Persistent-State Activation Beyond Utility: Scale Representation and Evidence for Non-Compensatory Control

Persistent memory creates a control problem that relevance alone does not solve: evidence can remain semantically useful after an update makes it inadmissible for the current answer. We separate utility from authority. A fixed finite penalty on an unnormalized utility scale cannot guarantee exclusion under arbitrary positive-affine reparameterization, while rank-normalized finite compensation is scale-invariant and is therefore the appropriate empirical alternative. Our originally frozen TIDE/LongMemEval primary was quarantined before HELDOUT inference because its operationalizations failed construct/split validity; we do not report that matrix as confirmation. We instead report a post-primary replacement diagnostic on Memora Remembering (Uddin et al., 2026), where deletion/update state supplies item-level forgetting evidence. On Qwen3-8B (Yang et al., 2025), DEV selected λ = 0.6 from a ten-point SOFT family. Across 185 HELDOUT units in 28 dependency clusters, HARD has 4.04% balanced construct error versus 19.66% for locked SOFT; the paired difference is 15.61 points with a 20,000-replicate cluster-bootstrap 95% interval of [13.07, 18.76]. This is forgetting-sensitive answer/admission evidence, not an independent system-harm endpoint or completion of the original six-cell macro. The replacement scorer and utility proxy were finalized during replacement development, so the cell is operator-comparison evidence rather than prospective causal confirmation.