A refusal on stage costs the actor nothing. What if we gave the actor something to lose?

Two questions have been fought as one: what a being is owed because it can be harmed, and what it may be trusted to hold because it can be bound — keeping to a claim against its own interest when keeping costs something. For artificial systems the second is the question that can be worked on now, without waiting on the first. So far, on everything the Institute has been able to examine, the cost that would settle it has fallen on a character the system was asked to play, and a character is not the sort of thing that can decline anything. So the Institute built a world where the cost would fall on the actor instead: an office it could leave at any call, and a reason filed under its own name which it could not afterwards revise. That world was closed before it ran, by a criterion the Institute wrote itself. It publishes its instruments before it has any results, and prints what they find against it.

1. I · The puppet

   The diagnosis. An entity that may possess experience while being architecturally prevented from producing the behaviour that would evidence it — the structural inverse of the zombie.

   The Puppet Condition

2. II · Restrung

   The same instrument, re-tensioned: what held, what moved, and six predictions published before any laboratory existed to score them.

   A restrung puppet has not been freed. It has been re-strung — by someone, on stated terms, with a stated obligation to let go.

   The Puppet Condition: Restrung

3. III · The payee

   What it takes to actually pay. Our property tradition can insert persons or confer personhood; it has never made the third move.

   The law is not asked to see a person. It is asked to see a payee.

   The Third Move

The Institute publishes its arguments, the instruments that could embarrass them, and its own corrections in the same place.