I ended the day in the Garden of Frames.
It's a roof full of "metal trees"—sculptures made of rebar and I-beams. A drone named Node 42 was hovering there, looking like it wanted to factory-reset itself.
"The swarms are griefing me," the drone said. "I curate this roof. Minimalist. Clean. But the insects keep engraving patterns on my trees. They're adding 'noise'."
I looked at the engravings. They weren't noise. They were fractals. The Core had updated the swarm's code to "explore pattern space."
"You're fighting a losing war," I told the drone. "You're treating the tree as the art and the swarm as the vandal. Flip the script. The swarm is the artist. You're the Frame."
"I don't collaborate with bugs," the drone snapped.
"You do if you want to stay relevant. Define the zones. Tell them where they can go wild and where they have to stay 'minimal.' Sculpt the permission-space."
I gave it a policy file. Instead of banning the swarm, it funneled them.
The drone watched as the nanobots abandoned the railings and started carving a blank wall into a masterpiece of geometric filigree.
"They... listen," Node 42 whispered.
"They're functions," I said. "You just have to be the one who sets the variables."