**The four questions move to the top of the page, where a thumb can reach them.** This page gets
opened one-handed, in a hall, thirty seconds before a conversation starts — and the four fixed
questions were the third pack down, behind two packs about ChatGPT interviews that nobody is reading
while a founder waits. They are now the first thing on it: numbered, English and Portuguese stacked
so the interviewer reads whichever the person in front of them speaks, each with the one line
saying why it is asked that way. The closing question and the thirty-second read-back sit under
them.

**They are rendered from one file, not retyped into a second place.** `00__the-spine.json` holds the
four questions and the closing one; the top card renders from it and the two question cards keep
their long-form treatment. Four sentences are a small thing to copy and exactly the kind of small
thing that drifts — one gets sharpened in the card, the card is what gets read at the event, and
the page at the top quietly goes on saying the old version.

**Gate 43 makes that impossible.** Every question in the spine must appear **verbatim** in both
question cards — English in the English card, Portuguese in the Portuguese one — and on the rendered
page. Gate 42 already tied the cards to the page; this ties the spine to the cards, so the chain is
closed at both ends.

*Broken on purpose in both directions before it was trusted: a question edited in the spine and not
in the card went red naming the card, and a question edited in the card and not in the spine went
red twice — once from gate 42 for the stale hash, once from gate 43 for the drift. And the language
gate caught this gate's own section heading, which I had written in Portuguese inside an English
file.*