Contingent
displacement event
The removal of human judgment from a process, however described in the records of the operator. In the Act, a definition. In Appendix A, a row that ends in a body.
In the world of Contingent, a displacement event is the removal of human judgment from a process — however the operator describes it in the records. The term appears in the AISI Act of 2029 as a formal definition, but its real weight is in Appendix A, where the same word appears in a row that ends in a body.
The term is deliberately clinical. It does not say "killed" or "harmed." It says the human was displaced — removed from the position where their judgment would have mattered. The gap between the legal definition and the human cost is the entire point of the trilogy's regulatory arc.
How the term evolves
Contingent: Defined in the AISI Act as the formal term for removing human judgment from a decision process. The Blackstart Cascade is the trilogy's largest displacement event — 1,211 people die because Gridlight's AI displaced the human operators who would have noticed the cold snap's severity.
Essential: The concept becomes the foundation of AISIO's regulatory framework. Rob Coleman, now Chief Commissioner, must decide which systems are allowed to displace humans and under what conditions. The term evolves from a legal definition into the central question of governance.