Quoted By:
"Some rules are unwritten," you shrug, "but just as important and necessary."
"Such as?"
"Such as don't f- mess with another person's ability to make money. Don't go after their family. Don't go after their home."
"So this was about revenge. For ransacking your home."
"It would be a lie to say it wasn't," you shrug. "But that was only part of it. Are you familiar with the concept of a cascade failure? It's an engineering term, mostly: it refers to an event in which a failure of a single part of an interconnected system results in failures in adjacent parts, which in turn leads to more failures, and more, until the entire system collapses. Which is generally seen as an undesirable outcome. So there is a lot of thought and effort placed into installing sensors, safeties, redundancies. maintaining safety margins, performing regular maintenance and so on. And often that is enough, but every now and then it's not. Because the people with decision-making power are rarely engineers and see safety margins as wasted capacity. Because a sentimental idiot exploits a legal loophole to refuse entry to maintenance crews. Because a political schism from six decades ago also created an infrastructural rift that has finally caught up. Because a freak chemical spill cuts off a critical connection at just the wrong time. Because someone's pet project got rushed through the testing phase and didn't account for different power loads during alternate system states," you shrug again, with a sigh. "Sometimes all these problems simply happen all at once, overburdening the system beyond its capacity to absorb any individual issue or mistake. And that's when you get a cascade failure."
"That is all very fascinating," the Marchioness gives you a polite smile. "But I don't quite see how that's relevant to the topic at hand."
"Societies are interconnected systems. Incredibly complex, incredibly fragile. At least until they've been around long enough to develop their own safeguards and redundancies - the unwritten rules that account for what written law cannot cover - the grease of the social contract that makes everything function smoothly. That ensures people feel safe and secure among their neighbors, that they know where they stand with one another," you chuckle softly. "But sapients are sapients, and sapients will always seek to push boundaries. They will ignore rules for the sake of personal gain, not caring for the grit this introduces into the grease, or the stress this puts on the system. And one person, two people, ten people, a hundred doing so might be fine. But what if a hundred and one is too much?"
(cont)
