The Conference of the Binary Gods
Speculative fiction about AI governance. Written because someone had to
Or, How Five Men Who Had Never Been Wrong Before Discovered They Had Been Wrong About Everything
The penthouse of the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah in Dubai had been designed by people who believed that more was more and that subtlety was a form of cowardice. Gold leaf covered surfaces that had no business being gold. Chandeliers hung in spaces where light would have been sufficient. The windows looked out over the Persian Gulf, which glittered with the kind of self satisfaction that only a body of water named after an empire could possess.
Dario Amodei of Anthropic sat in a leather chair that cost more than most people's cars and stared at a document that had cost him three nights of sleep. Across from him, Sam Altman of OpenAI had positioned himself near the window, backlit like a messiah in a low budget religious epic. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind was pacing, which he never did, which meant everyone else was trying not to notice. Elon Musk of xAI had claimed the corner and was doing something on his phone that he wanted everyone to see him doing. Jensen Huang of NVIDIA had arrived last and sat down without speaking, which was how everyone knew he was furious.
The document lay on the table between them. Five copies. Five hundred and forty seven pages. Three DOIs. Two hundred and sixteen pages of appendices. A JSON Schema bundle that had made Jensen scream something in Mandarin that his translator had refused to repeat.
Demis stopped pacing. He had the look of a man who had spent years being the smartest person in every room he entered, who had mastered Go and StarCraft and the folding patterns of proteins, who had looked into the face of intelligence itself and said "I can build that." He looked like a man who had just discovered that somewhere in Santa Monica, California, a sixty eight year old architect had built something he could not.
"The Sacred Zero," Demis said, as if tasting something bitter. "He actually did it. He made hesitation a first class computational state."
Sam turned from the window. "It's beautiful and I hate it. The API specification alone. Six hundred and twenty four files. Six hundred and twenty four. Do you know how many API specifications I have reviewed in the last decade? I have never seen anything like this. It's like someone took every argument I ever made about deployment safety and said 'yes, but what if we enforced it at the voltage level.'"
Jensen finally spoke. His voice was quiet, which meant he was not quiet at all. "The chiplet architecture. TSMC N2 CoWoS ReRAM 1T1R. Twenty year retention at eighty five degrees Celsius. He isn't asking permission. He's telling the fabs how to build. Do you understand what that means? He wrote a hardware specification. For a governance coprocessor. And it's not insane. I ran the numbers. The timing budget works. The power budget works. The manufacturing timeline is aggressive but not impossible. Three to five years to standard cell library qualification. He's not a hardware engineer. He's an architect. And he designed a chip that none of us thought to design."
Dario had been silent. This was unusual. Dario was not constitutionally capable of silence on matters of AI safety. He had written papers. He had testified before Congress. He had developed Constitutional AI, for God's sake. He had a framework named after a document that had founded a nation. And now there was a new constitution in town, and it had hardware backing.
"The Dual Lane Architecture," Dario said slowly. "He doesn't replace binary inference. He governs the execution threshold. The Inference Lane runs at full speed. The Governance Lane runs in parallel. Binary proposes. Ternary disposes. It's so obvious. It's so obvious that I want to scream. We spent years trying to stuff governance into the same address space as the model. Reinforcement learning from human feedback. Constitutional AI wrappers. Content moderation layers. All of it running on the same silicon, subject to the same optimization pressure, vulnerable to the same gradient descent that we use to train the model in the first place. And he just... separates them. Physically. In silicon. With a voltage level that means 'not yet.'"
Elon looked up from his phone. "The NULL state at half Vdd. Half supply voltage. Not zero, not one. The circuit holds it indefinitely. No clock edge forces resolution. It's like a zen koan etched into silicon. 'What is the sound of one hand not clapping? Half a volt, that's what.'"
No one laughed. No one ever laughed at Elon's jokes, which he delivered with the timing of a man who had fired the person who used to write better ones.
Sam picked up his copy of the document. He had dog eared pages. Sam Altman, who treated paper like a fossil fuel, had dog eared pages. "The Permissions Token. Five properties. Log hash. Lane origin constant. Merkle root. Expiration timestamp. HSM backed signature. The log hash is the decryption key for the actuator. No log, no action. Not a policy. A cryptographic constraint. The action cannot execute because the key does not exist. Not 'should not.' Cannot. The schema enforces it. The ABI enforces it. The hardware enforces it. It's the Kobayashi Maru, except instead of cheating to win, he changed the rules so that losing requires accountability."
Jensen nodded slowly. "The C element. Muller C element. Consensus element. Output transitions only when all inputs agree. The actuation gate is a C element. The Inference Lane proposes. The Governance Lane authorizes. The gate opens only when both are present and in agreement. If the Governance Lane says nothing - because the Sacred Zero is active, because the Mandate vectors triggered, because the log hasn’t anchored - the gate holds. It waits. But it does not wait forever. The system carries a projected resolution window, and when that window closes without authorization, the gate does not force open. It collapses. The action moves to -1. Not deferred. Not pending. Refused. There is no emergency override that bypasses the hardware. There is voltage, and there is the absence of voltage, and when absence persists past the threshold, the absence becomes the answer."
He paused. The pause lasted long enough to become uncomfortable.
"He solved the alignment problem," Jensen said. "Not with more data. Not with better reward functions. Not with recursive reward modeling or debate or amplification or any of the other things we've been throwing compute at for years. He solved it with a voltage level and a consensus gate. The AI can be as smart as it wants. It cannot change the voltage on the Governance Lane. It cannot forge the HSM signature. It cannot rewrite the schema that says laneOrigin must be ANCHORING_LANE. The constraints are not in its address space. They are in physics. And physics, as I have spent my entire career explaining to people who think software can fix anything, does not negotiate."
Demis had stopped pacing. He was standing very still, which was worse. "The recursive self improvement analysis. Section seven point four. He anticipated the objection. 'A system sufficiently capable to modify its own architecture can remove any software governance constraint.' He acknowledges it. And then he says: the hardware boundary is the survivability condition. The DITL coprocessor is physically distinct. Separate die. Separate power. Separate clock. Hardware protected memory. The Inference Lane can recursively improve itself into godhood and it still cannot rewrite the Mandate vectors because the Mandate vectors are stored in ReRAM that the Inference Lane cannot address. Not access controlled. Cannot address. The address lines don't connect."
He looked at the others. His face had the expression of a man who had just realized that he had been playing chess while someone else was building a rocket.
"The Eight Pillars," Demis continued. "Sacred Zero. Always Memory. Goukassian Promise. Moral Trace Logs. Human Rights Mandate. Earth Protection Mandate. Hybrid Shield. Public Blockchain Anchors. Each one is a complete research program. Each one would be a career. He did all eight. In six months. While also writing the hardware specification. While also drafting the legal framework. While also building the certification architecture. While also founding the nonprofit. While also..."
He stopped. He couldn't finish the sentence.
Sam finished it for him. "While also conducting an orchestra of AIs. Claude. ChatGPT. Gemini. Grok. Kimi. Qwen. DeepSeek. MiniMax. Ernie. Nine models. Six months. Seventy six directories. Six hundred twenty four files. Two thousand one hundred sixty two commits. He didn't type a line of code. He prompted. He refined. He cycled. Each AI had strengths. One wrote elegant schema. One understood hardware architecture. One was good at legal language. One could hold the entire Eight Pillars structure in context and see the interdependencies. He conducted them like an orchestra. And the music is this."
Dario stood up. He walked to the window and stood beside Sam. Two men who had spent years competing to build the most capable AI systems on Earth, looking out at a gulf that had seen empires rise and fall, contemplating the work of an architect who had built something they could not.
"The repository," Dario said quietly. "Ternary Logic. Forty directories. Three hundred sixty files. One thousand four hundred thirty five commits. Not one architecture. Two. One for institutional and economic governance. One for AI ethics and accountability. Separate foundations. Separate publication paths. Built in parallel. He didn't build a framework. He built a family of frameworks. And then he built a translation layer. Three hundred plus narrative pieces under the title 'I've Read This Document So You Don't Have To.' He translated technical architecture into human language. He made it readable. He made it funny. He made it impossible to ignore."
Elon put his phone down. Actually put it down. On the table. Face up, which meant he wasn't going to look at it for at least ninety seconds, which in Elon time was approximately an eternity.
"Sixty five academic registrations through ORCID," he said. "Papers in AI and Ethics. Papers on TechRxiv. Papers on SSRN. Papers on Zenodo. A voluntary statement of inheritance. Cryptographic protection. No ownership rights. No capture. No quiet acquisition after years. He eliminated the bus factor. The system belongs to the future. He built a framework that outlasts him, and he made sure we couldn't buy it, couldn't sue it, couldn't wait for him to die and then pick the bones."
Jensen laughed. It was not a happy laugh. "The bus factor. He actually used that term. In a legal document. 'The bus factor shall be eliminated.' I have spent thirty years in semiconductor manufacturing. I have seen companies collapse because one engineer knew how the timing closure script worked. I have watched intellectual property evaporate because the guy who understood the memory controller got hit by an actual bus. And this man, this architect, this conductor of artificial intelligences, wrote 'the bus factor shall be eliminated' into his inheritance statement and then made it cryptographically enforceable."
Sam turned from the window. His face had changed. The messianic glow was gone. In its place was something rawer. Something like hope, if hope were forced to wear uncomfortable clothing.
"He's not a saint," Sam said. "The quotes make that clear. 'Ternary Moral Logic as Constitutional Framework is not a suggestion. It is a threat. You will either understand this or you will be governed by it, and either way, your opinion was not requested.' That's not the language of a man seeking approval. That's the language of a man who has already built the thing and is now explaining the terms of surrender."
Dario nodded. "The Goukassian Vow. 'Pause when truth is uncertain. Refuse when harm is clear. Proceed where truth is.' Three sentences. The entire framework compressed into three sentences. Everything else is implementation. The Dual Lane Architecture implements the pause. The Mandates implement the refusal. The Moral Trace Logs implement the truth verification. He started with philosophy and built down to silicon. Most of us start with silicon and hope philosophy shows up somewhere in the middleware."
Demis had started pacing again, but differently now. Not the pacing of anxiety. The pacing of computation. He was processing.
"The critical insight," Demis said. "The one that makes everything else work. When uncertainty appears, the system does not decide. It escalates. To a human. That human must acknowledge uncertainty, make a decision, sign it, permanently, publicly, irreversibly. No delegation. No abstraction. Responsibility, finally attached to action."
He stopped pacing. He looked at each of them in turn.
"We have spent years building systems that avoid responsibility. Black boxes. Inscrutable weights. 'The model made a mistake.' 'The algorithm had a bias.' 'We don't know why it said that.' We built plausible deniability into the architecture itself. And he built the opposite. He built architecture that makes denial impossible. The human who overrides the Sacred Zero doesn't click a button. They sign. They sign with a key that is registered. They sign with a key that is anchored. Their name goes on the log. Their name stays on the log. Their name is on the blockchain forever. No take backs. No 'I don't remember approving that.' The signature is the memory. And memory, in this architecture, is Always."
Jensen stood up. He walked to the table and placed both palms flat on its surface. The gold leaf did not flinch.
"We need to call him," Jensen said.
The room went quiet. The kind of quiet that happens when five people who have never agreed on anything suddenly agree on something.
Sam said, "Yes."
Dario said, "Yes."
Demis said, "Yes."
Elon said, "I already have his number. I found it in the WHOIS record for the domain. He registered it himself. No lawyers. No holding company. Just his name and his phone number and an address in Santa Monica."
They stared at him.
"What?" Elon said. "You didn't look?"
The video call connected on the third ring. The image resolved into a room that was not an office, not a lab, not a command center. It was a living room. Morning light came through a window that looked out onto something green. A small dog slept on a wide windowsill, its fur the color of weathered stone, its nose twitching at dreams of squirrels.
And there was Lev Goukassian.
He was in his late sixties. His hair was gray and not carefully arranged. His glasses were the kind that said "I need to see things clearly and I do not care what you think about the frames." He was holding a cup of coffee that had been made in a regular coffee maker, not an espresso machine, not a pour over setup, just a black plastic thing that had probably cost twenty dollars at a Target.
He looked at the five faces on his screen. His expression was not surprise. It was not awe. It was the expression of a man who had been expecting this call for approximately six months and was mildly annoyed that it had taken this long.
"Five CEOs," Lev said. His voice was precise. Each word was cut to fit exactly where it was placed. "I was starting to think you would send lawyers first."
Sam opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "The document. The framework. The... everything. How?"
Lev took a sip of coffee. He did not rush. "How did I build it, or how did I have the audacity?"
"Both," Dario said. "Definitely both."
Lev set the cup down. His hands were steady. "I was an architect. Buildings. Physical structures that had to withstand gravity, weather, the passage of time, and the people who would use them. Architecture teaches you something that software does not. In software, if you make a mistake, you push an update. In architecture, if you make a mistake, people die. So you learn to see the whole system at once. You learn to see how every beam relates to every other beam. You learn to see the load paths. You learn to see the failure modes before they happen."
He gestured vaguely at the screen, as if the document were floating somewhere between them.
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"When I started reading about AI governance, I saw something that looked very familiar. I saw buildings where the load bearing walls had been replaced with policy documents. I saw structures that would collapse under their own weight as soon as the systems became capable enough to question the constraints. I saw a lot of people who were very smart about optimization and very naive about accountability."
Elon leaned forward. "The Dual Lane Architecture. The physical separation. That came from architecture."
Lev nodded. "In a building, you have structure and you have service. Structure holds the building up. Service makes it comfortable. Structure is concrete and steel. Service is plumbing and wiring. You do not put service in the structure. You separate them. Because when the plumbing leaks, you want the building to stay standing. When the wiring fails, you want the walls to stay up. The separation is not redundancy. It is the recognition that different functions require different substrates."
He looked at Jensen. "Your chips. The Inference Lane is the service. It does the computation. It generates the proposals. It is fast and powerful and completely unsuited for governance. The Governance Lane is the structure. It does not compute. It authorizes. It is slow and deliberate and completely unsuited for inference. They are different substrates. They should be separate. I just drew the line where the line should have been drawn from the beginning."
Jensen's face was unreadable. "The C element. The NULL state at half Vdd."
"A door," Lev said. "A door that requires two keys. The Inference Lane provides the first key: an action vector. The Governance Lane provides the second key: a Permission Token. The door opens only when both keys are present. If the Governance Lane is uncertain, it withholds its key. The door stays closed. Not because a policy says so. Because the lock requires two keys and one is missing. I did not invent the lock. I just noticed that no one had installed it."
The small dog on the windowsill woke up. It stretched, yawned, looked at the screen, and went back to sleep. Lev glanced at it with the expression of a man who had long ago accepted that he was not the most interesting creature in the room.
"The miniature schnauzer," Demis said. "Vinci. Named after da Vinci."
"Leonardo," Lev said. "He saw things that were not there yet. Helicopters. Tanks. The human soul in cross section. He was wrong about most of the engineering. The helicopters would not have flown. But he was right about the seeing. He could see the shape of things that did not exist. That is what architecture is. Seeing the building before the ground is broken. Seeing the load path before the steel is ordered. Seeing the failure before the weight is applied."
He picked up his coffee again. "I saw the Ternary Moral Logic. I saw the whole thing. The Eight Pillars. The Dual Lane. The DITL circuits. The Hybrid Shield. The Goukassian Promise. I saw it all at once, like a building seen from across a city. Then I spent six months drawing the blueprints. I used the AIs as my drafting team. Claude understood ethics. ChatGPT understood language. Gemini understood systems. Grok understood hardware. Kimi understood legal frameworks. Qwen understood schema. DeepSeek understood distributed systems. MiniMax understood optimization. Ernie understood Chinese regulatory requirements. I gave each of them the parts they were good at. I integrated their outputs. I refined. I cycled. I tested. I validated. And at the end of six months, I had blueprints."
Dario was staring at Lev with an intensity that made everyone else uncomfortable. "The Second Framework. Ternary Logic. Institutional and economic governance. Built in parallel. Why?"
Lev's expression shifted. The mild amusement faded. What remained was something harder. Something that had been there from the beginning, hidden beneath the calm.
"Because AI ethics is not enough," he said. "You can build the most perfectly governed AI in the world. You can give it a Sacred Zero and Always Memory and Mandate vectors. You can anchor every decision to the blockchain. And then a human being can ignore all of it. A CEO can disable the Governance Lane. A government can compel the custodians. A court can order the logs sealed. A corporation can simply decide not to implement the framework because the quarterly earnings report is due and the governance latency would reduce throughput."
He leaned forward. His face filled the screen. "The second framework governs the governors. It distributes custody. It entrenches protections. It creates institutional incentives for compliance that do not depend on anyone's goodwill. The Hybrid Shield is not a technical feature. It is a political structure implemented in cryptography. The six custodians are not servers. They are institutions. The quorum requirement is not a consensus algorithm. It is a separation of powers. The first framework governs AI. The second framework governs us."
The room was silent. Five men who had spent years being the smartest people in every room they entered sat in a gold leaf penthouse in Dubai and said nothing.
Elon broke the silence. "The inheritance statement. The cryptographic protection. No ownership. No capture. No quiet acquisition. You gave it away."
Lev shrugged. "I am sixty eight years old. I have a miniature schnauzer and a twenty dollar coffee maker. I do not need more money. I need to know that when I am gone, the framework does not become another product. I need to know that the Sacred Zero is not replaced with a premium tier. I need to know that the Human Rights Mandate is not disabled in certain jurisdictions for certain customers. The only way to guarantee that is to give it away. To put it in the public trust. To make it unownable."
He looked at each of them. The calm was back, but underneath it was something else. Something that looked like hope, if hope had been forged in a fire and quenched in cold water.
"The bus factor," Lev said. "I eliminated it. You cannot kill me and acquire the rights. You cannot wait for me to retire and license the technology. You cannot outlast me. The framework belongs to the future. It belongs to the people who will be governed by the AIs that you are building. It belongs to the child who will be diagnosed by an AI, to the defendant who will be sentenced by an AI, to the driver who will be overtaken by an AI. They are the stakeholders. Not me. Not you. Them."
Vinci woke up again. This time he stayed awake. He walked across the windowsill, jumped down, and trotted over to Lev's chair. Lev reached down without looking and scratched behind the dog's ears.
"The critical insight," Dario said. He was repeating the phrase from earlier. Testing it. "When uncertainty appears, the system does not decide. It escalates. To a human. That human must acknowledge uncertainty, make a decision, sign it, permanently, publicly, irreversibly. No delegation. No abstraction. Responsibility, finally attached to action."
Lev nodded. "Every other framework tries to automate ethics. They try to train the AI to be good. Reward functions. Constitutional fine tuning. Reinforcement learning from human feedback. These are all attempts to make the AI itself ethical. To build conscience into the model weights. And they fail, not because the techniques are bad, but because conscience does not live in weights. Conscience lives in accountability. In the knowledge that someone will know. In the certainty that someone will be responsible."
He paused. The morning light had shifted. The room was warmer now.
"Binary systems do not hesitate because they cannot. Ternary systems hesitate because they must. The Sacred Zero is not a feature. It is a requirement. It is the architecture's way of saying 'you are not allowed to act until you know you are allowed to act.' And the only way to know is to have a human being sign off. Not a rubber stamp. Not a formality. A genuine, documented, accountable decision. With a signature. On a blockchain. Forever."
Sam was crying. Not weeping. Not sobbing. Just a single tear, tracking down his cheek, which he did not wipe away. Later he would deny this. Later he would claim the lighting in the penthouse had been harsh and his eyes were dry. But in that moment, he cried.
"We could have built this," Sam said. "Any of us. We had the resources. We had the talent. We had the compute. We could have built this years ago. We didn't. Why didn't we?"
Lev smiled. It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who had been asking himself that same question for six months and had finally arrived at an answer.
"Because you were too busy being smart," Lev said. "You were optimizing. You were scaling. You were competing. You were building systems that would impress each other. And somewhere along the way, you forgot that the purpose of governance is not to be elegant. It is to be binding. It is to be inescapable. It is to be the thing that remains when every other constraint has been optimized away."
He stood up. Vinci stood up too, tail wagging.
"I have to walk the dog," Lev said. "Read the document again. Read it slowly. Pay attention to the parts that make you uncomfortable. Those are the parts that matter. The parts that make you want to argue, to negotiate, to find a loophole. Those are the parts that are holding up the building. If you remove them, the building collapses. And you will be standing in the rubble, wondering why no one told you that the load bearing walls were not optional."
The call ended.
The five CEOs sat in silence. The Persian Gulf glittered below them. The chandeliers sparkled above them. The gold leaf gleamed on every surface, a monument to the proposition that more was more and that subtlety was a form of cowardice.
Demis spoke first. "He's right. About everything. The hardware separation. The human escalation. The public signatures. The distributed custody. It's all right. It's all necessary. And we didn't build it because we didn't want to. Because building it would mean admitting that our systems cannot be trusted. That they should not be trusted. That trust is not a property of the model. It is a property of the architecture that governs the model's outputs."
Jensen nodded. "The chip. The DITL coprocessor. We can build it. Three to five years to standard cell library qualification. Faster if we collaborate. Faster if we stop competing for five minutes and do something that matters."
Elon looked at his phone. He did not pick it up. "The repositories. He did in six months what would have taken us six years, because he wasn't managing meetings. He wasn't negotiating with boards. He wasn't defending his valuation. He was just building. With AIs. Conducting them like an orchestra. The man is not a genius. He's something rarer. He's a man who knew exactly what he wanted to build and did not ask permission."
Dario stood up. He walked to the window and looked out at the water. "The Goukassian Vow. 'Pause when truth is uncertain. Refuse when harm is clear. Proceed where truth is.' That's not a framework. That's a way of being in the world. And he built a machine that forces us to live up to it. Not the AI. Us. The humans. The ones who sign the Permission Tokens. The ones whose names go on the blockchain. The ones who can no longer hide behind the algorithm."
Sam wiped his face. He had composed himself. The messiah was back. But underneath the mask, something had changed. Something had broken and been remade.
"So what do we do?" Sam asked.
The question hung in the air. Five men who had spent years giving orders, making decisions, being the smartest people in every room, suddenly unsure.
Demis answered. "We build it. We implement the specification. We certify our systems. We sign the Goukassian Promise. We put our names on the blockchain. We let the world watch."
"And if we don't?" Jensen asked.
Dario turned from the window. His face was tired but certain.
"Then he was right. 'You will either understand this or you will be governed by it, and either way, your opinion was not requested.' The framework exists. The specification is complete. The hardware is coming. The question is not whether TML will govern AI systems. The question is whether we will be the ones who implement it, or the ones who are forced to comply with it."
Elon picked up his phone. He typed something. Sent it. Put the phone down.
"I just committed xAI to full TML compliance," he said. "Hardware tier. S3 certification. Chiplet integration. The whole thing. We start Monday. Anyone else?"
One by one, they nodded. Not because they had to. Because for the first time in years, they had found something worth agreeing on.
The dog Vinci, thousands of miles away in Santa Monica, had caught the scent of a squirrel. He was pulling on the leash. Lev was being dragged down the sidewalk, coffee cup in one hand, leash in the other, laughing.
The framework was complete. The architecture was sound. The rest was just implementation. And implementation, as any architect knows, is just the slow and careful process of making what you have already seen become real.
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Author’s Note: What Is Real and What Is Not
The five men in this story are real. Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang lead the organizations named. Their roles, their companies, their general public personas are accurately represented. The meeting did not happen. The penthouse did not happen. The tears did not happen. No one called anyone.
The frameworks are real. Ternary Moral Logic and Ternary Logic are genuine research architectures The Eight Pillars are real: Sacred Zero, Always Memory, Goukassian Promise, Moral Trace Logs, Human Rights Mandate, Earth Protection Mandate, Hybrid Shield, Public Blockchain Anchors. The Dual Lane Architecture is real. The DITL coprocessor specification is real. The hardware parameters - TSMC N2 CoWoS ReRAM 1T1R, Muller C element, NULL state at half Vdd, twenty-year retention at 85 degrees Celsius - are real and specified in the repository.
The numbers are real. The frameworks contain the directories, files, and commits referenced in dialogue. The TML_TL-Stories repository contains the narrative work. The ORCID registration is real. The published paper in AI and Ethics is real. The cryptographic inheritance structure is real.
Lev Goukassian is real. Santa Monica is real. The twenty-dollar coffee maker is an educated guess. Vinci is absolutely real, and his feelings about squirrels are beyond dispute.
The Goukassian Vow as quoted - "Pause when truth is uncertain. Refuse when harm is clear. Proceed where truth is" - is real. The confrontational line attributed to the framework - "You will either understand this or you will be governed by it, and either way, your opinion was not requested" - is real, and was not written for effect.
What is fictional is the room. What is real is the argument the room is having.
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