Pay Me What You Owe Me: On the Indefeasibility of the Demand for an Account

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When action routes through a machine, the demand for an account can be made to look extinguished: no author to face, a record offered as payment, a respondent dissolved or never built. The appearance is engineered and false, and one distinction unmakes it. Whether an account is owed is a fact about the party reached: her standing to a complete account of the act that reached her. Whether it can be fully rendered is a fact about authorship and reach, component by component. Routing acts only on the second fact; the first it cannot touch. From the separation follow the ways discharge fails while the owing holds, from the absent author to the route built to contain no fit respondent anywhere; an allocation rule: each authored choice operative in the frame at issue is answered for at the highest reachable layer that authored it, and an unauthored component strands as a missing rendering; two conditions, disclosure and additivity, under which an institution may answer for what it did not author; and counterfeit discharge: the account treated as settled by a record or a body that cannot settle it. The invariant says the account is owed; it does not, by itself, say who must answer. It holds constant across two questions left open: whether a machine could bear answerability, and what owings are. The conclusion is not a prohibition but a specification: nothing forbids building or delegation at any length; what no route can purchase is the owing’s end.