Setting: The same sunlit study. Quillibrace reclines with a faintly sardonic expression, Blottisham is standing on tiptoe, waving a pen, and Miss Stray watches with a bemused smile, notebook open.
Mr Blottisham: (waving a pen) Professor! I cannot abide this. You claim there is no natural rest, no natural motion, no equilibrium—nothing the universe prefers. Are you seriously denying that things have a ‘proper’ state?
Professor Quillibrace: (dryly) I am seriously denying that, Mr Blottisham. What you call a ‘proper state’ is merely a habit of language smuggling substance back under the rug. There is no rug. Only relational architecture.
Miss Stray: (scribbling) So every system is just… doing what is cheapest, with no privileged endpoint?
Professor Quillibrace: Exactly. Stability regimes exist, yes, but they are contingent, local, and entirely architectural. No default configuration governs all systems. What you perceive as equilibrium is simply a pattern where re-actualisation is inexpensive.
Mr Blottisham: (aghast) But planets orbit neatly! Molecules settle into lattices! Surely that counts as a natural tendency?
Professor Quillibrace: (with a faint smile) Only if you forget the relational network in which they exist. Lattices persist because the constraints make deviation costly. Orbits persist because the architecture of mass, distance, and gradiented availability favours minimal-cost re-cuts. That is all.
Miss Stray: (amused) In other words, the universe isn’t aiming anywhere; it’s just… thrifty again?
Mr Blottisham: (grumbling) I was hoping for some cosmic teleology, if only to justify my morning coffee.
Professor Quillibrace: (dryly) Alas, Mr Blottisham, even your caffeine is cheap persistence. It continues only because it costs less to do so than to unbrew itself.
Miss Stray: (laughing quietly) I think he’s finally beginning to grasp it. Stability is a local pattern of relational economy, not a universal decree.
Mr Blottisham: (sighing, flopping into a chair) I see. So natural states are myths. Well… at least it spares me the trouble of arguing with the cosmos directly.
Professor Quillibrace: Precisely. And that, my dear Blottisham, is the quiet triumph of relational ontology: no hidden defaults, no privileged states, only architectures, constraints, and the subtle economy of persistence.
Miss Stray: (smiling) And a generous sprinkling of dry humour to keep us awake.
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