Chapter 637 Rules With a Capital R


    Fleet Admiral Bianchi wasn’t exactly sure he liked the thought of that level of existence being under his command.


    Laifu laughed again. “Don’t worry, Marco. Commander Takahashi is under your command. I... am not. I cannot be, for many reasons, foremost of which is that there are rules by which I MUST operate and things I am strictly forbidden from doing.”


    “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. Chee?ck out latest novels at novelhall.com


    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.


    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.