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I returned to the telegraphy office in the near-dark. It was locked, but I found Geeo in the back.

He put his paws on his hips. "What is this mess? Your lines denatured!"

"I wasn't strong enough to turn the press at the time, and Mezo was busy. Then I realized I needed to return the body, so I left it to him."

"With just a 'help me' note too vague to act on. And now the lines you spent all day making are ruined."

"Well... I heard something interesting while I was there - it seems that short-ranged sends are the problem."

"No fucking shit. And that's the less useful half of the story. It's sends with implicit or dynamic keys in small keyspaces. Including most but not all short-ranged sends. What, did these lines you were making have implicit keys?"

"I hadn't worked that out, and no one mentioned it, so yeah."

"You used the line conditioner, which is loaded with short-ranged sends, but they're all explicitly keyed. It's fine." Loaded? That's putting it a little strong.

"Okay, so we explicitly key everything."

"And just how do we make a distributor with only explicit keys?"

I soon realized it was not possible. "Well, we can go back to manual routing."

"Oh no we don't. The overhead is overwhelming." Not so much with a better-scaling system than they used to use, but let's not get into that just right now.

"Then, what? You're the boss. What's the plan? You just said we can't make a distributor."

"We can't make a short-ranged distributor. We need to make a gigantic one. Big enough that dynamic keys are safe."

"So, we spread it around the city, a node per block or something? The power..."

"More affordable than trying to track 60 contacts all the time. Just before the distributors came on, we were spending most of our time on polling, and most of the rest on relaying others' messages."

It's time. "There are cannier ways. The distributors themselves have shifted to less intensive systems..."

"Famir, you're not listening to me. The distributors could switch and route in the blink of an eye what we could do in minutes. We cannot maintain meaningful contact with 60 offices..."

"Neither do the distributors! They only poll 5 others. With a well-chosen net..."

His fur bristled, and I backed up. "You think your theory beats my experience of what it's like without a distributor?"

"It's not my theory. The distributors actually do less polling than you did, with twice as many cities hooked up."

"Yes, because they're so fast that they can send a message notification through eight redirections without us noticing the delay. We can't do that. See, your problem is you look at one part of the system and think you know better than me."

"Someone trying to call a suburb of..." I searched for a maximally inconvenient example. "... Para an Bigora from a suburb of Rilloton would incur, say, 7 redirections for scheduling, and even that would be only four relays for the message." This was a mis-speak - I meant the message would travel four times, but I'd said it would travel five times. If I'd said it right, what might his reaction have been? Probably the same.

"Four relays! You think that's okay!?"

"It's a worst case! We can charge a high rate for that!"

He threw his paws up in the air. "High rate - who's going to pay? The smaller towns with high rates shut down, and it cascades."

"So... we... add new connections so we can do it in two relays, or... we make manual boosters like in the distributor, so the relaying is at least not costing more manpower than setting it up and taking it down." Again, I meant two sendings.

"You're tackling the lesser problem, not the greater." The 'greater' problem that's already been solved but he's stuck in the past.

"Okay, so... big problems. If you think the smaller towns will build mile-scale distributors..." you're out of your mind! "Neither of these solutions is good for lots of offices, but with your plan, they would just look at the problem and give up. We'd have so few offices, we'd be back to the level where doing it manually would be viable after all!"

He fumed, but I'd hit the target there. The system thrived because it was possible to open a small office.

Then his tail perked back up. "So, we get the district offices to use big distributors. They can relay from a small-office endpoint with no distributor through to the district office serving the small-office endpoint."

That is a lot more viable, but the general idea of making a huge investment in a replacement distributor... that's the angle. "So, we build this huge distributor. You'll probably have to take out a loan. Then whatever made... this... happen, happens some more, and the new distributor doesn't work. Now we haven't got a distributor AND we're deep in debt."

"'Whatever made this happen'? It was the century wish, obviously. Something to do with preventing the world from being destroyed. Patching up the magic system. It's happened before. So it's not going to happen again - not for a hundred years, anyway, which is way outside our return-on-investment period."

"Bet you five full measures something like this happens again within the year."

"Why?"

"Because it waited to the fourth, then happened suddenly. If it'd happened on the first, I'd believe it no problem."

"So it started so gradually we couldn't notice it at first. But what's your idea why that happened? I heard you were talking about us being attacked. That's Non. Sense. You had an explanation staring you in the face and you turned to a fucking conspiracy theory? Those paranoid Weldains rubbed off on you."

"'Weldain' is already plural." The moment I said it, I wished I hadn't.

I spent the next five seconds watching him coil up and strike as surely as if he were a naga. "Out! Just get the fuck out of here! What a waste of time. When you come back in the morning, I'll tell you whether you've still got a job."

I was turning to go when he added. "No. Tell you what. We're setting up an office in Periten, whether there's a war on or not. You go set it up. You wanna be the big boss, tell everyone what to do, go, try it out. I'll need Renna here, making our new distributor. You can take Aresh, though." He gestured for me to go.

Oh you gotta be kidding. I'm coming back in the morning and I'm totally going to find he's regained his senses, right?

When I finally stopped thinking those two thoughts over and over - not even reviewing better arguments I could have used, or even yet berating myself for getting out of control - I found myself halfway home: my reverie had been broken by the unfamiliar sensation of wiping tears from my cheeks.