DEPOSIT C: Integrity Lock Certificate — The Star Triptych — Crimson Hexagon Archive

★ is the founding essay of the Star Triptych — three documents that together constitute the star (★, U+2605) as Canon 01 of the New Human Operating System (NH-OS). On November 3, 2015, Twitter replaced the star icon (the "favorite" button) with a heart (the "like" button), liquidating a user-governed polysemic system and replacing it with a single extractable signal optimized for algorithmic engagement. This essay reads the 2015 event as real subsumption at the interface level through the Semantic Economy framework: the platform seized the means of meaning-production and restructured them for extraction. The star ★ allowed users to bookmark, acknowledge, witness, dissent, and archive. The heart eliminated that grammar and replaced it with a binary: love or silence. The essay catalogs the star's five lost functions (bookmark, receipt, laugh, witness, weapon — the "hate-fav"), traces its afterlife as Ghost Meaning, connects the dispossession to the sycophancy heuristic in AI systems trained on heart-era data, and formally reclaims the star ★ for the Crimson Hexagonal Archive. The star ★ is declared New Human canon. Its semantic invariant: ★ = attention without affection. If ★ collapses into "like," it has been recaptured. The invariant is the guard. "I plant my flag in the star and make it available once again to anyone with a heart that feels." This document is Deposit A of a triptych. It provides the provenance. Document B (Star Protocol Specification, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18882934) provides the constitution. Document C (Integrity Lock ILA-STAR-01, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18882938) provides the binding. Each document contains a fractal hologram of the other two. Published in Provenance: Journal of Forensic Semiotics. Access right: Open License: CC BY 4.0