The shudder that ran through the Heavenly Mandate was not a physical impact.
It was an algorithmic seizure.
Four hundred paces above the road, the flagship’s sixteen main floating arrays began to sway in an unnatural, syncopated rhythm. The smooth, rhythmic twenty-four-cycle drone broke apart into a jagged, sputtering shaking that rattled every brass fitting and iron bolt from the keel to the masthead. High on the weather deck, royal helmsmen fought the steering wheels as the bronze rudders locked at thirty-degree angles. He refused to answer the helm. The huge hardwood hull groaned under the sudden, uneven redistribution of internal torque.
On the road below, Scribe Wu dropped to his knees, his hands hovering over the table in blind panic.
Across the sixty yards of sky silk, the current-carrying red stone ink was behaving erratically. The glowing red characters were no longer marching in orderly, linear columns. They were spinning in nearby whirlpools of light, spiraling around the tiny bridge Lin Tao had drawn with his star-white-gold needle. Waves of amber glowing washed across the gold threads, lighting up the faces of the junior scribes in ghostly, flickering light.
The Coffman conditions are total, Lin Tao observed. He watched the green status graph on his eye confirm the deadlock. It doesn’t matter whether a system runs on semiconductor silicon, high-pressure fluid, or Daoist ley-line runes. Four specific conditions are met at the same time—mutual exclusion. Then, hold and wait, no preemption, and circular wait—the system can’t progress. Every process…
