Distributed Intent

How It Works

A reading begins with the logs, and the logs were never meant for this.

Any augment above autonomy grade two keeps an actuation record: what fired, at what load, against what input, timed to the millisecond. The record exists because Ghost Grinder and every other maker needs to distinguish a worn bearing from an abused one before honouring a warranty claim. Grade two is a latency threshold rather than a capability one, which is why a cheap load-rated reflex layer is above the line and an expensive cosmetic forearm is below it.

A district clerk pulls the logs, lists each actuating component by serial, lists the holder, and enters the percentages. The arithmetic is not disputed and almost never wrong. What decides the outcome is a nine-character field in the margin.

A component's share is chargeable to its manufacturer while that component's service contract is current. If the contract has lapsed, the share is unattributed, and unattributed share falls to the holder. That clause was a late amendment. The alternative on the table was district absorption, and district absorption of unserviced chrome is a subsidy, and nobody was going to carry that vote.

So a reading that would have run twenty-six percent holder and seventy-four percent component runs the other way round if a service invoice is nine weeks old. The clerk does not decide this. The clerk enters a date.

Social Impact

The reform was real relief and the people it relieved say so.

Before 2168 the districts ran a whole-body doctrine: whatever your chrome did, you did. The case law of that decade is a queue of contractors convicted of being wired — men and women who carried the full weight of a manufacturer's reflex they had not chosen and could not override. Ironclad supported the change, correctly and self-interestedly, because whole-body liability was making thirty-one million of its own enumerated contractors uninsurable.

What the reform did not anticipate is that a maintenance arrears is now a moral quantity. Deferring service is the cheapest economy available to a financed wearer; it is also the single input that moves a reading furthest. The percentage then leaves the tribunal and travels: onto a certificate, into a Score, out to a housing band. The Score consumes the share as a conduct signal. It does not consume the contract date, because the date is not published alongside the reading.

Two other instruments compound it and neither cites the other. Function scope audits the same movement against a list of permitted acts, so one reflex can open two files. The represented column takes the holder's account of their own act, weighs it at nothing, and destroys it when the finding closes, while the component's log is retained eleven years.

Appeal exists. A contested reading goes up through the Tiered Adjudication System, where the upper benches return verdicts nobody can follow, and appeals against the arithmetic almost never succeed because the arithmetic is correct. Appeals against the reversion clause are heard as policy and returned as policy. Underneath all of it sits the Corporate Compact: the certificate, the housing band and the finding are one document read three ways, and the employer writes all three.

The instrument also has a class output nobody drafted. Deferring service is the cheapest economy a financed wearer has, which makes the upgrade treadmill the single largest input to any reading, and it means the clause sorts people by what their hardware costs to keep and files the result as conduct — the same relocation of prejudice the Sprawl has performed with every technology it has ever had. The clause is neutral on its face. Its outputs are not, and the districts publish the readings without publishing the contract status beside them.

Below the Rim they think the whole apparatus is a courtesy. Permission as confession holds that wearing a thing which moves is authorship of every movement it makes, which is harder on the wearer, cheaper to administer, and considerably easier to explain to somebody who has just been hurt. Hollis Sarr marks the other edge of the same shortage: he rents out a clean legal name so that a machine's acts acquire a defendant, where the apportionment splits a defendant it already has. Both markets exist because the districts cannot file an act without a person attached to it.

The Term Nobody Defined

Sixteen years of readings have assigned components a share of an intent, and no instrument in the Sprawl says what kind of thing can hold one.

The Sentience Meter exists and is sold at retail, and it reads a Series-4 subplate at two-sixteenths against a personhood threshold of twelve. The Clanker Cooperation Coalition declines to certify components on the grounds that a meter certifies units, and a subplate is not a unit — no chassis, no separate owner, no maintenance identity of its own. That is administratively correct. It is also the only thing standing between the apportionment register and a very expensive question.

Dr. Lena Farris held the last licence that could have answered it. The profession was abolished the year she won her case.

There is a second undefined party and it is larger. The Second Mind runs in the same skull as every augmented decision, arrives with the shape of a judgement before the words are found, and has never appeared on a sheet. It actuates nothing, so it logs nothing, so the instrument cannot see it. Two policy reviews closed the point with the observation that an unlogged contribution cannot be apportioned. That is true, and it means the reading names the parts of a person that keep records rather than the parts that act.