A Topological-Winding Memory Signed Multilevel Storage in Chiral Spin Textures, with Upgradeable Multimodal Readout, Intrinsic Radiation-Hardness, and Tamper-Response

Preprint — not peer reviewed. A design proposal and analysis, not a demonstrated device.

Charge-based memory stores a bit as electrons on a gate — a representation that is volatile, radiation-soft, and read-destructively coupled to its medium. This paper describes a memory in which the stored quantity is instead a topological winding: the signed, quantized invariant of a chiral spin texture (such as a magnetic skyrmion). The single change in representation is argued to yield four advantages: (1) a signed, multilevel symbol, where chirality gives a free sign bit and skyrmion "bags" extend the alphabet; (2) single-material multi-tier retention set by one Arrhenius barrier, spanning a self-erasing buffer to a centuries-stable archive; (3) reader-decoupled ("gramophone") storage, where the geometric record can be read by independent probes (optical, X-ray, RF, acoustic) and reads stay upgradeable indefinitely; and (4) intrinsic radiation-hardness with tamper-responsive security, in which an invasive read physically anneals the secret it reaches for.

The contribution is the cross-disciplinary architecture and a falsifiable test set, not a verdict on any single domain's physics. Results are analytic or simulation-based; no physical cell has been fabricated. The paper includes an honest benchmark against flash/DRAM/MRAM/ReRAM, a materials screen of candidate substrates with engineering recipes, and explicit conditions under which each claim fails. Companion to "Turtles, or Crystals" (Schulz, 2026) and to the artificial-life paper - "Topological Linking-Number Heredity in a Crystalline Substrate, and the Open-Ended-Evolution Wall" (Schulz, 2026)