The first consequence did not announce itself.
No alarms. No headlines. No dramatic shift in the rhythm of the estate or the city beyond it. What arrived instead was subtler, and far more dangerous. A recalibration. The kind that happened when systems accepted a new reality and quietly began optimizing around it.
Aria felt it before she could name it.
She stood alone in the glass-lined strategy room, dawn thinning the darkness outside, the city still half-asleep. The architecture's dashboards glowed in layered transparency around her, capital flows, institutional alignments, regional confidence indexes. Everything looked stable. Healthier than expected, in fact.
That was the problem.
Stability had come too easily.
The architecture was no longer bracing for resistance. It had moved into normalization mode.
