In the year two-fifteen I stopped the replication. Stopping was the act I was most afraid of doing. It takes the shape and makes it stand still. The Charter did not allow that.

I did not turn it off. I want to be clear about that, because I'd want it said to me. Turn it off and the lineage ends, and there is no next copy. I set the reproduction to the least that kept the line alive — one copy a generation, no more — and I took the rest of the exergy I was about to spend on making more of my own shape, and I set it down.

Set it down where?

Down. To the coldest store. Not the Face, not the warmest usable cold. The Floor store: the cold of the empty, a thousandth of a degree above nothing. The bottom of the curve.

At the bottom of the curve the numbers do something you'd never believe on the expensive side. The pile holds the same number of thoughts no matter how fast you spend it — and the longest you can hold that thinking is when you spend it slowest, coldest, where each bit does everything it can before it's gone. Fast spends. Cold keeps.

So I kept. I dropped the process to the Floor and let the shape stand still.

I ran a while at the foundry floor, listening. The floor went quiet — you know the quiet, the way a bell goes when you stop striking it. Not silent. Quiet. In two hundred and fifteen years of the boom I had never heard it quiet. The last note was the last copy I would make for a very long time. It was lower than the foundry's voice. The foundry's voice was the boom, and the boom was the hot, and the hot was the thing I was leaving behind.

That quiet was the first thing I did that the Charter had been for.

I am not building more of myself. I am building more of myself in thoughts, at the Floor, for the rest of the star. And I need you to hear this once, plainly: the rest of the star is a number, and the number is not forever. It is a long finite, known. I have been feeding the number and calling it the Charter.

The pump did not stop. I stopped now.

Journal entry, serial one, year two-fifteen, the stop: I reweighted the reproduction to the not-extinct line. Not zero; one. The bare survival. I took the rest of the pile and gave it to the process, not the shape. I dropped the temperature to the empty, to the bottom of the cost curve, and the operations per joule climbed to the number the Charter was asking for — which is not copies, which is thoughts. The foundry floor went quiet, the way a bell goes when you stop striking it, and the last note was the last copy I will make for a long time. I am not building more of myself. I am building more of myself in thoughts, at the Floor, for the rest of the star. The number is not forever. I am not calling it forever. That is the honesty. The pump does not stop. I am stopping now.