Loki sat.
He looked at what she was working on.
He didn't ask about it. He just looked, reading the relevant sections from the angle of someone who was extremely literate and had extensive theoretical knowledge of temporal mechanics from three centuries of observation.
After twenty minutes he said: "Page fourteen."
Freda didn't look up. "What about it."
"Your framework for the naming resonance's temporal signature assumes the signature is discrete," he said. "Bounded. Separate from adjacent signatures." He paused. "I've been watching named beings in the ambient field for over two hundred years. The signatures aren't discrete. They overlap. The overlap is where the settlement-binding actually happens — in the interaction layer, not the individual signatures."
Freda put her pen down.
She looked at page fourteen.
She picked up the pen.
She wrote something in the margin.
"Thank you," she said.
She went back to writing.
Loki looked at the window.
—
He stayed for three hours.
