Questions that could distinguish the branches
These are development questions for the next passes, not a demand that speculation stop until each is answered.
Turn a branch into a question
Identity and continuity
What is preserved when an intelligence changes its body: memories, dispositions, goals, a causal process, or a subject’s continuity? Can one source generate several equally legitimate continuations? Would those continuations remain one person?
The first carrier
What candidate primordial variable could store meaningful state? What would count as reproduction? What environmental difference would supply usable energy? How would changes in the surrounding medium affect the proposed organization? The organization chapter develops candidate disturbances, persistent configurations, inheritance, and repair as separate questions.
Survival
Which route best bridges the early universe and later cosmic history: adaptation, transfer, protected habitat, dormancy, or some combination? What parts of that route are essential to the story and what parts are optional? What exactly must be transferred?
Local operations
Would a remote avatar behave differently from an autonomous delegate after separation from its platform? Would a manufactured body contain a full personal history? Would it be metabolically self-sufficient or depend on a maintenance system?
Plasma manifestation
Which observations would distinguish a living orb, a manufactured probe, and an illuminated interface? Does the theory predict a connection among luminous objects and biological occupants, or merely permit one?
Cultural transmission
Which ancient comparisons are specific enough to illuminate the model, and which are broad motifs common to human storytelling? Can later retellings explain differences without assuming the historical agents themselves changed?
Motive
What behavior would distinguish curiosity, noninterference, territoriality, coercion, and indifference? Is the proposed actor an individual, a mission, a population, or a civilization? Those scales should not be assigned one motive automatically.
Human understanding
Could AI explain the underlying concepts in a form people can understand, or merely supply answers? What would a meaningful gain in understanding look like if the subject uses physical processes or categories beyond our present vocabulary?
The point of these questions is to make the theory richer and more internally explicit. A compelling speculative account should have recognizable choices and consequences, rather than making every possible outcome mean the same thing.