V21: CTM Inner Ticks

Period: 2026-02-19. Substrate: V20 + K=8 GRU ticks per environment step + sync matrix.

Motivation: V20 broke the wall but a single GRU step per environment step provides zero internal time for decoupled processing.

Architecture: Tick 0 processes observation (external). Ticks 1-7 process sync summary (internal). Evolution controls effective K via softmax tick_weights. 4,040 total params.

Results: Mixed. Ticks don't collapse to tick-0 (P3 pass). But no adaptive deliberation (effective K doesn't covary with scarcity, P1 fail). Evolution too slow to shape tick usage within 30 cycles.

Lesson: Thinking time alone isn't enough — the system needs a learning signal that rewards using that time effectively. Motivates V22.