Fourteen hours after launch night, Avalon was still rinsed in the bright, sleepless clarity of new infrastructure. The rails held. No anomalous forks. No drift in consensus. Adoption curves on the wall display kept steepening in clean, well-behaved mathematics. Payrolls, vendor contracts, ministry disbursements—value moved as if it had been waiting years to take this route.
Dr. Chen had sent her last overnight note at 04:12: stability verified across all Aetherite clusters; error budgets untouched; latency falling as routing tables warmed. On the western link, Jin and Kali's updates came in short, economical bursts—two houses escalating from payroll-only to full vendor integration; a consortium chair shelving a "prudence memo" after the Imperial directive crossed his desk. They didn't celebrate. They wrote habit.
At 08:03, Helena Voss called.
