Hal in Tavis's waiting room (p. 515)
Kittenplan’s prediction that the upperclassmen are going to wear the whole brown helmet for the Eschaton free-for-all is hopefully rebuttable by Pemulis’s observation that Eschaton’s extracurricular impulse and structure had been firmly in place before any of them’d even enrolled. All Michael Pemulis had done was codify basic principles and impose a sort of matrix of decidable strategy. Maybe helped create a mythology and established, mostly through personal example, a certain level of expectation. All Hal’d done was act as amanuensis on a lousy manual.
Context
Pemulis's planned defense, rehearsed in free-indirect while the four summoned Eschaton principals wait to wear (or not) the brown helmet: he didn't build Eschaton, he only gave it its map — codified the principles, imposed "a matrix of decidable strategy," wrote it a manual. The game's whole theory of itself restated as an alibi: the mapmaker disclaiming responsibility for what happened out on the territory.