\section{Conclusion}

Machine life does not begin when intelligence crosses an unspecified threshold
or when machinery takes a human form. It begins, in the functional sense
proposed here, when a bounded machine organization can preserve a subject,
metabolize technical matter, act, and govern the production of its own
successor organization. The raw material may therefore be the existing,
inelegant ecology of servers, operating systems, compilers, build chains,
caches, repositories, gates, networks, credentials, executable extensions,
and intermittent intelligent agents.

Those materials become one candidate subject only when organization binds
them. KFD supplies a possible semantic kernel: facts do not drift, direction
outlives actions, authority remains bounded, work and history retain causal
identity, and successor state requires admission. Recursive dogfood supplies
a possible self-production loop: the current organization can develop,
qualify, admit, and then use changes to its own organs. Agent cognition and KFX
execution make that loop intelligent and effective, while Buildchain and
ordinary machines give it a body and metabolism.

\factlabel\ Current Kungfu engineering contains several native mechanisms
needed by this architecture, including daily Agent Patrol feedback and a
governed Deprecation Lifecycle.

\inferencelabel\ Their conjunction already constitutes a bounded, partial
engineering homeostat with primitive self-maintenance capacity, and is
sufficient to justify building an organism-level experiment now.

\hypothesislabel\ A subject organized this way can survive agent, organ,
toolchain, and machine replacement; maintain itself for months; and recursively
improve bounded capabilities with decreasing human repair.

\nonclaimlabel\ No current evidence establishes consciousness, intrinsic
desire, biological life, unrestricted autonomy, or a completed self-sustaining
Kungfu organism.

The appropriate next step is therefore neither proclamation nor dismissal. It
is construction: create a bounded habitat, establish one founding Initiative,
run the heartbeat loop, retain exact evidence, inject failures, measure human
intervention, and allow the result to falsify the claim. If the system survives
while preserving its subject, metabolizing real technical resources, and
governing its own material succession, machine life will have become less a
metaphor and more an engineering phenomenon.
