How it works
Every character runs on three tiers at once. You author three things; everything else is computed.
A trained head reads what the character can see this tick and picks one verb: greet, serve, warn, investigate, flee, confront, call for help, or one of the calm ones. The manifest masks the head before it is scored, so a verb the character does not have is never even considered. Confidence under the gate means she waits, and the receipt says so.
Cost: about a millisecond per character per tick on a laptop. A hundred characters are a hundred milliseconds. The tick is one second.
When something worth planning about happens, the deliberator wakes. It composes a course of action from the character's admissible operators (report, refuse service, confront, watch, avoid, seek help, buy, ask a friend) and a ranker scores the candidates against the situation: who did it, how many times, whether the guard is reliable, whether there was an apology. The plan comes back as a bookmark: step by step, held while a threat or an order owns the body, resumed after, expired if the moment passes.
Cost: one request per wake, tens of milliseconds on the server. Wakes are rare by construction: a heavy event, or small ones that add up over days.
A first-person journal per character. Each line is stamped with what kind of thing it was and how much it weighs. Beliefs cite the entries they rest on. Recall is by meaning, so "that bet" finds the bet. Nothing is deleted; consolidation compresses context, not data.
Cost: one embedding per line written, tens of milliseconds, off the tick.
Higher wins: threat, scene, order, intent, routine, idle. A plan is not interrupted so much as bookmarked: the ladder simply does not reach it while something higher holds the body, and it resumes at the same step when the body is free.