A charge selection rule fixes what a squeezed-light reservoir computer can compute and afford

Abstract: Reading an optical quantum reservoir costs repetitions growing super-exponentially with feature order: what it can afford is set by its detector, not its optics. For reservoirs encoding data in a parametric pump's phase, one conservation law fixes what is readable and what it costs. Pairwise photon exchange conserves an integer phase charge: across an ensemble of input masks, order-D readout reaches exactly the assemblies of at most D unit-charge kernels; degree-one homodyne readout is universal for fading-memory functionals along weak-squeezing families, at shot cost polynomial in accuracy; and at fixed squeezing no finite degree reaches every sector, at a computable distance. Nonlinearity sits in the optics, not the detector, whose per-shot variance is fixed at every order. In a hardware-faithful digital twin-no device was built-the rule is visible: on an open RF corpus a displacement-encoded control at identical photon number loses 17.7 accuracy points, as the charge algebra predicts.