Twenty systems.
Five vitals.

Lesson 08 borrowed one idea from the engineers: a system separates into layers, and only the bottom one is physically scarce. That idea did not start in politics and it does not end in networking. Medicine has been quietly running the same argument for a century, on a stack with more floors, because a body is a taller thing than a protocol suite.

The network's narrow waist is the internet protocol: enormous variety above it and below it, all depending on one thin universal layer everyone has to run. The body's narrow waist is the internal environment — blood pH, glucose, temperature, potassium, held in a punishingly narrow band. Perturb that shared floor and everything above it fails at once, which is why a metabolic crash is an emergency in a way a single failing organ is not. It is a denial-of-service on layer one.

So this lesson reads every system twice. Toggle the lens above the stage. Under Network, a system is a protocol stack: clean interfaces, an app that should not own the cable. Under Body, it is a physiology: layers that leak, a lesion that should not be mistaken for the whole disease. The numbers do not change when you flip the lens. Only the words do, and that is the point — the argument was never about wires or blood. It was about layering.

Four of the vitals describe the shape of a stack: whether it locates the one scarce floor honestly, how much it fuses the floors above it, whether rival stacks can share the substrate, and how badly it fails when the top floor crashes. The fifth is the one that does most of the ranking, and it is the most physical: what does it cost to leave.

In networking this is vendor lock-in. Can you drop a provider without re-wiring the whole stack, or has it welded itself to your substrate so tightly that switching means rebuilding? In medicine it is the reversibility of an intervention. Can the drug be withdrawn cleanly, or has the body reorganized around it into dependence, so that stopping is its own emergency? Same measure, two vocabularies: how expensive is it to stop.

For a territorial state, exit means emigration. To change the system you live under, you must physically move your body off the substrate — sell the pension, break the marriage under one law and rebuild it under another, carry your debts across a border that reprices them. That is a near-maximal exit cost, and almost every system on the map pays it, because almost every system is territorial. The one claim that drives exit cost toward zero is the one the map could never hold: change your government without moving house. Watch where it lands.

The disanalogy is the mirror of Lesson 08's. Packets don't bleed, and the engineer designs interfaces to be clean. The clinician inherits interfaces that leak. The whole modern disease burden — diabetes, chronic pain, addiction, autoimmunity — is cross-layer coupling that refuses encapsulation: the social floor rewrites gene expression, the psychological floor produces measurable changes in the substrate, inflammation crosses from the immune system into mood. Medicine keeps discovering that its layers are the porous kind.

That is not a flaw in the second stack; it is the warning the second stack exists to carry. The reason a purely biomedical model fails clinically is the same reason a purely territorial politics fails: both insist that fixing the bottom layer is the whole job, and both are wrong for the same structural reason. The layers were never as separable as the engineer's diagram promised. So the scores here are not measurements of a body or a wire. They are measurements of an argument: how much a system pretends its layers are clean, and how much it charges you to test that pretense by leaving.

The scoring is editorial, the way two axes and four floors were. Every vital ships with its reasoning in the readout, and the third stage hands you the weights: decide for yourself which vital matters most and watch the ward re-sort. The systems keep their Lesson 07 identities and their Lesson 08 floors; what tightens the bolts between those floors is still the control axis, and fear still tightens them.

Twenty of Lesson 07's twenty-nine systems are scored here, chosen to spread across the vitals; the nine left out sit on top of a listed neighbour and would only crowd the plot, so each is named in its neighbour's card. Every system carries five scores from zero to one hundred, placed by its historical exemplars where they exist and by its stated program where they do not. Two vitals are healthy when high — honesty about the scarce floor, and the capacity to share it. Three are healthy when low — fusion, exit cost, and how violently it fails.

The single sickness number is a weighted average of the five, after flipping the two healthy-high vitals so that on the scale, larger always means sicker. Equal weights are only a default. The point of the exercise is not that the number is precise. It is that the same five questions can be asked of a protocol, a patient and a parliament, and that only one system on the famous list answers all five the way a healthy stack does.