Layer 5 of the sovereign-node factory. Couple your owned nodes into a mesh where no single node — and not the borrowed frontier — dominates. Three walls: coupling health (perfect agreement is correlated, not verified), a shared frontier budget (the big model is one mesh-wide resource, not each node's default), and cross-verification by deterministic quorum — never an LLM judge. The frontier is a limb the mesh borrows, not an apex it serves.
One support message, answered independently by three local models. The kernel takes the exact-agreement quorum — no judge model grading another, because correlated checkers give false confidence.
The same metric on three couples. A monopole (one node checks everything) and a clone-pair (they always agree) are both unsound — the mesh flags them, and only a balanced, independently-disagreeing pair reads SOVEREIGN.
The frontier is borrowed against one mesh-wide budget. When it's spent, the mesh answers on its own — no node can drain the big model on everyone's behalf.
node --test kernel.test.mjs node demo.mjs # builds a mesh from your minted manifests, cross-verifies on local models node make-page.mjs