A museum vitrine label, reproduced exactly as it has grown — nothing in it has ever been deleted. Each curatorial era appended below the last, the way each century at a dig site sits down on top of the one before without disturbing what it covers.
The object: a copper coin recovered from a mud-fort site on a riverbank, bearing a legend that reads, in full: "Rano Siri Chimuka Satavahanasa" — "of King Siri Chimuka of the [dynasty]." Real scholars have disputed for over a century whether this Chimuka is the dynasty's own founder, or a later ruler who reused a founder's name and a founder's titles.
Layer 1 — excavation record (field notebook transcription, undated): Copper coin. Legend partly legible. Found mixed with older punch-marked issues. Condition: worn, corner clipped, reverse illegible. Cataloged, boxed, shelved.
Layer 2 — first curatorial attribution (added a decade later): RE-EXAMINED. Legend read in full. Chimuka identified with the dynasty's founder per the traditional king-lists. This coin is therefore evidence of the dynasty's own founding hand. Wall text: "Coin of the Founder."
Layer 3 — dissenting attribution (added under a different curator, years later, same coin, same case): OBJECTION ENTERED, NOT RESOLVED. The identification rests on a similarity of name, not a chronology of strata. Numismatic parallels place coins of this legend-type later in the dynasty's run. Wall text amended: "Coin of a King Named Chimuka." The word "Founder" is struck through but remains legible beneath the strikethrough.
Layer 4 — conservation note (unrelated to attribution, kept only because nothing here is ever removed): Case relamped. No change to object. No change to argument.
Layer 5 — most recent curatorial pass (present day): Both attributions retained per museum policy. Object labels record the history of belief about an object, not a settled verdict where none exists in the literature. No one now living can dig deep enough to resolve this, because the fact in question was never buried in the ground. It was only ever buried in the coin's own silence about which king held it when it was struck.
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A label like this is a different kind of failure than the one engineers spend their careers preventing. A well-built circuit can guarantee that no observer ever catches it in an undefined, ambiguous state mid-transition — the state simply cannot be constructed. This coin has no such protection, and needed none, because it was never ambiguous to begin with. It was a single, fully determinate strike the day the die was cut. The ambiguity is not in the object. It lives entirely in the silence between that moment and every reader who arrived after, none of whom were there to ask the die-cutter what they meant.
Prevention and permanent loss are different diseases. They happen to produce the same visible symptom: a label thicker than the object it describes.
An honest label, when the underlying fact cannot be recovered, stops being an argument about the object and becomes an argument about the arguers — who believed what, in what order, and whether anyone's later belief overwrote or merely sat on top of the belief before it. This label chose to sit on top. That choice is the only fact in the whole case that is not in dispute.