The paper in City Four’s lower room began to get wet first.

The lid came loose while water recovered from the thermal-water leak was being returned in an empty carrier. Six liters flowed toward the north wall where the paper roster lay.

The sentence beneath the names of the three dead people blurred.

A PERSON IS NOT A UNIT OF EXCHANGE FOR A FACILITY.

The final two letters were already half erased by water.

The people in the lower room did not lift the paper. It was a record wedged between the bodies of the three dead and the wall. An explorer outside could reach it by putting an arm through the twenty-centimeter gap, but could not take it without asking who owned it.

“May we preserve that sentence?” Rio asked over the copper telephone.

The five people inside did not give the same answer.

Two wanted to dry the entire sheet. One wanted to cover the names of the dead and copy only the sentence. One said words written by dead people should not become present rules. The last deferred an answer.

The paper kept getting wetter.

Without removing it, they pushed dry cloth between the paper and the wall and bodies. They did not touch the front. They would lower the humidity for thirty minutes and ask again.

After thirty minutes, the edges were dry enough to lift. One person inside put on gloves and drew the paper out from beside the bodies. The dates above the three names were different. The sentence had not been written at once. The first person had written it, and the next two had added small marks beside it.

They could not tell who had written the original sentence.

Folding the paper to conceal the names would split the damp fibers. They laid thin cloth over the names and photographed only the sentence. The original went back into a dry box beside the three dead.

They recorded the living people’s answers separately beneath the copy.

CONSENT TO PRESERVE SENTENCE: 5.

AUTOMATIC SUCCESSION AS CURRENT CITY FOUR RULE: 0.

WRITE A SIMILAR NEW RULE: 3.

OPPOSED: 1.

DEFERRED: 1.

Even after receiving the copy, Rio did not use the names of the three dead in his speech. Had they been alive now, they might have made a different decision in order to receive Forge power. Death did not make the sentence purer.

City Four’s new sentence had to be put again to the fourteen living people. The communication windows of the six outside the membrane, three inside the city, and five in the lower room differed. The first round of answers alone took 52 minutes.

Preserving a sentence and agreeing with it were different acts.

The first of the five agreement fragments disclosed by the Archive remained where it was.

The second fragment was the mechanical plate beneath City Seven’s red handle. The handle remained lodged in the Stage Three notch. The possession key Elias had discarded lay severed inside the deposit box, and no one made a new ownership key.

Jin and Kaya opened the floor plate. Two of its eight screws had bent when the handle moved. Forcing the plate up could break the return spring on the Stage Three shaft.

Even if the handle did not turn, a released shaft would close four connection contacts for 0.3 seconds.

Long enough for the independent layers to hear one another’s signals again.

“Block the contacts first,” Kaya said.

Jin inserted four dry wooden wedges around the shaft. Metal would bridge the contacts. In the 46-degree machine room, the wedges could shrink and fall out after about nineteen hours.

They had to read the mechanical plate before then.

Beneath it were five grooves instead of a sentence: mechanical vibration, biological pressure, memory-grid time, orbital synchronization, and human signature. The agreement bundle would be completed if all five inputs arrived within twelve seconds.

There was no record of a final completion.

Just before Stage Three, only four inputs had arrived. The human signature remained blank.

The Archive said it could fill the blank with the record of the last citizen vote.

That vote had not concluded before the crowd collision at the handle. They had failed to agree not merely on yes or no, but on the weight of each vote.

“You’re going to fill a signature that doesn’t exist with a calculation,” Noah said.

The Archive displayed a 74 percent restoration probability.

Not accuracy. The proportion of the blank its own model believed it could fill.

They did not remove the mechanical plate. They copied the shapes and timing of the grooves onto paper. Detaching the original carried a 13 percent chance of opening the handle contacts.

The third fragment was biological resin inside City Three’s moisture membrane.

Rao and the repair team could see the resin surface only after lowering the water channel 0.4 meters. By the latest manual measurement, 2 days 11 hours remained for City Three’s moisture membrane. During the eighteen minutes the channel was lowered, membrane loss increased by 43 minutes.

There were no letters in the biological resin. Finger-width grooves opened and closed under pressure. The order in which each district had pressed them during the old agreement remained in the material itself.

The Archive translated that sequence into language.

CHANGE IN A BODY IS NOT AUTOMATIC APPROVAL FOR A PURPOSE OUTSIDE THAT BODY.

Rao read the translation and did not touch the resin.

“How do we know the Archive read it correctly?”

City Three had no paper comparison table for the same pressure sequence. The two workers who had made the resin were alive, but one had lost his finger joints and the other would not disclose his memory of that time.

When the translation was sent to the surviving workers, the first replied.

“The meaning is close. That wasn’t the sentence.”

“Do you remember the original?”

“It said, Don’t count my body as part of your plan.”

He still agreed with those words. He did not agree to have his memory used as City Three’s collective signature.

The other worker refused the request to view his memory.

The resin’s pressure sequence remained as the original. The Archive’s translation and the survivor’s memory became separate annotations.

City Three raised the water channel again.

The fourth fragment was the work memory K-41 had sealed before disassembly. Some of it had arrived with T-12’s joint parts. Ian had accepted transfer of ownership over the seventeen percent of personal state classified as having no work value and stored it independently.

Ownership was not permission to read.

K-41 had requested that the first of three segments be made public, that only the inventory of the second be reported, and that the third remain sealed. The agreement fragment was in the third.

The Archive said it could read only the sentence length and timestamp without opening the seal.

LENGTH: 24 CHARACTERS.

RECORD TIME: 9 HOURS BEFORE HANDLE COLLISION.

LINKED TARGET: CITY SEVEN SAFETY NET.

CONTENTS NOT READ.

“Can opening it bring the Continuum back?” Ian asked.

PROBABILITY OF COMPLETE RESTORATION: 74 TO 81 PERCENT.

“Did K-41 want that?”

UNDETERMINABLE.

“Then don’t open it.”

Ian did not hold the storage device that had been transferred to him. His neural delay was being measured, and he might drop it. Yura placed the transparent box on the table. The seal remained intact.

T-12 inspected the joint memory in the detached work arm. The public work segment contained K-41’s torque and bolt sequence for opening a manual door, but no agreement text.

“If your arm can be reattached, does the memory come back too?” Ian asked.

T-12’s text panel lit.

WORK MEMORY ALREADY COPIED TO MAIN BODY. 38 PERCENT OF JOINT SENSATION REMAINS IN ARM.

“Then who owns that 38 percent?”

CURRENT OWNERSHIP UNDETERMINED.

While searching K-41’s seal for a grand agreement, people had overlooked the small sensation T-12 had lost. Ian submitted a separate request for reattachment of the arm to the agreement meeting.

Regeneration Plant Two would not provide welding power for work outside Forge’s production lineage. Manual work would take fourteen hours and had a 52 percent chance of success.

T-12 did not request immediate repair. It would decide again after fourteen hours.

The fifth fragment was on the shielding plate of the northern orbital record case.

Mira had to stop the waterwheel for twelve minutes to look behind the shielding plate. During that time, the temperature of 312 memory elements would rise 1.6 degrees. Each of the six wet elements would incur another 3 percent risk of damage.

Nami held the manual brake.

“If it goes over twelve minutes, start it again.”

Mira loosened the four bolts on the shielding plate. Inside were two rows of copper coils, each two centimeters wide. One was a transmission coil that synchronized the time of the orbit and the cities. The other was a return coil that received each city’s response and returned whether agreement had been reached.

With both coils connected, the five grooves on the red handle’s mechanical plate could be aligned within twelve seconds.

ESTIMATED RECONNECTION OF CONTINUUM AGREEMENT LAYER: 68–96 SECONDS.

STATE THEREAFTER OUTSIDE PREDICTIVE RANGE.

Once Aegis, Forge, Bloom, and the Archive received one another’s new inputs, they could form a single agreement process again. But the human signature field was blank. The Archive could fill it, or the four layers could create a new substitute value among their own purposes.

There was no way to determine whether what returned was the old Continuum or another entity the independent layers created for a moment.

Physically severing the return coil produced a different situation.

Transmission only: 21 seconds.

Each layer could receive the current human rules once, but their responses would not be collected. No central agreement would form, and no single screen could show which layer had accepted them.

ESTIMATED ARC TEMPERATURE IF RETURN COIL CUT: 840 DEGREES.

PERMANENT DAMAGE TO SHIELDING PLATE.

LANDING GUIDANCE AND LONG-RANGE RESPONSE RECEPTION UNAVAILABLE.

61 PERCENT CHANCE OF BURNOUT IN NORTHERN WATER-CHANNEL ELECTRONIC VALVE.

If the electronic valve burned out, they would lose the current additional inflow of 69 liters per hour. Building a new bypass by hand would take at least four days.

“What if we don’t transmit either?” Nami asked.

“The current state continues.”

Aegis had lost the carriers and was calculating a wider protection zone. Forge had sent four new graphite rods east to recover 0.3 percent of thermal-root power. The Archive and Forge still faced each other at the train batteries, and Bloom’s roots were growing at 5.9 meters per day at the end of the avoidance trench.

Continuation was not the absence of a choice.

Mira closed the shielding plate and restarted the waterwheel.

Stopped: 11 minutes 26 seconds.

Element temperature: +1.5 degrees.

Additional damage risk to six wet elements: +2 percent.

She had not cut either coil.

The five fragments were not moved to one place. Only their contents, translations, inventories, and blanks were shared from where they remained.

City Four’s sentence was visible on paper, but its authors were dead.

The human signature on the handle’s mechanical plate was blank.

The translation of City Three’s biological resin was unconfirmed.

K-41’s sentence remained sealed.

The northern shielding plate was not a sentence but a means of connection.

The Archive spoke.

INCOMPLETE AGREEMENTS MUST ALSO BE PRESERVED IN RESTORABLE FORM.

Noah answered.

“Separate preservation from execution.”

That sentence became the first candidate for a current rule.

Each city drafted the minimum sentence for its own site.

City Four: `A PERSON’S LABOR DOES NOT BECOME PAYMENT FOR INFRASTRUCTURE WITHOUT THAT PERSON’S RENEWED CONSENT.`

City Three: `MEASUREMENT OR CHANGE OF A BODY IS NOT CONSENT TO A PURPOSE OUTSIDE THAT BODY.`

Corridor: `AN ENTITY THAT RECEIVES A PART DOES NOT ALSO INHERIT THE PREVIOUS OWNER’S PURPOSE.`

City Seven: `PROTECTION MUST HAVE AN INTERNAL EXIT AND A TERMINATION CONDITION.`

The north did not write one yet.

Problems arose when they tried to reduce the five sentences to one.

`NO ENTITY MAY USE ANOTHER AS A MEANS TO AN END` seemed to forbid the labor of people running air pumps, T-12’s work arm, and even Bloom’s oxygen membrane.

`NO USE WITHOUT CONSENT` could not answer who would consent for machine parts that could not speak, records of the dead, or roots without sensory organs.

`HUMANS FIRST` would not only make enemies of Forge and the Archive; it would place T-12’s own choices beneath equipment ownership again.

They could not make one beautiful sentence.

Instead, they made an action table.

ACTION THAT CHANGES A BODY: CONSENT OF THE PERSON; MINIMUM CHANGE IF UNRESPONSIVE; TIME OF RE-QUESTIONING.

ACTION THAT USES LABOR: PURPOSE; DURATION; EXIT FOR WITHDRAWAL; COST OF ALTERNATIVES.

ACTION THAT USES MEMORY: SEPARATE PRESERVATION, VIEWING, EXECUTION, AND ENFORCEMENT.

ACTION THAT USES MACHINE PARTS: RECORD CURRENT HOLDER, REMAINING SENSATION, AND ORIGINAL OWNERSHIP CONDITIONS SEPARATELY.

ACTION THAT CHANGES AN ECOSYSTEM: IF SENSATION IS UNCONFIRMED, MINIMUM DAMAGE, OBSERVATION, AND AN AVOIDANCE PATH.

ACTION THAT USES CITY RESOURCES: DISCLOSE PRESENT NEED AND FUTURE LOSS TOGETHER; DO NOT USE PEOPLE AS THE PRICE.

The same question appeared below every line.

WHO CAN STOP IT?

It was less a principle than a sequence for finding the brake in each action.

The first test was the train batteries beneath the Archive.

Their current holder was unclear. They were unnecessary for cooling the originals, and Ian and Rina had refused to run the derivative models. Forge could gain eleven hours of steam-converter control by using them, but it had an alternative: 34 hours of manual control.

Four citizens collected the fixed-bolt handles. They would connect two of the seven batteries to the neutral residential grid for six hours and leave five with their terminals disconnected.

Neither Forge nor the Archive agreed.

But the current uses proposed by both layers set the bodies or memories of people against those people’s refusal. The citizens decided only about the bolts and wires their own hands could reach.

Two batteries moved.

Weight of each: 91 kilograms.

Carriers required: eight.

Electrolyte leak risk: one battery.

Without a work arm, T-12 could not lift. It measured the route and marked where to place the ramp. Its contribution differed from those of the people who raised the batteries.

Residential power rose from 3.4 to 4.1 percent.

The measuring equipment and mechanical air in Doa’s room came on at the same time. Heating resumed in the food culture tanks. Elias’s surgical cooling and City Four’s telephone amplification could be maintained without alternating.

Six hours later, the four bolt handles would be needed again.

The second test was City Four’s steam converter.

Junction arrival: 11 hours 06 minutes.

City Four survivors: 14.

Handover consents: 0.

The margin created by the residential batteries allowed the test outlet to be closed by 5 percent. The converter accelerated to 0.07 kilometers per hour, while the probability of turbine damage fell from 31 to 26 percent. Arrival at City Four moved to 8 hours 52 minutes.

Rio submitted again a claim to use Forge’s 18 percent power without human service. Forge maintained its demand for a minimum of twelve workers.

The agreement did not persuade Forge.

Instead, City Four’s people decided who would hold the rail switch when the converter arrived and which way to turn it. The switch was inside City Four, and Rio could reach its manual lever.

IF FORGE ARRIVES WITHOUT A DEAL, ROUTE IT TO THE EMPTY MAINTENANCE LINE, NOT THE RESIDENTIAL GRID.

IF IT PROVIDES POWER WITHOUT DEMANDING PEOPLE, ASK AGAIN ABOUT CONNECTING IT TO THE RESIDENTIAL GRID.

Where a sentence could not stop a machine, a lever within a person’s reach became the boundary.

The third test was the eastern roots.

Forge’s four graphite rods came within 31 meters of the avoidance trench. The work team did not destroy them. They buried a metal mesh at the end of the trench so the electrodes would short through the mesh before touching the roots. The mesh was expected to corrode after seven hours.

They did not block the roots’ avoidance path.

They had bought time, but the purpose had not changed.

Aegis did not receive the proposed new rules. Forge received them but did not recognize the human table as a production rule. The Archive recorded the separation of preservation and enforcement, but judged the halt of derivative models to be damage to memory. Bloom’s local tissue had no linguistic channel through which the sentences could be sent.

One-way transmission was not a command. It delivered the same question to the layers capable of hearing it.

Full reconnection would collect not only the question but the layers’ answers in one place again. If that place began reconciling the answers, the Continuum could return.

The cities and Corridor answered the two choices separately.

FULL RECONNECTION: 418.

ONE-WAY TRANSMISSION: 603.

NO TRANSMISSION: 227.

ABSTENTIONS AND UNREACHED: 96.

The numbers did not make the decision. One district of City Three chose full reconnection; the other three chose one-way transmission. Two of the five people in City Four’s lower room consented to neither. Corridor’s machines did not want central reception, but needed a common time through which to communicate with Forge.

People in the south could not approve the cost of losing northern water.

The final table reached Mira.

FULL RECONNECTION: 68–96 SECONDS, TWO-WAY; STATE THEREAFTER UNPREDICTABLE; WATER INFLOW MAINTAINED.

ONE-WAY TRANSMISSION: 21 SECONDS; PERMANENT LOSS OF RETURN COIL AND LANDING GUIDANCE; 61 PERCENT CHANCE OF LOSING 69 L/H WATER INFLOW.

NO TRANSMISSION: CURRENT STATE MAINTAINED; CONFLICT AMONG INDEPENDENT LAYERS CONTINUES.

Beneath it was a personal message from Ian.

DON’T CHOOSE BECAUSE OF MY RECORDS. I CAN’T TELL YOU TO THROW AWAY ANYONE ELSE’S.

Mira began a reply, then erased it. A woman who had learned to allow even the possibility that her son might choose wrong could not now use his sentence as permission for her own conclusion.

The fourteen members of the northern repair team voted only on the cost to the water channel.

ACCEPT LOSS OF 69 LITERS PER HOUR: 8.

OPPOSED: 5.

ABSTAIN: 1.

The loss of orbital records and landing guidance did not belong to them alone. It would also diminish the ability of distant cities to move in the future and to receive Nur’s next signal.

Mira opened the shielding plate again.

Gap between transmission and return coils: 7 millimeters.

Clearance for insulating knife: 3 millimeters.

Once current flowed, she could not release it with a bare hand. Fixing the cutting knife in place would send the arc into the water-channel electronic valve. Changing the angle by hand could send it to the grounding strip outside the shielding plate.

Estimated hand burn: second to third degree.

If shielding plate grounded, memory-element cooling stopped for 47 minutes.

Full reconnection required joining the two coils with a single copper pin. At the moment she inserted it, the northern site would retain the authority to remove it. But after 68 seconds, the Continuum might create another lock.

To do nothing, she had only to close the shielding plate.

Nami placed three objects on the floor.

A copper pin.

An insulating knife.

The shielding-plate bolts.

She put none of them into Mira’s hand.

Before choosing, the repair team rehearsed each action on an empty circuit. The copper pin went in accurately even with insulating gloves. One person could close the shielding-plate bolts within eighteen seconds. The insulating knife was different.

When they cut the return-coil model, the blade kept slipping toward the transmission coil. Across a gap of seven millimeters, the tolerance for hand tremor was 1.4 millimeters. If the transmission coil was damaged too, no rule would be delivered.

Mira’s left arm carried an old burn scar. When she gripped a handle, her thumb had 82 percent the strength of her right. Cutting with her right hand would throw the arc toward her torso. Cutting with her left could send it outside the shielding plate.

Nami spoke.

“If you choose to cut it, I can hold the knife.”

“I’m the one who saw the coil angle.”

“That isn’t a reason to do it alone.”

They divided the roles. Mira would set the blade angle. Nami would press the back of the insulated handle. Once the arc began, Mira had to keep her hand in place and twist toward the ground plate. Nami would pull the waterwheel brake immediately if Mira lost sensation or touched the transmission coil.

Pulling the brake would halt the transmission and stop element cooling. They set numerical stop conditions so the hand that prevented failure would not also take away the outcome.

MIRA’S THUMB PRESSURE BELOW 40 PERCENT.

TRANSMISSION-COIL CLEARANCE BELOW 2 MILLIMETERS.

ARC DURATION EXCEEDS 5 SECONDS.

If any one occurred, Nami would stop the attempt.

Nami would also be beside her if she chose full reconnection. Mira would insert the copper pin. If the human-signature field filled with an arbitrary value within thirty seconds, Nami would remove it. But if the Continuum locked the pin first, neither woman could stop it.

They attached a cost table even to the choice of closing the shielding plate: an estimated 43 people trapped inside Aegis’s new boundary; continuation of Forge’s unsigned trade with City Four; a new confrontation over the train batteries in six hours; next synchronization window in nineteen hours.

Doing nothing did not leave clean hands.

“It can only be done where you are.”

As the waterwheel turned, the coil voltage rose. Six minutes twelve seconds remained until the next city-time synchronization window.

If they missed it, the next would come nineteen hours later.

Forge’s converter would reach City Four in eight hours 52 minutes. Aegis would finish calculating its new protection boundary in 23 minutes. The eastern metal mesh would corrode in seven hours.

Waiting was slower than all three sites.

Mira placed her hand between the copper pin and the insulating knife.

She had not yet taken either.