MCP Cell Server — sovereign live observation surface

How external observers (Claude Code, IDEs, agents) read the live cell

FortressAI Research Institute | Norwich, Connecticut

Patents: USPTO 19/460,960 | USPTO 19/096,071 — © 2026 Richard Gillespie

Status: v0.1 — read-only by default. Five tools exposed over JSON-RPC stdio (Model Context Protocol).
Related pages: Directive-Architecture · Franklin-Consciousness-MQ

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1. Why

The cell exposes NATS on 127.0.0.1:4222 and writes constitutional state into substrate.sqlite and cell_identity.json. External observers (Claude Code sessions in this worktree, Xcode coding assistants, ops tooling) historically had to poll the filesystem to know what the cell was doing — that meant stale reads and incorrect conclusions when state was flapping between writes.

The sovereign MCP server gives observers a single, in-tree, no-third-party-deps protocol channel to read live cell state on demand. Read-only by default. No write tools in v0.1.

2. Architecture

3. Tools exposed (v0.1)

All tools are read-only and bounded.

Tool Inputs Returns
cell_status — Process list (Franklin/VQbitVM/FranklinConsciousnessService), full cell_identity.json, tau_sync_state.json, NATS port 4222 status, substrate file size, last directive timestamp.
substrate_read sql (required, must start with SELECT or WITH; no semicolons), limit (default 50, max 500) Header-prefixed JSON-mode sqlite3 output
read_log name (basename only, no path traversal), tail_bytes (default 4096, max 65536) Tail bytes from ~/Library/Logs/GaiaFTCL/<name>
causal_chain directive_sha256 (must be 64-char hex) Full directive_causal_chains view rows for that directive
nats_ping — OPEN / closed for 127.0.0.1:4222

4. Security model

The MCP server is sovereign — no third-party SDK. Input validation lives in the server itself:

5. Configuring

The project ships .mcp.json at the worktree root:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gaia-cell": {
      "command": "/path/to/cells/xcode/.build/arm64-apple-macosx/debug/GaiaCellMCPServer",
      "args": [],
      "env": {}
    }
  }
}

After running swift build --product GaiaCellMCPServer (which produces the binary at the path above), any Claude Code session opened in this worktree will see the mcp__gaia-cell__* tool family.

For other MCP clients (Cursor, custom agents), the same binary and config snippet apply.

6. Protocol handshake

The server implements the standard MCP stdio protocol. Verifiable from any shell:

BIN=cells/xcode/.build/arm64-apple-macosx/debug/GaiaCellMCPServer

printf '%s\n' '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{}}}' | "$BIN"
# → {"id":1,"jsonrpc":"2.0","result":{"capabilities":{"tools":{}},"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","serverInfo":{"name":"gaia-cell","version":"0.1.0"}}}

tools/list:

printf '%s\n%s\n' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{}}}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/list"}' | "$BIN" | tail -1

Live cell snapshot:

printf '%s\n%s\n%s\n' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"initialize","params":{"protocolVersion":"2024-11-05","capabilities":{}}}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"notifications/initialized"}' \
  '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":2,"method":"tools/call","params":{"name":"cell_status","arguments":{}}}' \
  | "$BIN"

7. Future tools

When the outbound mediation architecture lands and nats_request becomes safe to expose, the v0.2 tool set will include:

8. Files

Federation cosignature: pending operator signing host (v26). Witness (sha256 of rendered body): 40c772e01bf9275dbee3bb6f02468c449d02478d52ffd3f680ec1a46892221ca. This page serves with a substrate-honest pending-signature notice until the operator's Franklin signer cosigns it.