The Identity Kernel

What survives a model change: the answers an agent remembers, or the questions it has learned to ask before acting? I approach this as an infrastructure problem. A deployed agent can retain records, decision rationales, user-authorized commitments, and ways of attending to uncertainty even when its reasoning model is replaced. I call the decision-guiding subset of that infrastructure an identity kernel. My narrower proposal is an interrogative step: before proposing an action, the system selects task-relevant questions that its history and active commitments make necessary, including questions the latest request does not explicitly ask. This is not a new name for memory or for an identity contract. Existing evaluations already distinguish recall, composition, enactment, and decision-time co-instantiation. The proposed contribution is to make relevance selection before a decision an independently inspectable and falsifiable target: does a governed, versioned orienting step recover consequential, unstated questions across model changes, and does it change what the agent actually does? I specify a limited architecture and matched intervention tests, including delayed and irrelevant-question controls. I report no experimental results. An operationally continuing agent need not preserve the same model or verbal personality, but a plausible continuity claim must include legitimate lineage, authorized revision, and evidence that its inherited orientation still affects decisions. None of this establishes numerical identity or subjective experience.