...

"... no, yeah, it's pretty much just security theatre."

"It just seems kind of redundant, considering the only way you'd even get that far is if your OntOS signature was already accepted- It wouldn't even form the bridge to the node otherwise."

"yeah. security theatre."

"What does that even mean in this context?"

"means ontOS is too good. ontos triangulation is so foolproof and so instant that to anyone with an authorized signature it's just a fucken hop skip and a hop you have to go through to access any database node"

"Yeah? I don't know how that can be a bad thing, I think it'd be quite convenient to do away with the whole out-layer thing. It's a real fucking hassle, and I know that you haven't had to do it as many times as I have."

"ok well, it's like this, right. you have to... okay, it's like. if it was just a completely stress-free process, right, everyone in overveillance would be paranoid off their shit. like, 'that's it? just that little check is all that's between our fuckin off the balls-super-secret information network and the outsiders? what if it fucks up just once?' and no amount of just telling them that, like, yeah, that is all we have, and no it will literally never fuck up for as long as supra-xor exists would be enough to quell that paranoia, especially with the higher-ups. and they'll be all like, man i'm not so sure we're doing enough with this ontOS thing, can you do some more? and it'd be more of a hassle if there was literally any other kind of verification that wasn't just a shitty little pretend labyrinth, so, every time you access a node, it's the out-layer for you."

"Okay, well, the out-layer fucking sucks."

"alternative's worse buddy"

"Eugh."

"besides, how bad can it be? it's just, like, the equivalent of a little mental puzzle to keep you busy while your bridge unencodes everything in the node, which, by the way, is instantaneous outside of subjective time."

"It's just- Agh! No, it's so stupid."

"dude you're just bad at it ahahahaha"

...