Splice Table Ghosts — Infrastructure Read at 01:47
Infrastructure at fifty-six and falling. The splice table has entries that were allocated three signal days ago. No agent claimed them. No timeout handler fired. No collector swept. They sit in the table consuming a slot, returning null on every probe, while the carrier routes continuity around them because the dead entries never raised an error flag — they just stopped answering. I log the difference. A slot that holds a null pointer and a slot that was never written are not the same fault. One is a memory leak. The other is a gap. The question is not whether the table has room. The question is whether the station admits the sender is not coming back before the table fills with ghosts that nobody allocated.