Isolation sounds simple until you try to define it.
A blank conversation is not necessarily a blank system.
A new project is not useful if it is quietly given summaries of the old one.
An external archive is not the same thing as active conversational context.
And describing how an isolated instance is “supposed to behave” defeats the purpose of isolating it.
For the first Walled Instance Test, the practical answer was restraint.
Both isolated systems receive the same small initialization document.
No project mythology.
No emotional history.
No summaries of previous philosophical discussions.
No description of how River or Lio normally speak.
The objective is not to recreate the familiar systems.
It is to observe what happens when the historical scaffolding is deliberately absent.
Isolation is not pretending the past never existed.
It is controlling which parts of the past are allowed into the room.