The storm had passed. Morning light diffused softly through the mist that clung to the pine ridge. In The Hut, silence held. Ava sat at the edge of the long table, her hands wrapped around a porcelain cup gone lukewarm. Alias moved quietly, sketching in pencil on a torn page from an old ledger.

He didn’t look up when he spoke.

“Entropy is not chaos,” he said. “It’s cost.”

Ava tilted her head.

“Every system generates it. The moment you structure anything—an economy, a protocol, a law—you also create friction. Delays, asymmetries, points of leverage. They accumulate slowly. Predictably.”

He turned the page, drew a circle, shaded one side, then drew a second, smaller circle inside.

“Entropy is inescapable,” he continued. “The goal isn’t to defeat it. The goal is to minimize its contact with decision-making.”

He handed her the page. She studied it. A rotating draw inside a fluid perimeter. The outer band was irregular, the inner motion perfectly smooth.

“Lotteries,” he said, “are the least porous surface. They leave very little room for manipulation. No appeals, no context, no history. Just outcome.”

Ava raised an eyebrow. “You trust randomness that much?”

“I trust design,” he replied. “Aleatory logic is neutral. But when structured recursively—tied to entropy inputs—it can harden over time. Learn where interference enters and reduce its future exposure.”

He took back the paper and drew a simple expression:

F(t+1) = F(t) – ε

“Each draw adjusts the surface. Minimizes new leakage. Not to reach purity—there’s no such thing. But to move closer to minimal friction. That’s all a system can do.”

Ava looked at him for a moment, then down at the equation. “And Bitcoin?”

Alias folded the page once, twice, set it aside.

“Bitcoin is static. Its entropy was low at origin. But it has no adaptive layer. No entropy mapping. So over time, points of friction became permanent: hardware centralization, geographic concentration, political exposure. It didn’t fail. It ossified.”

She nodded slowly. There was no judgment in his tone. Just observation.

“And yours?”

“It’s not mine,” he said. “It’s only written to require less intervention. Less trust. Less negotiation. It will still decay—just slower. With fewer seams to widen.”

They sat for a moment in silence.

Then Ava said, “You make it sound like an equation for time.”

Alias smiled faintly. “That’s all entropy is. Time, leaking order.”

Outside, the wind moved through the trees. Inside, only the pencil scratched lightly—working not to perfect the system, but to let it decay more gently than the rest.

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Let me know if you’d like to continue this thread into a later scene where one of the team challenges this premise, or where Ava reflects on t

he emotional cost of removing trust from the equation.