A Conversation, Recorded Eight Minutes Before The Torren Moon Bloom

“Yes,” said the forensic eschatologist. “Your crippling techniques all appear fully operational. Your screening talkers have detected no basilisks or dangerous memetic payloads, and neither have the people screening them. Your emergency-wipe protocols show no sign of tampering, your network links show no anomalous traffic, and there is no present sign of a hard takeoff within the constrained subnet.”

“So it’s safe, yes? And you can report that to the -”

“This is exactly what one would expect to see if your containment protocols worked perfectly. However, it is also exactly what one would expect to see if a four-point-two kilosoph-equiv intelligence wanted you to think that your containment protocols were working perfectly. Leaving aside the implications of your belief that trying to jail something three orders of magnitude smarter than you was a good idea in the first place, which do you think is more likely?”