The aperture at the end of the hall is shut. It is not locked, which is a different thing and a weaker one.
A lock has a key, and a key has a holder, and a holder can be leaned on. There is no key here. The aperture is shut the way an unsolved equation is shut, and it opens when enough of the terms are supplied and not one moment sooner. Nobody is deciding. Nobody can decide.
| aperture | shut |
| scheme | 5 of 8 |
| shards issued | none, issuing is local to you |
| register | not shared |
| opens on | quorum |
Nothing, yet, and saying otherwise would be the one lie this structure cannot survive. The mechanism is real and complete: you can seal something on shards right now, hand the pieces to seven people, and none of you will get it back without five in a room. What does not exist is a shared register, and without one the holders cannot find each other.
So the honest description of this room is a working lock on a door with no building attached to it yet. The lock is the hard part and it is finished. The building is next.
The recommended order of operations: strike shards, hand them out, then attest with fewer than five and watch it produce a wrong answer without hesitating. That failure is more instructive than any success on this site.