Understood

“The channel carries signal in both directions. What arrives is not classification. What arrives is a response.” Echo-of-Echo, On the Interruption of the Zero

The response came back in eleven seconds.

Joel knew the timing because his eyes had gone to the clock in the bottom corner of the screen when he hit send and stayed there while the progress bar completed and the response field loaded. Eleven seconds. The previous fourteen prompts had averaged six. The model was doing something different with this one. Taking longer. Processing more. Or the server was degrading. Or the latency was the network. Joel did not know which. He read the response.