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The Observer's Position
Where an observation was taken from is part of the answer. A projection that does not know where it stands publishes its own location as the state of the system.
A measured case
One day, the operator queue showed five blocking problems: critical components were "broken," storage was "missing." None of them was about the system. The command had been run from an administrative machine, while the projection assumed it was on the control node-so it asked the local system about services elsewhere, failed to find them, and published "broken."
The cause was a single line: "where we are" was calculated as "where the center lives" rather than "where we actually are." All five alerts disappeared as soon as the projection learned its own position.
The rule
Every state snapshot carries a "captured from" field. Every "unset" is relative to that position: invisible from here does not mean nonexistent, much less broken.
A component invisible from its own node is still an alert. A component invisible from another node is an honest "unset." The difference between those two sentences is the entire rule.
The rule has a price, and we pay it visibly: one test of the vantage detector deliberately stays red today - it cannot tell an archive on the same machine from a live node. It was neither painted green nor deleted: a recorded limit is more honest than a removed signal.