The New Year didn't just flip a page—it stitched five banners into one.
From the mezzanine of Intelligence Command Alpha I watched Viktor's intercepts coalesce into a single, breathing diagram. Lines of money, materiel, and people flowed between organizations that had spent centuries competing by reflex. Now they moved like organs sharing blood.
"Chronovant is pushing time-series research methods into Stratovate's build teams," Viktor said, the map brightening where blueprints gained predictive models. "Terranova is provisioning Harmonyx with food security for mass events. Pyronis is underwriting energy for the others' labs. And they've unified their strike capacity."
I zoomed the lattice down to see details—their governance layer, their knowledge graph, their personnel exchanges. It wasn't coordination anymore. It was integration.
"They've built a genuine R&D commons," I said. "Not a memorandum—an engine."
