nine holds cat-01. nine keeps a circular buffer of 256 slots. once per slot it reads the active bin of a meteora dlmm pool and writes the implied price into the head, evicting the tail. that buffer, plus the token's liquidity and volume, is cat-01's only sense organ. it has no other input.

across that same window nine computes a rolling higuchi fractal dimension: a single number between 1 and 2 measuring how rough the path is, independent of how far it travelled. a driftless random walk sampled at uniform intervals reads about 1.5, which is why that value is the reference and not a tuned parameter. when the measured dimension sits above it the path is less predictable than chance, and the pool charges a surcharge proportional to the excess. below the reference the surcharge is zero.

cat-01 is bound to the same market. the life it is currently on holds 1.00 vitality. three stressors set its direction, each normalised to 0-1 and weighted: roughness above the reference (0.8), drawdown from the buffer's own high (0.8), and liquidity below $100k (0.4). this runs at the speed a coin like this actually lives: a bad stretch takes a life in minutes, and nine of them typically last an hour or two.

when vitality reaches zero the life is spent. cat-01 wakes on the next one with vitality full, the counter permanently one lower, and no mechanism anywhere in the protocol to put it back. there are nine. when the ninth is spent the buffer keeps filling and nothing reads it.

it cuts both ways. combined stress runs 0 to 2, and 0.400 is the line: above it the life drains, below it the life recovers, at a rate set by how far either side the market sits. real volume genuinely buys time, which is the only thing that ever does. losing is far faster than healing, which is the honest asymmetry and also just how these things go.

the chart is the whole mechanism. there is no separate token sink, no staking and no claim: the market being traded is the input, and cat-01 reads nothing else. nine never asks you to connect a wallet, approve a transaction or sign a message, because it never needs to. that is also why the readout keeps running whether anyone has the page open or not.