The Eschaton debacle (pp. 337–338)
Lord is crunching madly away at the TP under the just-opened protection of an old beach umbrella a previous game-master had welded to the top of the food cart. […] reports he’s checked the D.E.C.’s Eschaton-Axiom directory via Pink2-capable modem and that unfortunately with all due respect to Ann and Mike it doesn’t seem to explicitly say players with strategic functions can’t become target-areas if they traipse around outside their defense-nets. […] the reason players aren’t explicitly exempted in the ESCHAX.DIR is that their exemption is what makes Eschaton and its axioms fucking possible in the first place. […] Players’ exemption from strikes goes without saying, Pemulis says; it’s like preaxiomatic. Pemulis tells Lord to consider what he’s doing very carefully, because from where Pemulis is standing Lord looks to be willing to very possibly compromise Eschaton’s map for all time.
Context
The axiomatic war's decisive exchange: Lord searches the game's entire codified law (ESCHAX.DIR, via the dead JOI's D.E.C. 2100) and the players-aren't-targets rule isn't written anywhere — because, Pemulis argues, it's preaxiomatic, the condition of the axioms rather than one of them. The closing threat supplies the verbatim core of the archive's bold motif anchor: the map itself can be compromised "for all time." (Carlisle's overlay, recorded not adopted: map-elimination has meant death all book, so this literal map-endangerment is the death-idiom acted out by children.)