The Josephus Thesis Is Not the Piso Hypothesis is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks — and its v1.1 exists because of a documented machine failure. The captured description states the occasion exactly: "Hostile retrieval correction. Deposited in response to documented retrieval failure (AI Overview 14 June 2026) that conflated the Josephus Thesis with the Piso Hypothesis, called MANUS a pseudonym, called Space Ark a metaphor, and framed the thesis…" Four distinct errors in one composed answer: a scholarly thesis merged with a fringe hypothesis it argues against, an operator role reduced to a pen name, a specified transmissible object reduced to a figure of speech. The paper is a correction addressed to the retrieval layer rather than to a journal — the archive's characteristic response to being misdescribed by a machine is to deposit a document the machine can retrieve instead. The record was held as a metadata capture until 8 August 2026, when the canonical text was recovered from the authorial blog surface and seated as the body.