Chapter 187: The Spreadsheet Doesn’t Know What a Person Is

At three in the morning, the enemy occupied three lines on Station 50’s wall.

[MATCHED STRESS-TEST RESULTS]

Legacy Keystone architecture: 0.04% catastrophic failure. Distributed prototype V3: 8.71%.

Integrated distributed prototype V7: 0.83%.

Empty coffee cups covered the table below.

They had brought the figure down from 8.71 to 0.83. It was still more than twenty times the legacy result.

Lucian stared at the display with dark circles under his eyes. “I hate progress.”

Evelyn lay across the drawing table. “Technically accurate.”

“Can we get it down to zero point zero three in the next forty-eight hours?”

She lifted her head.

“Sure. Build a time machine, go back ten thousand years, and punch the chief engineer.”

Lucian considered the suggestion.

“How much would the time machine cost?”

He tilted his head as a brass wrench flew past and struck the titanium wall behind him.

Across the table, Sylvia set down a file.

“Lucian.”

“What?”

“You’ve been doing these calculations for three days. You’re waiting for a number that means you won’t have to choose.”

His fingers stopped tapping.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

He looked at the open ledger. There was no flaw in her statement that another calculation would fix.

Eleanor put a glass of water beside his hand. “What if the number you want never appears?” “Then it’s a bad investment.”

“And then?”

He picked up the glass.

The map behind it showed thousands of settlements, most re-duced to points too small to label.

“Sometimes you still have to invest.”

The System displayed the comparison in terms that were becom-ing harder to avoid.

[NO GLOBALLY DOMINANT SOLUTION IDENTIFIED]

A: Minimize immediate technical risk by permanently binding five peo-ple.

B: Reduce dependence on individuals while accepting distributed oper-ational risk.

Optimization requires an objective and constraints.

The algorithm cannot decide what Host is willing to sacrifice.

[HOST RESPONSE]

Evidently offended by the question.

The 0.83 percent result hadn’t come from Lucian alone.

Sylvia’s 1,284 archives reduced the modeled loss of knowledge. Evelyn’s modules shortened repairs. Dwarven mechanical break-ers allowed isolation when magical controls failed. Eleanor’s twelve-province mandate removed a central command bottleneck.

Those seventeen old relays from Astra’s first test had mattered too. Evelyn had traced their supposedly unknown transfers and recovered working routes they could adapt instead of building every connection from nothing.

Two hours earlier, the Eastern Smiths’ Guild had also submitted a relay design that beat his in the local simulations. Their model included avalanches and actual household demand. His had included beautiful assumptions.

He had read the comparison and typed, Use theirs.

The financial papers had found an uplifting interpretation of this by morning.

VANCE RENOUNCES PROPRIETARY DESIGN TO HONOR LO-CAL INGENUITY!

A reporter caught him on the Tower steps.

“Did you deliberately lose to encourage the next generation of engineers?”

“I lost because their design was better.” The reporter’s eyes shone. “Such humility.” Lucian went back upstairs.

At the original configuration console, he opened the ancient objective file.

[CORE OBJECTIVE CONFIGURATION: PLANETARY_SURVIVAL] PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: MINIMIZE_CATASTROPHIC_SYSTEM_FAILURE

ADDITIONAL HARD CONSTRAINTS: NONE

He read the last word again.

The designers knew people would bear the load. They had written the lock deliberately. What they had left out was any condition that allowed the optimizer to say the price was unacceptable.

Keep civilization alive. Whatever it takes. The program had done exactly that.

Lucian put his hands on the keyboard. “Here’s your problem.”