked and what the device did. Wekesa added a limitation: this finding applied to the tested build and would still need comparison with server-side contract behavior.
Then he opened the creator metadata index.
Joel's tag did not appear once. It appeared in 213 packs under an aggregated royalty code that had never paid him directly.
He stared at the count.
“I was paid one flat fee two years ago.”
“Then the collective needs this record,” Amina said.
Joel picked up the report.
On the monitor, `JN-snd-44` remained next to the usage count.
“I sold this sound once,” he said.
He pointed at the number.
“They sold it a thousand times.”