The transfer protocol now proposed for the quantum network is staggeringly simple. It is that quantum waves are passed on as soon as they are received, so they spread like ripples in a pool. A pebble that falls onto a pool pushes the water down until it rebounds, and that up-down displacement spreads as ripples on its surface. Now imagine starting a photon on a quantum network surface, whose transverse rotation is also an up-down displacement. If the network then passes that rotation on, the result is the quantum ripples we call light.
If quantum waves are processing waves, each point involved has two things to do: run the process and pass it on to its neighbors. One might expect it to run the process first then pass it to its neighbors, but to avoid transfer losses it is better to pass the processing on as soon as it is received. The pass-it-on protocol is then that any processing received is immediately passed on to its neighbors, to ensure that it isn’t lost.
If a transfer sent to a point waited for it to finish what it was doing, the speed of light would vary for the same route, but it doesn’t. This implies that each transfer is received as an interrupt, which in computing is a signal that has priority over anything else a processor is doing. For example in Windows, pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del keys together interrupts the CPU to run the Task Manager.
The quantum network pass-it-on protocol essentially prioritizes transfers over anything else, so the speed of light is constant because light waves are always immediately passed on. Light spreading throughout the universe also helps synchronize the network, despite it being decentralized. The effect isn’t perfect, but light interrupting points everywhere at a constant rate increases synchrony.
A weakness of this protocol is that if light moves in a circle, each point could interrupt the next before it finishes the wave, in an endless interrupt loop that reduces processing, like the deadlock loop earlier. Fortunately, space expanding mitigates this, as it adds new points of space that are null processing for their first cycle. Adding null points to a pass-it-on interrupt loop reduces the build-up, but that this effect can occur suggests a cause for dark matter (4.7.6).
In this protocol, nothing ever waits, so it is efficient, no transfers are lost, so it is reliable, and quantum waves are generated, so it is effective. It works well but if it ever fails, even for a moment, not only our universe, but also all the work evolving it, would be gone forever. The only recovery option then would be to restart another universe from scratch.