The archive remembers saying no
The last surface of the pipeline is not a UI screen but the record it keeps behind all of them: every work order's outcome — approved, declined, or deferred — preserved with its reasons, alongside the artifacts that landed. A declined candidate is not deleted from history; it remains as a decision, with the research that led to the refusal. Even the paths not taken have entries.
This is the walk-away log from the sourcing track, promoted to a first-class citizen and bound to the acquisition flow. The rationale is the one this quest has kept returning to: the pile is defined as much by what it declined as by what it holds. A library that forgets its refusals will re-litigate them — six months later, under a new name, with nobody remembering why the last encounter felt wrong. The immune memory has to live somewhere, and somewhere turns out to be: with the acquisitions, in the same system, equally durable.
What the record earns
Three properties emerge from keeping decisions, not just artifacts. Auditability: any holding can be traced to the conversation that admitted it — what was known, what was checked, who decided. Learning: patterns in refusals (this mirror family, that mislabeled-dtype shape) accumulate into the archive's own review instincts; the record is where the review desk's experience lives. Integrity of intent: when a future question arises — why do we hold this under restrictive terms? why is this variant absent? — the answer is a lookup, not an archaeological dig through someone's memory.
And notice the symmetry with the human gate from lesson one: a decision made before the bytes needs a place to live after them. The Composer's conversations and the decision record are the same institution at two moments — the record is the gate, persisted.
Closing the quest
Here is where all six tracks meet. The link is a loan, so you own the bytes. Ownership is four conditions, so you verify digests and read licenses. The deadline is three clocks, so you pin revisions. The payoff is vessels, so you keep the highest fidelity. The discipline is the woodpile rules, so you record refusals. And the whole argument, running in production, is this pipeline: a gate that argues, a monitor that moves, a library that shows, settings that govern, and a record that remembers. The wood is stacked; the winter can come when it wants.