ADR-024 — the mem engine adopted as the family's third engine (wave 6; release readiness renumbered to wave 7)

Row-first gate: consumer-inventory.md gains an engine-tier section — the mem-engine need recorded operator-authority, dated 2026-10-10 (wasm32 sandboxing across the alk protocol family + downstream ffi/napi/python-adapter economics; rusqlite/tokio-postgres structurally out on wasm, so mem is the only triad member the sandbox can carry).

ADR-024 (decisions/024-mem-engine.md) pins the decision set: (1) separate `alkstore-mem` crate — discharges and amends ADR-001 §4 (superseded in part: full contract-v1 engine, not an "implementation convenience"; annotation on ADR-001 §4 + Status, class-1 window still open); (2) honest-ephemeral posture — no durability, single-process, ephemeral by design, never fleet-valid (ADR-010 §3's shared-pool predicate fails structurally), riding ADR-016's carriers unchanged (identity + docs + matrix); (3) full contract v1 tier with the asymmetry classification — `PayloadTooLarge` never produced (SQLite arm), no reconnection concept (reconnect-wake/watcher rows absent from mem's per-engine column), receiver close at engine drop, wake coalescing N/A; (4) `MemStore::new()` engine-native constructor — the one documented exception to the open-prose, core-contract.md Store concept amended; shared-instance (two opens → one engine) rejected with the ADR-016 §4-style re-entry gate (consumer-inventory row), register stays closed; (5) wasm32 — compile-clean for wasm32-unknown-unknown plus the suite's mem column green on host under a current-thread runtime flavor are wave-6 acceptance items; on-target suite execution scoped out with a named collapse condition (wasm-bindgen-test adapter crate) — a scope decision, not a pending-client hedge; (6) mem is not a core dev-dependency — core's doc examples stay mock-based, ADR-001 §4's doctest posture declines.

engine-mem.md (draft): the in-process mapping — guarded per-mechanism state (no pool, no schema bootstrap, no forwarder, no spawn_blocking seam), the tx overlay (staged *_tx effects merged atomically at commit; read-your-own-writes easy, drop-=-rollback trivial; wake-at-commit structural — the seam pg needed pg-fix-tx-wake for, mem pins from birth via the existing tx-commit-atomicity rows), ADR-012 §2 third owner of the curve/opts/@every arithmetic (three-way equivalence, ADR-022's StoreFactory reused verbatim — born pinned).

deployment.md: host-semantics row (single-process, ephemeral, never fleet-valid, wasm32-clean), mem connection-budget subsection (none — nothing to budget), durability-knobs row (the honest row is the absence), toolchain row (wasm32 subset + current-thread-clean, acceptance-cited). README/overview: engine-mem.md row, ADR-024 row, family table entry (alkstore-mem, no driver deps), current-state updated to the implementation phase with engine specs' stable statuses reflected.

implementation.md: wave table gains wave 6 (mem engine, depends waves 1 + 5) and renumbers release readiness to wave 7 (fuzzing decision — the one remaining decided-at-implementation deferral — rides wave 7); wave-6 section records the born-pinned posture, acceptance items, the one suite-harness pre-task (past_stamp_sleep blocking sleep → async sleep, review 003's properties.rs:1683 note), and the window riders (review 003 Finding 1: the pg transient-fault seam, MEDIUM, rides wave 6; Findings 2–3 follow their park into wave 7's pre-release); wave-6 review gate defined; Decided points updated (mem discharged, fuzzing renumbered); stale wave-6 references swept across review docs and the landed tasks' notes (release-readiness items renumbered or annotated).

Docs-only change; verified by cross-reference audit (all ADR/OQ/anchor references resolve, residual wave-6 mentions are correct under the new numbering or carry dated annotations).

docs/architecture/core-contract.md

@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 ---
 status: draft
-last_updated: 2026-10-08 (ADR-023 — fourth review round: numeric-argument domains pinned by kind, encode_payload typed, plain-path SQLite open, watcher cadence posture)
+last_updated: 2026-10-10 (ADR-024 — the mem engine joins the family;
+the Store concept prose admits the engine-native constructor
+exception)
 ---
 
 # Core contract
@@ -37,7 +39,11 @@ descriptor; the
 - **Store** — what a consumer opens from a connection string or file
   path ([ADR-001](decisions/001-crate-split.md)): one handle, the engine
   behind it chosen at open time. Consumer code never branches on
-  engine type (guiding principle 4).
+  engine type (guiding principle 4). (The mem engine is the one
+  documented exception to the open-prose: its constructor is
+  engine-native — `MemStore::new()`, no connection string — per
+  [ADR-024](decisions/024-mem-engine.md) §4; the engine choice
+  remains a dependency-graph fact made before any `Store` exists.)
 - **Mechanism** — one of the surface's coordination families: notify,
   streams, queues (+outbox), locks, scheduler. Delivery guarantees are
   pinned per mechanism in [ADR-006](decisions/006-wake-and-delivery-contract.md)'s