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Chapter 637  Rules With a Capital R

“Are you reading my mind?” The admiral’s eyes narrowed.

“No, Marco. I don’t have to read your mind when your worries are written on your face.” Laifu gave him an encouraging smile.

“So what are you forbidden from doing?” he asked, wanting to get an idea of what he could expect once Commander Takahashi was released and under control of her own body again.

“I’m sorry, Marco. I can’t tell you the rules. All laws and rules have... loopholes, shall we say. But trust me, not telling you the rules is the best thing I can do for you.”

“Why is that?”

“Temptation, dear Marco. You would be tempted to find ways around them, and perhaps even succeed.”

“And why would that be bad?” he asked.

Laifu unfolded her feet and drifted over to the viewscreen on the wall of the admiral’s ready room that simulated the view outside the Proxima. “Have you heard of heat death, Marco?” she asked, her voice suddenly grave.

“How does heat death relate to temptation?” he replied.

“Entropy, Marco. Entropy. Every rule the Five labor under is directly aimed at preventing, delaying, reducing, and combating entropy. And entropy is what will eventually lead to the death of everything and the unraveling of the fragile skein of thread that is existence.” She smiled, a bit sadly.

“So you’re saying that, every time you break—” the admiral began, but was interrupted.

“Or bend, Marco. Especially bend. Bending the rules is sometimes, or perhaps even most times, worse than breaking them outright.”

“Okay... so every time you break, or bend, a rule, entropy creeps in?”

“Not exactly, Marco, but close. Entropy does not, by itself, exist. It cannot exist, not on its own. If there is no order, there can never be entropy. Entropy exists because order exists, and the converse is also true. Order exists in order to combat entropy.”

“So it’s like the chicken and the egg argument?”

“Not exactly. More like the ouroboros, or at least what it has come to symbolize.”

“An endless cycle of beginnings and endings?”

“In part, yes, but also so much more. It symbolizes unity and wholeness, self-sufficiency and introspection, infinity and eternity, and most importantly, duality. Order and entropy are a duality and one cannot exist without the other. But they are also eternal foes—and to oppose something is to maintain it.”

“What do you mean by that? Isn’t opposition what eventually triumphs over what it opposes?”

“No, Marco,” Laifu said with a sad shake of her head. “It’s precisely the opposite. The more you oppose something, the more firmly it entrenches itself. Look to your own history for examples. The Civil Rights movement in the United States gave rise to both the Black Panthers and Aryan Nation. The women’s liberation movement led to feminism and men’s rights activism. And with every generation that split into opposing viewpoints, those viewpoints grew further and further entrenched, dividing society along an ever-deepening and widening gap until it was virtually uncrossable.

“But then you formed an empire, and began to heal the various divisions and schisms which plagued your own society. When I look across your grand fleets that you’ve sent out into the vast cosmos, I see men and women of varying identities, ethnic groups, religious beliefs, tribes, communities.... I see many divisions among them, but they are striving to integrate rather than separate. They do not oppose each other, thus the divisions cannot be maintained and the people come together as one.”

“I see. So by seeking not to oppose, but to understand, we naturally come together. But I don’t see how that’s relevant to the topic at hand,” Admiral Bianchi said.

“Because it isn’t very relevant, dear Marco,” Laifu laughed. “We’ve gotten a little bit sidetracked, but the same can apply to order and entropy. Much like matter and antimatter, the two are complete opposites with nothing in common, so the only thing they can do is annihilate each other when they meet.”

“So what you’re saying, then, is that if we break one of the rules that govern your actions, we introduce entropy into our ordered system?”

Laifu turned and a brilliant smile spread across her face. “Exactly! You understand it exactly!”

“And that, simply by knowing the rules, we might try working around them, thus bending them—which is somehow even worse than breaking them?”

“Yes! You get it, dear Marco. You get it!”

“How does that work?”

Laifu was slightly taken aback by the question; she’d assumed that Admiral Bianchi understood what she had spent all this time talking about.

“How can bending a rule ever be worse than breaking it?” he continued, pressing the point.

Laifu took a moment to consider how to get the idea across to the admiral, then finally said, “If you live in a house and a water pipe breaks, how easy is it to spot and seal the point of the break?”

“Very easy,” Admiral Bianchi said. “But how does that apply?”

“And what if that same pipe had, instead of broken, sprung a small leak? How easy would that leak be to find?”

Marco’s eyes flashed with understanding. “I get it. You’re saying that breaking a rule is like breaking a water pipe. It’s easy to seal the breach when you know exactly where it is. But if a rule gets bent, it’s much more subtle and harder to discover. And as you’re looking for it, the leak continues dripping water into the walls. But then, if you know exactly where your pipes are, wouldn’t you know where to look?”

Laifu laughed. “Indeed, Marco. Of course we know where to look! The thing is, when you’re looking for a small leak in a house, that’s only a few hundred meters of pipe to look through. And when you’re looking for a small leak in a house the size of existence itself, the search takes quite a bit more time.”

“And during that time, more and more entropy is allowed through.”

“Exactly! So that’s why we can’t tell you the rules.”

Marco and Laifu continued speaking long into the ship’s night, while the others who had been present at the meeting in the SCIF were also busy working in their own specialties, coming up with a brand new SOP for interacting with the new species about to be born, along with contingency plans and questions that would be asked of Joon-ho in order to further refine the fleet’s response to the new normal.