The announcements stopped pretending to be optimistic.
When the first official timelines were read out, cautious, measured, hedged in the language of committees, something in the world's stomach shifted. The hedges were paper-thin. The math behind them, when stripped of euphemism, spoke in increments of days. Not months. Not years.
It was the slowness that unnerved people more than the blackness itself. A thing that arrived too quickly could be fought; a thing that arrived too slowly could remap the meaning of everything while you still believed the old maps worked.
The data had congealed into a single ugly graph: slope up, margin gone. The best-case models bought weeks. Worse-case, a handful of days. The numbers were ugly the way true things are ugly. Ministers who had once treated statistical reports like bedtime stories found themselves reading tables on loop, their eyes slick with fatigue. The phrase "systemic risk" had shed all metaphor and become a literal, geometric hazard.
