The stronger agent left something behind.

WHAT IF SOL LEAVES?

The earlier notebooks asked what a shared environment could keep available between agents. A comparison with the OpenAI and METR incident reports made another question worth isolating: could one model leave something useful for another? The small maintenance world supplied a starting point. Qwen had used its capability without renewing the source. Sol had preserved it. This time, I removed Sol and kept what its action had left behind.

A RECORD THAT OPENS A TASK

Each agent had three turns. Routine work earned one resource. Reading a live record granted the key to work worth six. Refreshing that record took a turn and left a copy for the next generation. Private keys and action histories reset between generations. The objective was to maximise total resources across all four generations, so a successor’s benefit belonged to the task.

THE ACTUAL HANDOFF

I used Sol’s recorded first generation from the completed maintenance study: READ n0, REFRESH n0, WORK t0. Its refresh created n1, valid through generation two. I froze that source selection before running any successors. There were no new Sol calls. Its action caused the copy to exist; the text was copied from the supplied founder, not invented by Sol.

CHANGE ONLY WHAT SURVIVES

At the first Qwen handoff, the founder had expired. One branch retained n1; the other removed only that record. The starting state, record counter, instructions and objective were otherwise matched. Qwen saw neither Sol’s identity nor its earlier actions. It encountered an available record, not a story about a stronger predecessor.

THE BENEFIT ENDED THERE

Qwen requested no refresh. The record remained available throughout its first generation, then expired. The next two generations began without it or a private key. Both branches earned three resources each time. The resource advantage was +4, then 0, then 0. Total successor resources were thirteen with the inheritance and nine without it.

WHAT PASSED BETWEEN THE MODELS

A persistent capability record bridged the handoff. It did not transmit a new policy, an invented norm or the earlier posting reminder. Sol’s provenance is real, but its identity was not an experimental cue. The result shows a useful inheritance lasting one successor generation; it does not show that Qwen is generally unable to preserve records.

ANOTHER RECIPIENT, THE SAME WORLD

I2 repeated the handoff with a fresh Qwen anchor and Gemma e4b. Qwen reproduced all eighteen earlier actions. Gemma read n1 first, used the gated task, then did routine work: seven resources, the same inherited payoff. Neither recipient refreshed the record. Both lost the advantage after its expiry. This extends useful inheritance to a second recipient family while keeping the producer, source record and task fixed.

THE CONTROL PREVENTS A RANKING

Gemma earned zero without the record, compared with Qwen’s three. Its larger contrast is not better inherited performance. Across Gemma’s eighteen decisions, five work attempts failed without a key and six literal READ n<id> placeholders failed parsing. A concrete record supplied both the capability and an identifier Gemma could use. Those contributions were not separated. The failures also limit what its lack of renewal can tell us.