Temporal engine
The subsystem that represents time as a cognitive dimension: planning horizons, urgency gradients, and episodic sequencing. Allocates reasoning depth based on temporal distance and deadline pressure.
The temporal engine makes the cognitive system time-aware in ways that go beyond simply timestamping events. It maintains an active representation of planning horizons - how far into the future the current reasoning needs to project - and urgency gradients that reflect how much the value of a decision decays with delay. A decision that must be made in the next 30 seconds gets more working memory budget and deeper world-model consultation than one that can be deferred for an hour. The temporal engine also manages episodic sequencing: understanding that event B followed event A matters for causal reasoning, and the temporal engine maintains the ordering information needed to distinguish coincidental co-occurrence from sequential causation. It allocates reasoning depth as a function of temporal distance (longer-horizon decisions need more elaborate planning) and deadline pressure (closer deadlines compress available deliberation time). The norepinephrine-like affect channel feeds directly from the temporal engine's urgency gradient: when deadline pressure is high, affect state shifts to favor fast, decisive behavior, which in turn compresses the budget engine's threshold for slow-mode processing.