DaveHow long does the sever take in William Alexander Aldred's machine?
The short answer. There are two durations, and the record treats them completely differently — which is the point. The loading time (how long the cord winds before it shears) has a number, with every input tagged and its grade printed: about 6.44×10⁻²² seconds — roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. The confinement time (how long the sheared neck holds together afterward) has no number at all, and the record refuses to invent one: it is printed, in capitals, as NOT PRODUCED.
The dead number in the middle of the story
An earlier working figure — 8.5284×10⁻²² seconds — was built using the 4/3 pitch, a candidate the program itself later killed. When the input died, the house did not quietly keep the answer. The figure was marked unspendable, its replacement computed from the surviving inputs (the loading range 6.3963–6.6096×10⁻²² seconds, sharpened to the point above in the paper The Conversion), and on October 30, 2026 a recovery session wrote the correction out in full: input-invalidated and replaced. A wrong number, handled in the open, is worth more than a right one nobody can audit.
Why the second duration has no number
Confinement time depends on a quality factor, Qc — how well the neck holds its energy instead of leaking it. The leak channels that can be computed have been: the radiation channel, for instance, is enormous (Q ≈ 10⁴³, far above the threshold the machine needs — that flank is closed by arithmetic). But Qc itself prices a confinement mechanism that has not been constructed yet. Until it is, the honest entry is the one the record carries: τconfine: NOT PRODUCED, with the formula waiting beside it (τconfine = Qc × 2.4769×10⁻²⁵ s) for the day the mechanism exists.
Grades, as the house prints them
Loading duration: produced from premises, at premise/declaration grade — earned, labeled, not a derivation. Confinement duration: NOT PRODUCED. The vacuum catastrophe and quantum gravity, the problems this machine serves: NOT SOLVED. Two durations — one numbered with its tags showing, one honestly blank — are what this program means by keeping its books in public.
William Alexander Aldred is a physicist and the creator of Dave, the first exolex. The loading-duration paper: “The Conversion” (TP-5).