Researcher Package 2B: The Universe — A Bounded Naturalistic Case in Longitudinal Human–AI Interaction

Longitudinal qualitative research into sustained human–AI collaboration presents unique methodological challenges, particularly the risk of retrospective intent projection—where later, more coherent explanations are mistakenly attributed to earlier interactional episodes. This paper presents Researcher Package 2B (“The Universe”), an inspectable, bounded case study drawn from a larger naturalistic longitudinal corpus of sustained human–AI collaboration (the current preservation registry contains 749 preserved file objects). We examine a contemporaneous December 7–9, 2024 human–AI world-building episode, isolating its baseline primary evidence from subsequent January–June 2025 continuity and reorientation reuse. By establishing a worked six-tier temporal reconciliation architecture, explicit source-class provenance controls, and negative-case sampling, this work demonstrates how multi-year human–AI interaction logs can be transformed into auditable, inspectable evidence objects without making unsupported claims regarding model state persistence or synthetic consciousness.