“Humans are autonomous.” Seung Ngo progresses down the avenue, moving between mottled shadows at a leisurely pace, as though they have all the time they require. “Yet you have law, hierarchy, bureaucracy. There are impositions on free will. There are sacrifices to make and costs to account for. A person cannot decide one day that they would upend the order of their world and succeed. Even your Alabaster Admiral must contend with polities great and small, armies equal or vaster than her own. The Mandate coheres by consensus or it would not be the Mandate.”
