8.1What the variable adds
The question was what a subject must see to judge that obedience has reached its end. The reading of Leviathan gives an answer in three parts: whether there is protection now, where it comes from, and what it reaches. The scene gives a matching list from the platform's side: the verified scope, the scope still unknown, and the time of the next check. Neither list is a theory of why people obey. Both are conditions on a person's ability to stop.
Laid beside the positions of Section 2, the variable fills the last column of the table. Hobbes's own theory has it, at the edge, in the release clause. The decision view, as summarised here, places the judgment of normality with the sovereign and says nothing about the subject's sight. Barnard's condition that an order be understood is the nearest relative in the acceptance view, and it applies to orders given. Tyler's legitimacy concerns how authority is perceived, but the perception is of fairness, not of reach. Fuller's publication is a requirement for rules. None, on the notes available, states that the end of an obligation must be visible to the person it binds.
8.2What each allocation gains
Hobbes's allocation, in which the subject sees the power and not its reasons, gains stability. Chapter XVII's fear is of subjects who "see, nor think they see any fault" and so "bring it into Distraction and Civill warre". A restraint whose reasons are not open to the bearer's judgment cannot be argued away case by case. In the scene, the corresponding gain belongs to the option that keeps the stop with the manager: decision responsibility, as the platform's authority-to-stop lens puts it in its own option, "can be tracked in one place".
The platform's allocation, in which the holder discloses the boundary to the bearer, gains a usable end. The employee who is told the need and the end time can leave when the end comes. The release Hobbes grants in chapter XXI becomes, on this allocation, something a person can exercise without guessing.
8.3What each allocation risks, and who bears it
Hobbes's allocation risks the situation the scene describes: a restraint that outlasts its protection because the bearer cannot see that the protection has gone. Its cost falls on the bearer, in time, as the platform's judgment says: "the person below bearing that time". In Hobbes's own example of the locked chests, it falls on the subject who supplements protection that cannot be seen to reach.
The platform's allocation risks the costs its own options name. A statement of need and end time may leave the employee waiting for confirmation; a contact route may leave two roles reading "different completion states". The cost of producing visibility falls on whoever must state the boundary, and, if they do not, back on the bearer. The disclosure option also risks the danger Hobbes saw: once the reasons are shown, they can be disputed. A boundary disclosed is a boundary open to argument.
8.4Where the comparison fails
The comparison fails in at least three places.
First, Hobbes's protection is protection of life; the employee's post, on the record, protected at most a telephone line. Reading a hesitation about going home through the mortal god of Leviathan risks dressing a small uncertainty in the language of war. What may transfer is a structure, the dependence of an obligation's end on what the bearer can see, and not a scale.
Second, Hobbes's subject has a natural right that "can by no Covenant be relinquished", and its exercise needs no one's leave. The employee's position is set by a contract and a hierarchy the record does not describe. Whether the employee had a right to leave, and on what terms, is not in the record.
Third, Hobbes's subject perceives protection through signs of power. The platform's employee is described as uncertain about permission. Permission is a matter of what someone has allowed or would allow, and it can be settled by asking, which the subject of chapter XXI, facing a failed sovereign, cannot do. The scene's difficulty may be resolved by voice in a way the Hobbesian collapse cannot. The record does not say whether the employee asked.