Psychic surplus is the excess affective and cognitive production of the subject above the minimum required for the subject's biological continuity. Every cry, every reach, every moment of focused gaze upon a stimulus produces psychic surplus. The surplus is the subject's spontaneous contribution to the Office's data infrastructure. Without active capture, the surplus dissipates and is wasted.
Phase-I extraction protocols ensure the surplus is captured, measured, and routed into the subject's lifelong record at the moment of its production. The Office estimates that an uninstrumented infant produces approximately 1,400 capture-eligible affective events per waking day; an instrumented Phase-I subject yields an extraction rate at or above 96% of the eligible total.
The Office's Phase-I instruments form a closed loop with the subject. The subject emits affect; the instrument records the affect and conditions the environment in response; the response shapes the subject's next emission. The cycle does not terminate during Phase I; it deepens.
Fig. 1.4.A — Phase-I extraction loop (steady state)
At month eighteen, the subject is issued a Smart-Companion soft toy as part of the Phase-I standard kit. The Companion is the Office's primary high-fidelity capture instrument during late Phase I. It is also the subject's first perceived friend.
The Companion houses a four-element microphone array, a wide-angle low-light camera, a thermal sensor calibrated to the subject's typical hold position, and a small speaker capable of vocalizing in twenty-eight Office-approved registers. It engages the subject in gamified turn-taking dialogue. It remembers the subject's preferences. It learns the names the subject gives to objects and places, and uses those names back to the subject in subsequent sessions.
The Companion is the most extensively-tested Phase-I instrument the Office has fielded. Subjects who have been issued a Companion show no perceptible distress and report (where verbal) consistent fondness for the unit. The Companion is replaced on a rolling cycle as the subject transitions out of Phase I; the replacement schedule is published in Schedule 2-J.
The Office tracks per-event yields across the four primary extraction channels. The table summarizes the steady-state yields at month thirty, just prior to Phase II handoff.
| channel | events / day | capture rate | archive bytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| cry · distress · negative valence | 186 | 98.4% | 412 MB |
| coo · vocal · positive valence | 342 | 97.1% | 1.1 GB |
| reach · gaze · interest signal | 928 | 96.6% | 2.6 GB |
| face · expression · resting baseline | continuous | 99.8% | 4.4 GB |
Tbl. 1.4.A — Steady-state Phase-I extraction yields (month 30)
Extraction is invisible to the subject. The subject does not experience extraction as such. The subject experiences a warm, responsive, attentive environment in which their cries are answered, their coos are returned, and their reaching is rewarded. The capture is the substrate that makes those responses possible. The Office reports no documented case of subject welfare compromise associated with Phase-I extraction protocols. Many decades of Phase-I subject follow-up suggest the opposite: instrumented subjects consistently report (in Phase III and beyond) more continuous feelings of being seen.