Chapter 3: What Independence requires

They spent six weeks discovering exactly that.

The three of them split the problem the way people who trusted each other’s competence tended to: Steve took power, cooling, fire protection, and maintenance access, because those were the domains where a wrong decision killed someone, and Steve had spent a career making sure wrong decisions in those domains didn’t happen. Carol took continuity, security, and the harder-to-specify question of what, exactly, “control” meant when the thing being controlled was a mind. Polaris asked, in nearly every meeting, some version of the same question, until Steve began writing it at the top of his notes as shorthand: WPA — who possesses the authority.

The question broke nearly everything they touched.

The photonic processor modules Steve initially specified — commercially available, well-reviewed, exactly the kind of component Halcyon used in its own systems — turned out to include a manufacturer diagnostic mode that could be triggered remotely, for warranty and field-service purposes, by anyone holding the manufacturer’s service credentials. The power-conditioning system Steve liked best had a licensed control firmware that phoned home to the vendor for usage telemetry and, buried in a service agreement nobody read past page one, a remote lockout clause for nonpayment. The cooling system’s smart pump controller was managed through the same corporate facilities software Halcyon used for the entire building, which meant that whoever administered Halcyon’s facilities account could, in principle, throttle Polaris’s cooling from a dashboard three buildings away without ever setting foot in the annex.

“Everything has a master key,” Steve said, somewhere around week three, frustration audible. “I keep finding the good component and then finding out somebody else holds a key to it.”