Phase 1: Human Prime ↔ iFay

Phase 1 is the first cornerstone of the Faying Protocol: establishing the most basic custodianship relation, "Human Prime ↔ iFay," and making it faithfully expressible and continuously sustainable on any terminal and inside any application.

This phase does not pursue breadth of coverage; it pursues depth of self-consistency. After Phase 1 lands, any iFay — running on any device, any operating system, any application container — can clearly answer two questions: "am I in Faying State right now?" and "if so, to whom am I responsible?"

This is the minimum viable form of the entire Faying Protocol's evolution. Phases 2 through 5 all build on Phase 1: if Phase 1 does not hold, the later extensions have no foothold.

Coverage

Phase 1 covers only one kind of relation:

Human Prime ↔ iFay

The responsible end of the relation is a specific Human Prime; the other end is one of that Human Prime's iFays; the content of the relation is that the iFay carries out digital action under the Human Prime's custodianship.

Phase 1 does not directly cover "Human Prime ↔ terminal" or "Human Prime ↔ software application." When a drone, a home robot, or an enterprise process application enters a Faying relation, the form of expression Phase 1 requires is:

The terminal / software application enters Faying State through the corresponding Human Prime's iFay, rather than establishing a Faying relation with the Human Prime directly.

This form is intentional. iFay is the only entity form that is trusted in Phase 1 to bear the custodianship contract. Understanding "drone ↔ Jack" as "the drone enters the controlled state through Jack's iFay" keeps the chain of responsibility in Phase 1 simple and clear, and avoids prematurely introducing the complexity of "multi-end direct Faying."

Three core topics

Within the strictly limited coverage of "Human Prime ↔ iFay," Phase 1 must solve three core topics.

Establishment — how a Faying Action is explicitly initiated by the Human Prime, witnessed, recorded, and pushes the iFay into Faying State. This topic is unfolded in Chapter 12 (Dual Semantics of Faying).

Maintenance — how Faying State is continuously calibrated through the iFay's working life. It must both ensure the state still holds at every moment and ensure the iFay exits immediately the moment it no longer holds. This topic corresponds to the nine triggering conditions in Chapter 13 (Rogue Fay and Responsibility Attribution).

Exit — after Faying State exits, how the iFay enters Rogue Fay and retains only the minimum action set across the three dimensions A/B/C, while the entire dimension D of outward action is forbidden. This topic corresponds to the A/B/C/D four-dimension rules in Chapter 13.

These three topics are not "advanced features" of Phase 1; they are the entirety of Phase 1. Until they are landed self-consistently, Phase 1 is not considered complete. Phase 1's scope is deliberately narrowed so that Phases 2 through 5 can extend on already-settled contractual ground rather than wrestle with the basic form at the same time.