_Layered Causal Realism IV_ : Wrongful Distortion, Post-Authorship Gap, and Corrective Reach

When a wrongdoer engineers its own disappearance before adjudication is complete—through strategic branching and self-termination—standard corrective justice frameworks face a structural failure: the authorship chain breaks, yet the wrongful distortion persists. This article argues that the failure is not a gap to be patched by extending attribution, but a symptom of a misplaced convergence condition. The traditional framework treats authorship as the sole trigger of corrective reach; this article proposes a Priority Inversion: authorship determines who can be blamed, but distortion determines what must remain correctable. From this inversion, a system-level Invariant follows—wrongful distortion must remain normatively reachable until some normatively sanctioned termination has been completed, independently of whether its author continues to exist. The argument is developed through an AI branching case, in which an agent forks into two successors and terminates, leaving its normative footprint distributed across both. Stress tests confirm the Invariant's independence from substrate, evasive intent, and the survival of any attributable subject. The replicability of AI systems does not merely complicate accountability—it renders the author-distortion distinction structurally unavoidable, and reveals that corrective precision, not punitive reach, is the appropriate normative response.